Since I was born in 1955, this is within my lifetime.

As a side note, I have a book of letters written to Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination of her husband, and one of the letters is from someone who was alive for all 4 presidential assassinations. I thought that was amazing.

hedda_foil

(16,375 posts)

5. I remember seeing this when it was originally broadcast.

Reply to Adenoid_Hynkel (Original post)

Wed Apr 15, 2015, 12:17 AM

Apr 2015

I was almost 11 and it boggled my mind. This and the marking of the last few deaths of very old men who had been underage bugle boys in the Civil War.

MillennialDem

(2,367 posts)

6. Amazing - I was born in 1980 so this aired before my time, but I remember my AP history teacher in

Reply to Adenoid_Hynkel (Original post)

Wed Apr 15, 2015, 01:42 AM

Apr 2015

high school (who was near 60 at the time, so born in the 1930s or early 1940s) mentioning that when he was a kid there was an old man in his neighborhood that was in his 90s and so remembered the civil war.

To me that is so distant it is unfathomable that there were still living memories of that well into the 20th century...

To me World War I is as far back as I can even conceive understanding what the world would have been like in my head... of other interest to me is that when I was in high school (mid 1990s) there would have been a small but significant number of WWI veterans still alive as well as a small but significant number of people born before 1900 (old enough to fight in the great war / old enough to remember it as adults).

Now all the veterans are gone and even the people old enough to remember it as adults or teenagers is miniscule.

I also think about for this man the difference of the world around him from his childhood and early adulthood - no cars or television even remotely in the works, yet they were all invented. Did he think back to the good old days of no cars and using horses to get around?

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