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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As many of you know for the last couple of weeks on the show we've been inviting listeners to share the most defining news stories of your lifetimes, definitive events that shaped you in one way or another. We followed up that series with a few conversations over the last couple of days about what it means to be a member of your generation. We're going to go a different way with this now because many of the stories that we heard, really the overwhelming number of the stories that we heard were big national or global news events, things like Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11, January 6th.

Our last caller yesterday mentioned the killing of Trayvon Martin. People brought up the pandemic of course. We're going to go a different way. Now we want to hear about the most defining news event from your neighborhood or town, any hyper-local story. It can be recent or it can be far away in the past that has shaped you and why. This is open to everybody. We're not doing this by age or generation. Listeners of all ages from any generation this time all at the same time are welcome to call 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Tell us a story of a defining news event from your neighborhood, your block, your town, any hyper-local story, recent or in the distant past, and how it shaped you and why. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @Brianlehrer. On the show during the series for example Samantha, 22 years old tied the two together. We were just asking 20 somethings the most defining news event in your lifetime. She brought up something that some other people brought up too Sandy Hook Elementary School, the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut back in 2012.

For her, it was because she lived there, and it was very different for her in ways that you'll have to go back and listen to the tape to hear. It was a local story. It wasn't a national story for somebody there. We had Holly, a caller in their 30s who lived in the suburbs of Oklahoma City in April 1995, when a domestic terrorist bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building and Holly said this.

Holly: I remember my mom thought that the water heater had exploded. We live about 20 miles away from where the actual explosion occurred.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. You heard it is what you're saying, 20 miles away?

Holly: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Another example of a big news story that may have been a national news story for anybody paying attention in 1995. For this listener it was we thought our water heater blew up and then went on to talk about ripples of fear and experience of various kinds living in Oklahoma City after the Oklahoma City bombings. Maybe your example isn't as earth-shattering or nationally known as those. Maybe for some reason, an example that also comes to mind is that movie from 2019, the Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix. Remember they filmed a scene from that movie on the step of a street near 167th Street in the Bronx. Then tourists flock there for months.

Maybe your example is something like a film shoot on your block that altered the character of your neighborhood in some way or your hometown or something as big as some of those other examples. 212-433-WNYC. We'll take your calls on a defining news event from your block, your neighborhood, your town, your neck of the woods right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. I know the movie was called Joker, not the Joker but now to your calls on a defining news event from your block, your neighborhood, your town, and Rachel in Philadelphia, you're on WNYC. Hi Rachel, thanks for calling.

Rachel: Hi, Brian. It's a pleasure to speak with you. I'm sorry I'm talking about something a bit more somber than a movie shoot. Back in 2001 obviously 9/11 happened and then two months and a day after 9/11 there was a plane crash in my home neighborhood of Rockaway Beach. It was American Airlines Flight 587 and it crashed about five blocks away from where I lived. It killed several people on the ground and unfortunately everybody on the plane.

I remember just feeling really scared and feeling like is this a terrorist attack again? I didn't feel safe. I know my neighbors might stream down onto the street and we just weren't sure what was going on. My mom went to the local elementary school because she's a doctor and just in case there was anybody she could treat. There wasn't anybody that she was able to help. There weren't any survivors on the plane. The people who died on the ground.

I just know that it really created a feeling of resilience in Rockaway that I think has remained. I know that obviously in 2012 with Sandy Rockaway was also really hard hit by that. I think it started at least in my consciousness since I was a child back in 2001, it started just a feeling of resilience and community coming together. That lasted into Sandy when we had to recall that same feeling again.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for sharing that story, Rachel. Really appreciate it. Michael in the East Village, you're on WNYC. Hi Michael.

Michael: Hi. Such a pleasure. Thank you so much. I moved into the neighborhood 46 years ago, 1977. I'm still in the same apartment and that was the year that the first McDonald's came to New York, to the metropolitan area and it's still there on First Avenue around 7th Street. Everyone said this will never succeed because New York has its own fast food like Nathan's and Chock full o'Nuts. It turned out to be a harbinger that everything else came on its tail. Kentucky Fried Chicken, all the others, and suddenly we were just like anywhere else in America and didn't have that unique New York quality that everybody seemed to love. It just turned a corner.

Brian Lehrer: Do you feel like that corner though it was turned by the first McDonald's and what a thing to have come up the first McDonald's in New York City? Do you feel like the neighborhood has maintained a unique New York character? Of course, you're calling from the East Village. So much has happened there over the 46-year span since that McDonald's came in. I guess I'm asking did it absorb and assimilate it in a way over time, or did it assimilate the city?

Michael: I don't think so. Obviously, a lot of that came in and NYU students whoever appreciated it, people with lower income really appreciated it 24/7, all of that. East Village still maintained the character of Ukrainian and Polish and Italian. It's changed but I don't know if I can say that's why it changed.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Heather in Bushwick, you're on WNYC. Hi Heather.

Heather: Hi. I'm driving. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you. We usually ask people to pull over before they have to concentrate so much as to talk on the radio but be careful and what you got.

Heather: This is a story that caused huge shot waves through our neighborhood in Bushwick in the bar and restaurant community. I own a bar there and there was a pizzeria where the bar manager had been accused of sexually assault or a predatory behavior toward his employees. One of the employees came forward on Instagram and then tens of women joined her. The pizzeria which I won't name ended up shutting down because of the accusations and it caused this re-examination especially during the pandemic of different bar and restaurant owners just [beep] talk female employees and checking in like, are you okay, because a lot of these women had worked at other places as well. How do you feel? What could we do better?

It was just this huge micro news story that just never got any journal or attention. It was big through all the bars and restaurants and Bushwick just having their own me-too moment in the summer of 2021.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, me too on the neighborhood level rather than the national level. You're really describing a lot of personal sharing and checking in with people if they were okay in their workplace bars.

Heather: Yes. A lot of bars that the people that I know that operate they're also female business owners. We talked to our staff, we talked to those women like when the restaurant shut down some of the bars took on the staff that got shut out in the cold. It was this massive neighborhood news story.

Brian Lehrer: Heather, thank you for sharing it. That's a good one. Nikki in Massapequa, you at WNYC. Hi, Nikki. Nikki in Massapequa are you there?

Nikki: Oh, can you hear me now?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you now.

Nikki: All right. Hello. I graduated from high school a year before the Trump presidency, and the year of the Trump presidency one of my friends I graduated with his whole family were deported. They were sent back to Mexico where they had come from. That was a huge story just around my high school or the community of people I graduated with especially because there were other students there who were susceptible to that. One of my closest friends is Heron Daka. He was born in Zimbabwe. It was a very defining and scary moment for me and others in my community.

Brian Lehrer: It's like one thing to read about this in the news, it's another thing when it happens to your friend.

Nikki: Absolutely. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Did it politically activate you or anybody else in your mutual friend's group with your friend who got deported?

Nikki: For sure yes. Me and my friend who was born out of the country in Zimbabwe and a couple of others. We were already a little bit politically involved since the Ferguson unrest, and then we started really looking into things then.

Brian Lehrer: Nikki, thank you for sharing that. Call us again. Jeff in Union you're on WNYC. Hi Jeff.

Jeff: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. First-time caller here. Anyhow, I grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, which isn't too far from Newark. In the summer of 1967, right after Newark had race riots, Plainfield erupted in race riots. It was a very frightening situation partly because my father owned a business in the downtown area.

That Sunday when the riots were taking place, normally it was a five-minute drive from his business to our house. It took him over an hour to get home and my mother was in an absolute state of panic. The reason being is that everything was being barricaded and blocked off and he had to go drive down to nearly Bridgewater, Somerville area to get back to the other side of Plainfield where we lived. It was a really wake-up call.

My parents, even though they were upset and panicked, I asked them why was this occurring because I was a little young to understand. They explained to me the whole civil rights issues and Blacks and discrimination and segregation. They gave me a very good understanding of everything. From that point on, I was well aware of racial issues. I went to school in Plainfield, graduated from Plainfield High School. The school was about half Black, half white.

We were always being, I wouldn't say bombarded by, but Black issues were always coming up. A lot of the Black students who were more activists wanted off for certain Black people's birthdays well, Martin Luther King actually, and then also Black culture being taught. I came to understand the issues and I'm much better for it that I grew up in a place like Plainfield, not because of the riots, but because of me becoming aware of civil rights issues. I was always sensitive to minority issues.

I've supported the gay community, women's rights, I'm Jewish so I've certainly supported freedom for Soviet Jewry back when that was a big issue back in the '70s. I grew up with that in mind. Like I said, it was a shocking incident because Plainfield a small town maybe 45,000 people at the time and to have a major race riot that made national news was shocking. It was a wake-up call to me and a lot of other people.

Brian Lehrer: You say wake-up call, you almost exemplify what the word woke was originally supposed to mean when it was a good thing before people started using it as a bad thing. People who may not have had the personal experience of racism on the receiving end, becoming aware of reality in the world on many levels becoming awakened to it. That's how we first started using the word woke. When you said awake it just made me think that in a good way it sounds like you exemplify woke.

Jeff, thank you very much. It's interesting so many of the callers so far and a lot that are on the board are-- like if I thought most of them were going to be like the guy who called about the first McDonald's coming to his block, so many of them are about big global events or big epic events, iconic events of one kind or another, and the local impact and the personal impact that they had on people when they came close to home. The airline crash after 9/11, Jeff's story right there.

Some of the others that are coming in, and I think our next caller has one even further away in time and in space. Ming in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi Ming. Thanks for calling in.

Ming: Hi Brian. How are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thank you.

Ming: That's my second call. Successful call. Yes, I think to me the most defining moment is German Square.

Brian Lehrer: You lived in China at the time?

Ming: Yes. In 1989.

Brian Lehrer: Did you live in Beijing itself?

Ming: No, I was only 11.

Brian Lehrer: It's okay. I hear you emotional. It's okay. Did you know people there?

Ming: My uncle.

Brian Lehrer: Your uncle was there?

Ming: Yes. My mom's dad. We are well close even now. We are actually very much alike when it comes to look, when it comes to interests and when it comes to personality actually. He's the first one in my family going to college and then graduate school. He was in graduate school in Beijing. He actually wrote a letter to my mom, basically saying he was determined to fight for the injustice.

Then my mom actually, so freaking out. I don't know why I memorized all those things. Then my grandpa came to my home because my grandpa actually live in the countryside and I was living with my parents in a small town in southeast part of China. I was going to middle school, and then my mom actually came out with a genius idea. They wrote back to my uncle. I think they actually sent a Telegraph to my uncle saying my grandma was dying so sick. Then basically pushed my uncle to come back with that reason. My uncle did come back I would say right before that massacre, right before that crackdown. He actually basically [unintelligible 00:19:01] got away I would say from the killing.

Brian Lehrer: I was waiting for the end of that story whether he made it out alive but he did but it became a personal story for you not just an abstract story about human rights.

Ming: I think why is still impact me such emotionally I think two reasons. First, why I'm in my middle 40s and I'm in United States. If I think back, if you think why China actually is getting backwards when it comes to freedom of speech, all kinds of freedoms, you just say freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of worship, freedom of everything. Why is actually such a mess it's falling back to just complete authoritarian.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, in recent times under Xi Jinping. Ming, thank you very much for the call. We really appreciate it. Thank you for all your calls. These oral histories, because it was an oral history series in the first place and now these oral histories of things that happened on your block, in your neighborhood, in your hometown, or whatever you want to call it, thank you for all those calls. Tomorrow, we're going to do another kind of oral history as part of a history segment that we're doing.

Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of Bill Clinton. We're going to look back with two journalists who covered the Clinton campaign back then and why Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, and why 1993, the year that he took office and a lot of stuff happened, why 1993 has helped set up the world of 2023 that we're living in today. We're going to have the two journalists, we'll do some oral history with you on the phones about the year that Bill Clinton was elected president, and a lot more on tomorrow's Brian Lehrer Show. Thank you so much for your calls and your ears today.

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