Pearl Harbor Day – December 7, 1941 – is irretrievably etched on my psyche. I knew what that meant. World War II was beginning and it would call me and other young men my age to arms. I was broadcasting a symphony concert over our college radio station that Sunday afternoon and the news broke into every radio program then on the air, and into homes and hearts across the nation and the world. In those days there was no TV to depend on for visual images but they came in the newspapers the next morning and F.D.R’s famous “Day of Infamy” speech quickly followed.

     When the atomic bomb burst upon Hiroshima and the world in August of 1945 I found myself a mere 635 miles from Ground Zero aboard a ship in Bruckner Bay at Okinawa. Like everyone else, we U.S. Navy personnel had no advance knowledge and we listened to the incredulous radio reports and wondered what kind of WMD this nuclear device could be and what it meant for us, for our country, for the world – to say nothing of what it meant for Japan and immolated victims.

     On November 22nd of 1963 I got the news of the assasination in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy while I was at a meeting in New York across the street from the United Nations. My faithful secretary phoned to interrupt the scripting session for a movie about Bach. Needless to say, we stopped our deliberations in mid-sentence.

     Momentous events that can cause mass changes in human perceptions are not always disasters. The astronauts landing on the surface of the moon that the world watched and heard on television on July 20th 1969 was just such a shared collective epiphany. An earlier Apollo crew had orbited the moon, described and filmed it prior to our witnessing that “first step” landing on the Sea of Tranquility. I was in my mother’s Minnesota apartment helping her celebrate her 86th birthday. Suddenly all of us had a new vision of our planet now seen in the context of its place in space. Humankind would never be the same.

     And who of us has recovered from the searing effects of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001? Wherever we were that day – and each of us knows precisely – we were part of the communication-transportation chaos, anxiously trying to reach our loved ones to let them know we were safe and to discover if they were okay. But that day I was trapped in, of all places, an American Airlines plane that left New York just 20 minutes before the first of the two historic crashes that destroyed the buildings and their hundreds of occupants and rescuers and similarly blasted the innocence of our nation and the world.

     Another of infamy was the death trip across the Indian Ocean by the 2004 Tsunami on the Second Day of Christmas. Casualties are now estimated at almost 300,000 lives plus vast devastation. Unprecedented empathy brought gifts of money and direct aid from so many individuals, organization, companies and nations throughout the world wanting to help. This disaster, like all of these major calamities, surely left its imprint on the survivors – and on the rest of us, too.

     Following nine months later was the awesome devastation from Hurricane Katrina with its wicked waste of lives and man-built structures. The aftermath was surrounded by confusion and controversy. Did government at local, state and federal levels manage the rescue and recovery process.

     The archives of history abide not only in libraries, vaults and digital file drawers; the imprint of history likewise is held by each of us whose soul remembers just where we were and just what we were doing when a major event happened.

Baldwin, NY
February 13, 2005