My Flashbulb Memories

A flashbulb memory is a vivid memory about an emotionally significant event, usually a historic or other notable event. People often experience these memories in photographic detail, and can recall aspects like what they were doing when the event occurred or how they learned about what happened.

Flashbulb memories tend to endure over long periods of time, although it’s not clear if people continue to remember the events with accuracy.

The term “flashbulb memory” was coined by Roger Brown and James Kulik in a 1977 paper published in Cognition. They were studying how people remembered the JFK assassination and noted that these memories were formed with certain qualities. People remembered the JFK assassination with uncanny clarity, including details about where they were at the exact moment they heard, and what their emotional reaction was.

I have several flashbulb memories that have occurred over the last few decades. Many of them are well known but a few are more personal. Here is my list of flashbulb memories:

* The 1973 flood in Enid, Oklahoma
This one is easy for me to remember because I was actually living in Enid when it happened. My sister and I were staying at our house alone that October evening because my mom had gone bowling. Our great-grandmother was keeping an eye on us from across the street on S. Johnson. As the rain kept coming down in heavier and heavier amounts our great-grandmother called us to come to her house because her basement was flooding.

I remember crossing the street and there was about 4″-6″ of water in the street making it impossible to cross without getting our shoes completely soaked. We spent a short while carrying buckets of water up her stairs and dumping it out the back door. It didn’t help because the water just kept coming in the windows that were in her basement.

I don’t remember how much water ended up in her basement. Our mom was trying to make it home from the bowling alley which was only about a mile away but most of the streets were flooded and impassable. She drove completely around the city and eventually made it home.

* The day Elvis died
We were living on W. Broadway in Enid. My moms best friend Dottie Johnson called and asked me if my mom was home. When I told her she had not gotten home yet she told me to tell her that Elvis had died and she knew my mom would be upset. I don’t remember if I was there when my mom came home of not or if I was even the one that told my mom he had died.

It wasn’t a big shock to me because by 1977 Elvis wasn’t as popular as he had once been. I really only remember it because I knew my mom was a big fan.

* The day President Reagan was shot
I was a senior in high school in March of 1981 when President Reagan was shot. I remember I was home alone watching TV after school. I must have been watching something on one of the big three networks when it was interrupted with a report that Reagan had been shot.

This was before we had remote controlled TV’s so I sat close to the TV on a stool so I could flip between channels to get the latest updates. I remember one of the TV anchors getting really upset while covering the situation. It might have been Frank Reynolds when he was told James Baker was not dead after he had just reported that he had died.

News anchors were not used to doing live updates on TV at that time and news was coming in over the phone and Reynolds was being handed pieces of paper with updates on them.

* The day the space shuttle Challenger exploded
In January of 1986 I was still in college at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma. A group of me and my friends had rented a house on Broadway. That morning I was getting ready to go to class when I noticed everyone sitting around the small TV in our kitchen.

When I went into the kitchen they told me that the Challenger space shuttle had just blown up. I watched the replays on the news reports and couldn’t believe it. This was the mission that had taken a teacher aboard the shuttle to fly her into space. It was a very sad day on campus and everyone in every class was talking about the tragedy.

* The day the Edmond post office shooting occurred
The Edmond post office massacre occurred in August of 1986. I had recently graduated from college and was living in a house with a guy that had run a newspaper ad for a room rental. I had a girlfriend that lived on the other side of Edmond and had stayed at her place the night before.

On my way home that morning to get ready for work, I was driving three blocks from the post office while the shooting was happening and didn’t even know it. By the time I got to our house I was five blocks from the post office and I could hear helicopters flying all over the. area.

I turned on the TV and by that time the local news stations had started reporting that something was happening in Edmond. Before the shooting had ended fourteen people were killed and six others wounded.

* The day the OKC Murrah Building was bombed
In April of 1995 I was the Advertising Director at Evans Drug and was living in Enid, Oklahoma. I was at work that day when my bosses mom, who later became my grandmother-in-law, told us that there had been some type of big explosion in downtown Oklahoma City.

I listened to talk radio all day but we had a small TV in the office so I turned it on to get some updates. After seeing images of the building we couldn’t believe what had happened. The entire front half of the building was gone.

As more news came out we realized it had been a bomb that blew up the Murrah Building. There was 24 hour coverage in Oklahoma during the rescue phase after the bombing. It was so upsetting when we heard about the daycare and how many people were being pulled from the rubble.

We eventually drove to OKC from Enid just to see the destruction and watch the continuing rescue operations. They had out up a temporary chain link fence to keep people back but you could stand there and see everything. They had huge spotlights on the building so they could search at night.

People from all of the world had already started showing up leaving teddy bears and other things stuck in the fence as memorials.

* The day the OJ verdict was read
I had been following the OJ trial every day and was really interested in what was happening. In October of 1995 I was living in Enid on W. Cherokee and I was working at Evans Drug. That day I was at home for lunch and they reported that a verdict had been reached in the OJ trial.

I believe OJ was guilty and I started repeating guilty, guilty, guilty thinking he would be going to jail. I stayed at home late so I could see the verdict live. Once it was read and he was found not guilty I couldn’t believe it.

* The day the May 3rd F5 tornado hit OKC
In May of 1999 I was temporarily living in an apartment OKC with Denise while she was going to Dental Hygiene School. I was driving back and forth to my job in Enid, Oklahoma every day. We were home in the late afternoon and there were storms popping up all over the state.

One huge storm had popped up in southern Oklahoma but it started heading towards the OKC area. In Oklahoma, if there are tornadoes possible the local TV stations will start covering them non-stop. They will track them for hours.

We kept watching as the storms got closer to the OKC area and a large tornado had formed and was heading northwest. We were living in the northern part of OKC at the Edmond line. After a couple of hours of watching this storm and then the tornado I got the bright idea to try go see it live.

Denise and I hopped into my Honda Prelude and started driving towards the Midwest City area where the tornado would hit if it kept going. As we were driving it was very eerie because there were very few cars on the usually very busy roads.

We could see the huge black storm as we were driving but couldn’t see the tornado because it was rain wrapped and was very wide. We drove into Del City minutes after the tornado hit there. That’s about where it finally lifted off the ground and started to dissipate.

We ended up in front of Rose College as debris was falling out of the sky. Several things had been tossed around and one of the streets we went down had all of the power poles leaning over on their side. The Prelude was just low enough that I was able to drive under the power lines. We had to drive several miles east to get out of the damage path which was blocked off just to get back to our apartment.

* The day 9/11 occurred
I normally watched the news on TV in the morning before I went to work. On the at September morning in 2001 I was watching Fox & Friends when they came on and said an airplane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. There wasn’t much information and I thought that a small propeller plane might have hit the building and it was an accident.

I didn’t think a whole lot about it so I went to work at Evans Drug. By the time I got to work the talk radio stations were going wild with news coverage. I turned on the TV to watch the coverage and it just kept getting worse. After the second plane hit the second tower I was completely stunned.

The third plane hit the Pentagon and another airplane went down in Pennsylvania and it just felt like there was nothing we could do to stop it. I think everyone was in shock and we all realized the United States was being attached by terrorists using our own airplanes.

I’ve never felt like I did at that time. I wanted the US to start bombing every terrorist country and just keep bombing them until everyone was dead. It was actually a very scary time because we didn’t know what could happen next.

* The day Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died
In June of 2009 I was on a vacation trip in Cancun, Mexico. I had been doing my work from my laptop in the hotel lobby to use their Wi-Fi service. There were several things I would do to check my stats and my websites.

I noticed that my personal blog at CurtisTucker.com was no longer online. I had been posting photos on my blog from vacation so people could see what we were up to. I snooped around a bit and discovered that all of my bandwidth for the website had been used. I thought that was really weird and logged into my account to increase the bandwidth.

I discovered that a photo I had of my holding the Farrah Fawcett poster in the 70s was being downloaded over and over again causing my bandwidth to be drained. It was at that point that I found out Farrah had died of cancer. She was a huge icon for me during the 70s and it was a pretty big shock.

Unfortunately for Farrah, her death was quickly overshadowed by the untimely death of Michael Jackson which was an even bigger shock because he had seemed to be healthy and was getting ready for a new tour.

These are the big events that I still remember today. The events that you say, “I remember where I was when…”