What Does Your Child Self Remember?

A person I follow on Twitter asked an intriguing question of his followers: 

Who was president the year you started first grade and what world event do you remember from the news?

He's a Gen Xer, so his answer was Jimmy Carter and the Cambodian genocide. 

Lyndon Johnson was president when I was in first grade and, off the top of my head, I couldn't remember any world (or national) events from that school year. 

So I read through the Wikipedia lists of major events for fall 1964 and winter/spring 1965 to confirm that lack of recollection and yes, I was correct. Though many famous and infamous things happened, my child self didn't commit any of them to memory.

The only things I saw on those lists that I do remember were all from popular culture:

• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer premiered on television that Christmas.
• The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Cinderella with Lesley Ann Warren premiered on television that winter or spring.
• The Sound of Music opened in theaters.
• The James Bond movie Goldfinger played in theaters (and had a big splashy photo display in Life magazine, featuring a woman spray-painted gold. But I probably saw it over multiple years later when doing collages).
  

I think I don't specifically remember any of those from that exact year, either, though: I rewatched Rudolph and Cinderella multiple times when they were reshown throughout my childhood. I vaguely remember that I saw The Sound of Music in the theater when it came out, since it was one of the few movies I ever saw as a child, but I  remember it more because we had a record album of the music. 

I also was probably aware of the various Gemini space program achievements that happened that year, since my father was working on the space program for IBM. That year saw the first American two-person flight and the first American walking in space, for instance. But I don't remember either of those specifically. 

Here are the major news stories, but which 5- or 6-year-old me was blithely unaware of:

• Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Kruschev was deposed and Brezhnev took over as leader of the USSR.
• Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election.
• Malcolm X was assassinated.
• All of the civil rights struggles of Selma took place (Bloody Sunday and the Edmund Pettus Bridge and so on)
• The Voting Rights Act was written, passed, and signed into law in about two and a half months.
• Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Act of 1965, establishing Medicare and Medicaid.

In defense of my childhood self, I point out that I was a young first grader, while it's likely most Gen Xers would have been six months or more older than I was while in the same grade. So I'd maybe be better off comparing what I remember from second grade. 

Here are some of the most prominent news stories of that year, 1965-66:

• Summer between first and second grade: the Watts riots. I remember these from Life magazine, possibly from seeing the images multiple times over the years later, though.
• Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 immigration law that ended racist quotas that had been in effect since the 1920s. Nope, that made no impression on me.
  
• Vatican II announcements continued from work the earlier year, especially the one finding that the Jews are not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. I think I knew about this, being raised Catholic, though maybe not right when it happened.
  
• The great Northeast blackout. Oh, I remember that! Thirteen hours in the dark, who wouldn't. But you can see why: it happened to me personally. And I also remember the Life magazine photos about it. (Are you sensing a pattern about Life magazine?)
  
• A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted. Oh yeah.
• The Supreme Court ruled that Miranda warnings must be given. Nope, no memory of that important ruling.
  
• I generally remember anti-Vietnam War protests (people were setting themselves on fire, which kind of gets your attention), but it's very nonspecific.

Also in defense of my young self, I note that 3-year-old me was aware of (and I do remember) John Kennedy's assassination. It's one of my earliest memories.

It's a frightening thought, but what will the young children of today remember from the past four years? I hope they were shielded from it as much as possible and instead they remember a movie or TV show.