Remember where you were ... ?

It was a good day for America, said President Obama, as he announced that Osama bin Laden had been finally brought to justice. So good, that years from now, people will say they remember where they were when they first heard the news. Having been around for a while, I can quickly recall where I was on several great, historic days, not all of them good days for America. Think about how many “I remember where I was” events in your lifetime and you’ll see what I mean. Even the youngest among us will long remember where we were when we first learned of the heroic attack on the bin Laden compound Sunday night. But even more will and should never forget the massacres of 9/11, the very awful day almost 10 years ago that led to Sunday night’s time of triumph and pride. My timeline for remembering when history was made begins on another Sunday, nearly 70 years ago, when a football game my father and grandfather were listening to after Sunday dinner was interrupted by a news bulletin reporting that Japanese planes were bombing Pearl Harbor. I was 8 and also remember asking the adults, “What’s Pearl Harbor?”The next four years were unforgettable even for children as we were caught up in a war being fought all over the world by people we knew and missed and by some we’d never see again. Three events during those years fall into the “I remember where I was” category, one sad and the other two marking the last time people gathered on the streets to sing and cheer and wave flags for something other than sports victories until last Sunday night. I was shooting baskets in my friend Johnny Miller’s backyard on an April afternoon in 1945 when his mother told us President Roosevelt had died. Johnny, a few years older than I, cheered and I was confused by him cheering what seemed to be to be something terrible. We weren’t as united then as history wants us to believe. Just weeks later, the sadness of the wartime president’s death turned to joy. It was around noontime on May 8 and my mother and I were having lunch when the anticipated news of Germany’s surrender in a French schoolhouse crackled over our kitchen radio. Three months later, we were visiting my mother’s family in Scranton, Pa., when the new president, Harry Truman, the little haberdasher no one thought much of, announced Japan’s surrender. Mostly I remember it as the only time I would ever see newsboys hawking extras on the street.There would be other such days as years passed, but those two happy days, in May and August of 1945, were the last that you could call good days for America until last Sunday. The next two were especially bad.On Nov. 22, 1963, Walter Cronkite interrupted a soap opera to report President Kennedy had been shot as I was waiting in the lobby of Channel 3 for Frederick Barghoorn, a Yale professor who had been imprisoned by the Russians for several days until Kennedy had arranged his release. When the professor arrived to tape an interview, I had to tell him the man who had gotten him out of Lubiyanka Prison had been killed. Then, there was the next assassination, of Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, 1968. We had just finished dinner and put our first-born son to bed when I received a call from the station, telling me to come in because rioting had broken out in the North End of Hartford.Pearl Harbor, the deaths of three great men, the end of the World War II in Europe and Asia, the 9/11 attacks and, if you count a memory of just a few days, the end of bin Laden. Three days that were good for America and five that were not. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.