From All of Us...Good Night

I got up at 3:15 this morning to watch the space shuttle land. Okay, that's a lie. I really wanted to get up at 3:30 this morning to watch the space shuttle land at 3:39, but my alarm is set for 5:40, and going through fifty minutes to reset it is a huge pain in the keister. When I woke up for what we shall delicately term "other reasons" at 3:15, I remembered that it was almost time for the landing. I turned on the TV; NBC was showing a "full-length commercial program for HomeLife products" and ABC was at commercial. I should have known Discovery was scrubbed--but in my own defense, it was 3-frickin-20 am, okay?

I kept ABC on, because that's the network I trust. In my family, you watch ABC News when there's a crisis. Or at least you used to; now my parents have cable and may well watch CNN, and honestly if the news happens in the evening cycle I hope BBC picked it up in time for the show that runs on PBS at 11. But back in the day, whenever the world got dicey, you turned to channel 8 (WQAD from Moline, for all you ex-'Burg readers). This probably had more to do with longtime anchor Jim King than anything else; think an Iowa version of Walter Cronkite and you've got a pretty good mental image. I'm not sure this was the universal reaction to bad news back there; mladyjade, I seem to remember your mom watching NBC.

I still default to ABC, when NPR's lack of picture just won't do. Okay, true it's the only Big Three network to reliably tune in, and of course KCRG is the one local station to give you the news without invoking "the power of prayer" or blessing its audience (okay, even there it happened once. But the next week, they announced that the Sunday night anchor had left TV to become a Lutheran minister. I'm willing to forgive). Deep down, I know the real reason I tune to ABC is to hear Peter Jennings' soothing voice sort out the issues (and to watch "This Week" for the post-Clintonian eye candy, but that's another post). When ABC came back from commercial, the news wasn't about Discovery. In fact, they ran a pre-taped segment on Discovery that led me to think the shuttle was braking over Cuba, as planned. The error went undetected, because of course the major news story was the death of Peter Jennings.

In my head, Peter Jennings told me that Challenger blew up (true, reconfirmed by footage today), the Berlin wall had fallen (probably true, given that it happened during prime time), we were bombing Irag (definitely true), a coup had overthrown the Russian government (probably not true, as I was eating a bagel with peanut butter at the time), we were bombing Iraq again (not true; I was on vacation in Toronto). When NPR broke through with a strange story about "unconfirmed reports" that two planes had hit the World Trade Center, I have it in my memory that Peter Jennings was the voice-over on Good Morning America (which can't be right). His voice is the soundtrack to a good deal of my political conciousness. It was such a shock to hear that voice rasp and catch in April, more of a literary device than a reality.

I stayed awake for a while, supposedly waiting for news of the shuttle. Really, I was watching my life in review (Peter Jennings' second round of anchoring at ABC began in 1978, the year I was born). It was during a World News Tonight broadcast, the day that Lucille Ball died if I remember correctly, that I had a chiling pre-teen thought: "Someday, everyone famous from when I was a kid will die." It seemed sad, an unwelcome confirmation that you were now a grown-up, and I pondered that while the familiar rich Canadian voice reviewed Ms. Ball's career. So...I guess it's starting.