Lana Whited at Roanoke.Com

Thirty-one years ago Thursday night, I learned an important lesson about news. I was packed with dozens of other little Girl Scouts into the basement of the caretaker's cottage at Camp Whip-poor-will Hills in Ohio. At 10:56 that evening, July 20, 1969, we all gasped as we saw fellow Ohioan Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. It was so far past my bedtime that I felt other-worldly. I have always re-told this story as happening in the middle of the night and was stunned, this week, when I discovered that the big event occurred just before the 11:00 news. (I guess I should be careful when I insist that the snows were deeper back then, too.)

Of course, I know that Armstrong said some famous words, and I can conjure a pretty good image of him stepping down from the Eagle onto the lunar surface. The collective gasp of the Girl Scouts was thrilling. But what I like best about this memory is that I can recall it in vivid detail. I know where I was at the moment of the "giant step," and I can see it in my mind's eye. When I replay that mental video, it isn't the TV set I focus on -- it's the sea of small faces bathed in the electronic glow of history being made before our very eyes.

After the broadcast, we all trudged back around the canoe pond to our tents. Well, most of us trudged. I was carried across the shoulder of a sympathetic counselor named Cinda Miller, who said to me on the way back through the trees, "don't wake up in the morning and think you dreamed this up."

I have other such moments in my mental media scrapbook.

When President John Kennedy was assassinated, I was just getting home from kindergarten. My mother and grandmother crowded close to the television, as if they'd hear the news faster if they were closer to Walter Cronkite.

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Mom and I were shopping at Miller's Department Store in Kingsport, Tenn. We had just entered the front door when a saleslady behind the make-up counter told us, and we headed straight for the television department.

When John Lennon was shot, I was in a college apartment at William and Mary watching a Miami Dolphins game with Mary Kay Henning, whose father Dan was the Dolphins' quarterback coach. I watched details of President Ronald Reagan's shooting on the same TV the next semester, just after I returned from a Hemingway/Fitzgerald seminar.

When the Challenger space shuttle exploded, a colleague at UNCG, where I was a doctoral student, stopped me in the hall between classes to tell me.

When I learned that the Persian Gulf War had begun, I was sitting in my living room in Rocky Mount waiting for my friend Katherine to get back from her Ph.D. comprehensive exams in Greensboro.

Dan Rather broke in on a Perry Mason movie to tell me that Richard Nixon had died. To this day, I don't know how that movie ends.

When I learned that the Federal Building in Oklahoma City had been blown up, I was at our campus snack bar, getting a medium Diet Coke, and manager Debra Peak said, "Have you heard about the bombing?"

When the O.J. Simpson verdict was read, I was at a colleague's house on campus, eating macaroni and cheese and trying not to bite my nails. In the minutes leading up to the verdict, I heard at least three reporters on three different channels say, "You'll never forget where you were at this moment." If you're tempted to say that statement is hyperbolic, blowing the significance of the Simpson verdict way out of proportion, consider for a moment that the significance of the Simpson verdict is beside the point.

Breaking news is exciting, and it draws us in a way that the next day's newspaper doesn't. There's an adrenaline rush to watching an unexpected news event, something so important that it interrupts regular programming and comes right into your living room. When John Kennedy's plane crashed last summer, I watched the search-and-recovery coverage on a Boston channel I got with satellite TV. at the time. It was special to see live local coverage.

Television not only records but actually establishes most of our cultural milestones. Would the wedding of Charles and Diana, or the sight of Diana's sons walking behind her coffin in mourning, resonate with us so deeply if we had not seen those images live but instead in the next day's newspaper? Would we have felt the Kennedy and Bessette families' agony so deeply last summer if we hadn't seen hour after hour of the search-and-recovery attempt? Would we have truly shared the Columbine victims' terror if we hadn't seen students fleeing their school on live TV?

The speed at which news travels now is part of what makes breaking coverage exciting. Imagine being the spouse of a solider off fighting the first or second World War, depending on slow mail or delayed news for information about your loved one's welfare. I once heard a World War II veteran say the war was "much more frightening for my family at home. I always knew I was all right."

Now, with the speed of e-mail, faxes, and satellite-beamed news transmissions, a family might know the same day if a member died in some other part of the world. When the evening news reports no new U.S. casualties in Bosnia, there must be some peace of mind in knowing that update isn't two weeks old.

The communal or shared experience of news breaking is the other element in the formula. For most of the major news breaks I remember, I can recall not only where I heard them but who told me or whom I was with. When there's an emotional component, a memory tends to be stronger. So add to the death of a famous person we love or admire the presence of others who are dear to us, and we end up with a strong memory.

It also occurs to me that my catalog of news events includes mostly tragedies. I had a playwriting teacher once who said a sad ending stays with us longer, and he was probably right. Broadcast networks tend not to follow good news for hours continually, and so it doesn't become ingrained in our memories. Apart from the lunar landing, I don't have many strong memories about breaking news I was glad to hear. Watching the voter returns during Bill Clinton's first election is memorable for me, because he felt like the first president from my generation. He was also only the second presidential candidate I ever voted for who actually got elected.

That Neil Armstrong stepped gingerly down the steps of the Eagle and onto the surface of the moon is no longer a big deal to me. In my level-headed moments, I think we spent too much money on the space race. I couldn't even tell you what Neil Armstrong looks like up close. But my memory of being packed into a basement den in my Peanuts pajamas, surrounded by dozens of Girl Scouts, when Armstrong finally took the big step is frozen, precious, in my mind. That is my experience of the first man on the moon, and it makes me almost as emotional now as it did when I was 11. It's not that it happened. It's that I saw it, as it happened, live on a black-and-white TV. If I had "dreamed it up," I couldn't have improved on it.

Do you remember where you were when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon? If you're lucky (and you're old enough), you do.

Where were you when . . . ?

Where were
you when . . . ?