Remembering days of infamy

Can you remember what you were doing when something historical happened in your lifetime?

For each generation, there seems to be at least one date that, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt said nine decades ago, “will live in infamy.”

Roosevelt was speaking of December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into World War II. That date was burned into the memories of the Greatest Generation, who could tell you 50 years later exactly what they were doing when they heard that news.

The next big date of infamy was November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. My Baby Boomer generation joined the Greatest Generation in having that fateful Friday seared in our memories forever. I was an eighth-grader at St. Mary’s School when just after lunch there was a knock on the door of our second floor classroom. We were told to join the rest of the school next door in St. Mary’s Church to pray for the president. Msgr. Ivis, the pastor, was leading the rosary for school children and members of the community who came spontaneously to pray for JFK and our nation. It was there that Msgr. Ivis announced that the President had died.

Then came September 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda used airliners to attack the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., while another crashed into a Pennsylvania farm field. Three thousand people died that day, another date that lives in infamy.

We Boomers were joined by Gen X for that fateful event. It’s hard to believe it happened 25 years ago this Friday.

That fateful Tuesday we were working in the Times office about 9 a.m. when Mike Diercks, our sales manager, came into the newsroom and said he’d just heard an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center.

We assumed it was an accident, although it seemed hard to believe since modern airplanes have systems that make such mistakes highly unlikely. Back during World War II a US bomber accidentally flew into a fog-shrouded Empire State Building. It killed 14 people and left a big hole in what was then the world’s tallest building, but the skyscraper held.

On that fateful September 11, I headed home to watch coverage on TV. As I walked into the living room, the Today Show hosts were also wondering if it was an accident. When another airliner hit the second World Trade Center tower, we knew it wasn’t an accident. Then came the third hit on the Pentagon in Washington. Shortly after came the final crash near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where brave passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to thwart the hijackers’ attack on the U.S. Capitol minutes away in Washington.

We have visited the sites of all the 9/11 tragedies: Ground Zero in New York, the Pentagon in Washington and the sacred ground of rural Pennsylvania. All are sobering experiences, but the Pennsylvania memorial moved me the most. It reminded me that terror can happen anywhere in America, in quiet pastoral settings as well as teeming cities.

I’m always amazed that people — myself included — can’t recall what they had for lunch yesterday, but they can remember in vivd detail these big events for the rest of their lives. Psychologists say this is because emotional events are highlighted by the brain as more memorable and more easily retrieved. Our brain’s ability to recall vivid details triggered by major events is called “flashbulb memory.”

Most people under the age of 35 today probably don’t have a vivid memory of what happened on 9/11. Let’s hope future generations won’t have to endure memories of infamy.