For my parents generation, the “greatest generation”, their terrible appointment with disaster came on December 7, 1941.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it a “day of infamy,” the unforgettable day that Japanese emperor Hirohito’s air force struck our Pearl Harbor. . . the day we entered World War II.
22 years later, the date of infamy for my baby boomer g-generation arrived: November 22, 1963—the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
That was the day Walter Cronkite removed his glasses and told us that President Kennedy had died at 1:00 pm, central standard time.
All of us baby boomers remember where we were when we first heard the terrible news. I was in a 7th-grade classroom. Our principal interrupted the class to deliver the news. She spent a few minutes recalling how the President had "had 'em backed up against the wall," referring to the Russians and the Cuban missile crisis.
There was no other day of such a tragic infamy until 9/11/2001, when we all remember where we were and what we were doing when we saw or heard the news of the World Trade Center collapsing. I was repairing some exterior siding on a friend's house when Mike rolled out in his wheelchair with the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. My first imaginative image was of a small plane, like a Cessna, crashing into that skyscraper. But, of course, the disaster was much larger than I had first imagined. . .
But hey. . . even as I recall these tragic dates in American history, I do want to conclude this moment of reflection with a positive indicator for our future, 200 colorful images.
Behold the hopeful graphic artworks of 200 child residents, on display in a public playground, Vacaville, California:
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