Significant Events
Terry Odell
Significant events can be individual, familial, national, or international.
I was at a family reunion last weekend, and seeing so many cousins in one place was a visual lesson in the strength of DNA. No problem knowing we were all related. What was missing was the generation that included some we fondly remember as the crazy old aunts. Looking around, the cousins of my generation realized that to a lot of the others in the room, we were now the old guard and undoubtedly would be thought of as the crazy old cousins.
Many of the maternal side of my family hailed from Danzig (now Gdansk), and were lucky enough that one of the crazy old aunts had the foresight to push the family into selling their goods and getting the hell out of there. Their arrival in New York was on the maiden voyage of the SS Noordam. A reporter was sent to cover the arrival of the ship, and when they saw the passenger manifest with Anker after Anker, they figured there was a story there.
Another branch of the family lived in Berlin, and their patriarch was of the “This too will pass” mindset. Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938, opened his eyes, and they began their plans to leave. That’s a significant historical event that might be more significant to their family than others.
Image by Foundry Co from Pixabay
For most of us who are old enough to remember, September 11th, 2001 is a date that won’t be forgotten. We remember where we were, what we were doing, when we heard the news.
I was home, working on my part-time day job, which was entering registration data for an upcoming conference. As was typical, most of the attendees waited until the day before the early bird pricing was going to expire, and I was swamped. My husband called, said a plane crashed into the twin towers. My first reaction was, that’s a terrible accident, but I’m busy. He said to turn on the television, which was in his office in the next room. I did, and it took a moment or two to register that it wasn’t an accident at all. I turned up the volume, went back to my data entry, but turned on the ‘real’ television in the living room and bounced back and forth between work and watching for updates.
There are other major historic milestones. Another for me was the assassination of JFK. I was in high school history class, which was being taught by a ‘student teacher.’ I don’t know what they’re called in other regions, but this was part of the required curriculum for anyone wanting a teaching certificate in Los Angeles, and it was late enough in the semester that the teacher himself felt he could leave the room and leave her in charge. I don’t remember their names, but I remember he came into the room and interrupted the lesson and announced the assassination. Everyone’s first reaction was that he was playing up the curse that presidents elected in years with zeroes would come to a bad end. Then we noticed he was crying, and the shock hit us. School was dismissed for the day.
Few of us still remember Pearl Harbor Day, but that was another one where people knew what they were doing when they got the news.
Today, we should take a moment to remember 9-11 and those who lost their lives, and the repercussions throughout the world.
How do you handle historical and significant events in your writing? If your characters are boarding a plane, do you consider the security hoops they have to deal with? Do they even know what it was like before the inspections were put in place? Do you include mention of the pandemic? I read books obviously written during the pandemic by authors who assumed it would be long gone before their books came out, and they got it wrong. Or elections? Do you mention current administrations? The floor is yours.
How can he solve crimes if he’s not allowed to investigate?
Gordon Hepler, Mapleton’s Chief of Police, has his hands full. A murder, followed by several assaults. Are they related to the expansion of the community center? Or could it be the upcoming election? Gordon and mayor wannabe Nelson Manning have never seen eye to eye. Gordon’s frustrations build as the crimes cover numerous jurisdictions, effectively tying his hands. Available now in ebook, paperback, and audio.
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Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”
I still vividly remember waking up at 6 a.m on 9/11 to the station our alarm clock/radio was set to and hearing a confusing sounding news piece that “a small plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers,” and groggily going into our living room to turn on cable news, just in time to see the second plane strike the WTC. The rest of that morning I was numb as I watched events unfold. I didn’t have to work at the library until late afternoon.
My cozy library mystery series is set in mid-1980s and book 3 is going to see the Cold War come to Fir Grove in time for July 4, 1985 during an international chess exhibition between U.S. and Soviet chess players. I get to play with spy fun and games and possible back channel diplomacy. But avoid naming names and getting too specific about the events of 1985.
I shy away from names (and most of my books are set in “based on” places) as well.
Like all of us old enough, I have my own 9/11 and JFK and moon landing stories.
Here is a tidbit from my fiction affected by it, as the story is set in 2005/06. In the greenroom of a late night talk show in NYC:
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Dear Elise, worrying about her difficult hermit author. Kind Elise, who hadn’t demanded tiresome explanations: Why not a suburban book signing? Why national television? And why now? As response, Kary nodded toward the plate-glass window separating WMRC-NY’s third-floor greenroom from the clear New York night, where streetlights battled the erratic illumination of neon signs under an almost-full moon.
Elise joined her, gazed warily at the skyline. “What?”
It was automatic, halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century. “No. Down.” Below, across the avenue, a knot of pedestrians encircled a figure in a puffy red parka whose arm was being held and dusted off by a second figure in a Navy peacoat. “Must be black ice.” Kary pointed. “The red one fell. He hit his head. He lay so still for so long I thought he was dead. I…
Ehrhardt, Alicia Butcher. PRIDE’S CHILDREN: PURGATORY (Book 1 of the Trilogy) . Trilka Press. Kindle Edition.
—
Quick and centering in time and effect – without making a big deal. NYC and 9/11 are iconic.
It reinforces the heading for the scene:
New York City; February 25, 2005; 11 P.M.
Thanks for sharing, Alicia.
I remember the walk on the moon, the Challenger Explosion, and 9/11, Like you Terry, someone came up to me and said the Twin Towers have fallen. I thought the person might be talking about a construction issue in the building we were in. It took about five minutes for the news to hit and to wonder what should I do next.
I should add that I haven’t included any events like these in my books mostly because I write in the present time and those significant events are once in a decade or two or three. So they don’t happen while I’m writing. (I wasn’t writing books in 2001).
Two more significant events. I remember where I was and what I was doing for those as well, Alec.
One of my Romeos was written during the lockdown/mask madness which was esp. onerous in L.A. I felt I couldn’t avoid it, so worked it in. I’m glad I did, because it added a layer of originiality to the plot, and also preserves that historical moment for some future reader.
I generally avoid political naming, except tangentially, as in “He was popular during the Clinton administration” or some such.
As long as you’re writing in the ‘here and now’, and not projecting what will happen, mentioning significant events–if they have a place in the story–works for me.
But reading about two characters doing an elbow bumb “as a leftover gesture from the pandemic days” when the pandemic is still going strong bothers me.
During the panicdemic.
The final book in Tod Goldberg’s Gangsterland trilogy, in which a Chicago hitman hides out as a rabbi, deals with 9/11 in an interesting way. The series starts a year or two before 9/11 and the last book is set after it — the MC wants to flee, but the suddenly heightened security and cameras everywhere makes it impossible. It was very well used, and a reminder of how easy travel used to be.
I was living in Boston when 9/11 happened and working from home. My husband called me and suggested I stay home because the Twin Towers had just been hit. I didn’t get much done the rest of the day. A NYC friend was walking her kids to preschool, blocks away, when she saw it happen — she lost her apartment because it was in the closest residential building to the Towers and was contaminated. My brother-in-law lost a friend in the crash at the Pentagon. My niece’s young husband keeps wanting to argue that 9/11 was a conspiracy or some such bullshit and I keep telling him to shut the hell up.
So many people were affected on a much more personal level than their television sets. Thanks for sharing, Janet.
My high school classmate Robert died about two weeks ago. I will tell the short form of his 9/11 story. Robert graduated the USMA and went on to serve 20+ years in the Army. When he heard the news, he grabbed his uniform and flew down the highway to his base. A highway patrol officer saw him speeding and pulled him over. Seeing the uniform, the officer escorted him at speed to the state line. A few days later Robert learned that three of his USMA classmates died when the plane hit the Pentagon.
My first child was two weeks old on 9/11/01. I could go home at lunch and hold the baby for a bit. On 9/11 my co-worker had a radio that picked up TV sound. She could keep up with her “stories” at work. I heard the news. My first thought was that a plane had accidentally flown into the WTC. A plane had flown into the Empire State Building in the 1940’s. But that wasn’t it.
I went home and held the baby and cried. My mother and mother in law were over. My mother told us about sitting at home with her baby (me) and the TV. I was almost one. She held me tight and watched the funeral of JFK and cried.
Like many (afraid to say “most” for fear of assuming everyone here is “old enough” to be at work 23(!?!) years ago), I was at my day job, and we were two days into a week-long accreditation survey on that Tuesday, 9/11. I’d just turned the corner coming around from a quick walkthrough into a waiting room when I heard, on the Today Show, about the first plane hitting the WTC. I’d read about the Empire State Buidling being hit by a B-25 back in the mid-40’s, and while concerned, of course, kept moving, planning on catching up at the next TV I encountered. By then, the second plane had hit and I, like everyone else, knew it was no longer an accident. And the accreditation agency only ramped up their inspection to see how our hospital reacted in an emergency… and that evening, out in the quiet twilight of our airport-approach-path farmhouse, looking into the blue-hour sky and not seeing, but hearing a “heavy” aircraft of some sort traverse from north-to-south was both eerie, and decidedly different from the mayhem on TV…
I was five when JFK was assassinated and in the parking lot of a Publix in Cutler Ridge/Perine, Florida, with my brother and grandmother while Mom ran in for “milk and bread” – and came out with the news… I can still see the grainy black-n-white picture on the TV and feel the coolness of the Cuban tile floor in our small house in South Miami Heights…
Similarly, I was 10 when RFK, and MLK were shot, with all the resulting madness and such on the streets and around the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and remember seeing the news flashes and headlines about the protests and anti-war marches and news reports about Viet Nam, Kent State… all from the safety and security of our Florida-room sofa,
There are, really, so many socially significant events over the last 60+ years – the fire on Apollo 1, moon landing of Apollo 11, the Space Shuttle disasters – it’s hard to “write around” them sometimes… but some of them do slip or slide into my both my fictional and songwriting work, especially the events of today as I hear more and different stories from the survivors…
George – I used to shop at that Publix!
Thanks for sharing your stories.
on Sept. 11, 2001, I worked on the seventh floor of a building next to the San Antonio airport. My husband worked for a Fox affiliate as a photographer. He called me to tell me what had happened. Apart from the horror and fear of the unknown, I remember how eerily quiet it was when the airplanes stopped flying and the airport shut down.
Other events that embedded in my memories include the Challenger explosion in 1986. I worked in a newsroom in Laredo then and we all stopped working to watch the coverage. And then there was the Oklahoma City bombing and the horror of knowing children in a daycare were among the victims. I was working in downtown SA and again we stopped what we were doing to watch and try to fathom the evil and ask ourselves why someone would do something so heinous.
As a news junkie my life is marked by a sense of what’s newsworthy as opposed to what is historically momentous. I don’t include a lot of this in my stories because I don’t want to date them. But I have included the pandemic in my current WIP because the family owns restaurants, which still struggle to overcome the impact of the pandemic. In San Antonio, which has a huge hospitality industry, restaurants are still shutting down everyday. They haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic and now high grocery prices are affecting them as well as staffing issues.
I think the novel I’ve read about the pandemic (coupled with the George Floyd’s murder) is Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence.
The silence as air traffic stopped. It was strange.
Challenger exploded on my mother’s birthday. I was in a mall getting chocolates. The clerk was on the phone with her daughter. She turned around and was crying. I went down the mall to Radio Shack to see what I couldn’t believe.
Good post, Terry. I haven’t worked any *significant* dates into my writing, yet.
I was at work when the towers came down. The entire orthopedic practice stopped what they were doing, including our patients, and watched on the TV set in the waiting room. Some were crying, others were cursing.
I was ten when JFK died. I was out on the playground jumping rope with my girlfriends when a playground teacher herded us back into the building, saying, “JFK has been shot”.
I remember some kids saying, “Who’s that?”
We went back to our classroom and watched the news on a TV set they rolled in on a cart. The adults in the room were crying, while most of the kids sat quietly looking confused.
I wish we could believe never again, but it’s unlikely.
Terry, thanks for this moving post on 9/11. I remember all these pivotal historical events except for Pearl Harbor. Family members were there on December 7, 1941 so I heard their accounts.
Several years ago, a friend expressed concern that her grandchildren were not taught about 9/11 in school and they didn’t even know what it was. That was scary.
Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.
Mom’s (crazy) Uncle Joe was a Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate at Pearl Harbor during the attack, and her cousin, his son, recalls being able to see the goggles on the pilots as they passed overhead. Her uncle told her (equally crazy), Aunt Ann to start cooking, and that he’d send word, and then disappeared into the smoke and battle down at the harbor, sending hungry sailors to their house for something to eat – provided they told his bride where and when and (in what condition), they’d last seen him…
I worked for a thirty-something at an Orlando theme park who hadn’t heard of the Vietnam war. Scary.
I was on a conference call with the regional salesmen for an aerospace components company when one of them said to turn on the television in the break room because an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Towers. We did so and about then the second tower got hit. I realized that it changed everything but I didn’t know why.
Going home from work there were lines at all the gas stations and I thought how pathetic, that all this tectonic event caused people was to think they better gas up the Plymouth.
I called my mother whose 21st birthday was December 7, 1941 and asked her about it, She said “Oh, it was totally different. We knew exactly who the enemy was and that it would take a while but we would smash them into bits. This, this, we don’t know who the enemy is.”
We talk about heroes-the word has cheapened noticeably these days. Some guy pushes a grocery cart for an old lady and suddenly he’s a hero.
This was different, and there is an image abroad of a fire truck heading toward the twin towers, which was the unit’s last call.
The bravery of the firefighters and first responders leaves me speechless, on that ride knowing that their chances of returning alive were chancy. And the passengers who ended up in a cow pasture in Schencksville, but yet gave what Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion.
Those were the real heroes and they died like warriors, not small fearful people like me.
Up to now I have not included notable historical events in my short stories except for one I wrote about Pickett’s charge. Instead of being specific and instructive it forms the backdrop for dialogue between two soldiers on the nature of slavery.
Abacha, the last military dictator in Nigeria died in June 1998. He forcefully took over power from another military dictator in 1993. MKO Abiola was believed to have won the 1993 national election. But while the Democratic Government was getting ready to take over, Abacha overthrew the government and jailed MKO. When Abacha died after his five years of terror, the country rejoiced that MKO’s time was here. But to the shock of everyone, MKO died a month later, on the day he was supposed to be released from jail. He was visited by US officials that day and fell down in their presence, dying later at the hospital. So there were unfounded rumours that the US had a hand in his death. I was young and only followed up the news on the TV. It didn’t mean much to me then until I studied it in High School and read about it as an adult.
When 9/11 happened, it was just one of other catastrophic news from across the world. What made it concerning was that it was the first time I’d be hearing about such massive terrorist attack on US soil.
PS We also have student teachers in Nigeria and the meaning is the same.
Thanks for sharing this, Stephen. I’ve never been a good student of history, and this was (sadly) new for me.
I was at church when I heard the news about the plane hitting the World Trade Center, and like a lot of others, thought it was an accident. Didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t. Like Debbie, I remember all the events mentioned except Pearl Harbor. I also remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. My daughter was two weeks old and I remember being afraid for her.
Great post to remind us of the bravery of those who died giving their all.
I’ve got a lot of significant events I remember. Perhaps the strongest is the morning I learned that Bobby Kennedy had been killed–after JFK’s assassination, after MLK’s assassination. I blogged about it the day after Obama was elected:
“November 5, 2008
Trying to sort out my thoughts and feelings this morning. They keep going back to that morning in 1968, when I walked back up Demptster Street in Evanston after playing tennis with my wife, and turned on the TV to hear that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. After Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. After JFK had been assassinated.
It’s like there’s some strong connection in me—or is it in the world?—between that morning and 11:00 pm last night. It’s like something that has lain dormant for 40 years has been revived. It’s like something that left the world 40 years ago has orbited back. Is it too strong to say that something died that morning and has come back to life now? A nexus between that morning and now.
It’s not that I was aware of what that morning meant to me. I was aware that I felt how terrible it was. But I was also resigned, I think. VietNam. Richard Nixon. Watergate. It would go on and on. The world was not going well, but what could one expect? Best not to invest too much in it.
My wife says that she “signed out” from politics after McGovern lost in 1972. I don’t think I ever “signed out,” but neither was I ever fully there. I did not take the McGovern loss—or the Humphrey loss, or the Carter loss, or the Mondale loss, or the Kerry loss—as hard as I would have taken an Obama loss last night. Nor did I respond to Carter’s and Clinton’s wins, pleasing as they were, the way I’m responding to Obama.
It has something to do with that morning 40 years ago.”
I remember most of these events, but haven’t used any of them in my books. I did include Vietnam War veterans in my last book, and it’s my intention to include veterans of foreign wars or their descendants in future books in the series.
Long before I knew him, my husband served aboard a Navy destroyer in the Cuban Missile Crisis. We learned recently that things got a lot closer to war during that time than we had thought.
It just occurred to me that I wrote about a Vietnam vet in a short story that gave some back story about Horace Blackthorne, who started Blackthorne, Inc. on its path. I’ve shared it in 2 parts over on my Substack.
I mostly write to take readers away from current events, so no history in my stories.
I was in the philosophy building at USC, struggling with a math problem, when JFK was shot. I don’t recall ever solving the problem. The prof never came to school that day.
IIRR, on 9.11, I called in sick that day and was told by whomever I talked to that the towers were down. I went back to bed.
I was 2½ on Peru Habah Day. Some time after that, my mother told me about the war, and I decided to ask her every day if it was over. I remembered to do so the next day, but her reaction discouraged me from ever asking again.