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This is one of the handful of dates that I remember for where I was and what I was doing, as with the JFK assassination and the Challenger shuttle disaster.
It was on a Friday. My wife (who teaches German) had gone with a colleague to Atlanta for a language-teachers' convention that weekend, and I was to drive to Atlanta the next day to join her. So I was alone in the house when I came back from work. It was a bit later than usual, so when I turned on the TV for the news, it was halfway through the 6 PM local news, just before the weather. I caught what looked like the tail end of an interview with a local resident about something that was happening in Berlin. It's unusual for our local news programs to have stories related to world affairs, so I figured something big had happened, and set the VCR (remember those?) to record the NBC Nightly News which followed at 6:30.
That broadcast had Tom Brokaw reporting live from the Brandenburg Gate. At the beginning, a huge crowd was massed in front of the wall (the west side), and the East German police were shooting water from fire hoses on the other side, to keep people off. By the end of the broadcast, the police had given that up, people had climbed up on the wall from both sides, and had started chipping off pieces.
I was so overcome by what I had seen that I left the house to go to campus, hoping to find someone in the computer lab or somewhere that I could talk to. Right after closing the door I realized that although I had my car key, I didn't have my house key! And my wife was out of town. So I ended up driving to a colleague's house, where we tracked down a locksmith and got him to break into my house for me.
I've still got that recording of the NBC News broadcast, which I transferred to DVD several years ago. You can also find a link to a copy of part the broadcast here. (Actually, almost the entire show was given over to coverage of the events in Berlin.)
It was on a Friday. My wife (who teaches German) had gone with a colleague to Atlanta for a language-teachers' convention that weekend, and I was to drive to Atlanta the next day to join her. So I was alone in the house when I came back from work. It was a bit later than usual, so when I turned on the TV for the news, it was halfway through the 6 PM local news, just before the weather. I caught what looked like the tail end of an interview with a local resident about something that was happening in Berlin. It's unusual for our local news programs to have stories related to world affairs, so I figured something big had happened, and set the VCR (remember those?) to record the NBC Nightly News which followed at 6:30.
That broadcast had Tom Brokaw reporting live from the Brandenburg Gate. At the beginning, a huge crowd was massed in front of the wall (the west side), and the East German police were shooting water from fire hoses on the other side, to keep people off. By the end of the broadcast, the police had given that up, people had climbed up on the wall from both sides, and had started chipping off pieces.
I was so overcome by what I had seen that I left the house to go to campus, hoping to find someone in the computer lab or somewhere that I could talk to. Right after closing the door I realized that although I had my car key, I didn't have my house key! And my wife was out of town. So I ended up driving to a colleague's house, where we tracked down a locksmith and got him to break into my house for me.
I've still got that recording of the NBC News broadcast, which I transferred to DVD several years ago. You can also find a link to a copy of part the broadcast here. (Actually, almost the entire show was given over to coverage of the events in Berlin.)