Question of the Day

I read a thread at Echidne's today that quotes Jimmy Carter. A few comments mentioned remembering Carter's presidency or being too young to recall it. I wrote in part,

[...] one of my earliest political memories was Jimmy Carter and the Swamp Rabbit. That was the spring after Milk was shot, and in the Bay Area where we lived everyone was still talking about it in hushed tones (White and Milk, not The Rabbit). Ah, kindergarten!

Other dominant themes in my memory from that time include the Iran hostage crisis and the 1979 energy crisis. I clearly recall my parents explaining California's odd-even gas rationing to us. This explanation prefaced anecdotes about how they had to give their rubber duckies and Kewpie Dolls to the war effort* when they were little.

In October 2008, Melissa asked about our earliest memories of presidential politics. Here's my answer to that one:

The first presidential election I remember was 1980. I remember riding in the car after dark with my mother one evening. She was worrying out loud that my father was "probably going to vote for that moron!" (she meant Reagan.)

The rest of the story is priceless and I think I've related it here before. I remember saying, so, you're going to vote for Carter? and she looked at me like she'd said too much and told me that asking people who they're going to vote for was like going into their living room and mooning them. ("pulling your pants down" was the way she put it; I guess she figured I didn't know what "mooning" meant, like it would occur to me to do that anyway, lol!).

But my question this evening is broader:

What is/are your earliest current events memories? Tell us memories from every time and place. How did you process these events?

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* World War II