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Here is a challenge from author Gene Weingarten: "What I am seeking now are more elusive stories, harder-to-find events and anecdotes from private lives that had intense meaning or resonance within those lives, or were portentous of larger events to come. Or other sorts of events – within the business world, or in the military, for example – that didn’t make the news."
More here.
And on that day, here is an article from the LA Times:
"Early in December two sixth-grade classes from an elementary school in East Los Angeles came downtown to tour the Los Angeles Times and meet a live editor.
On an impulse I asked the youngsters how many of their families had videocassette players. A thicket of hands went up; it looked as if at least three-quarters of the students were saying they had VCRs at home.
Their parents did the movie renting, they said, but frequently following orders, or requests, from the kids. "Ghostbusters" seemed to have been at the top of the year's hit parade, although one young man said that "Nightmare on Elm Street" had been seen at his house, and he shuddered pleasurably at the recollection.
Two classes as a sampling don't necessarily prove a point, and there may simply be a wizard salesman of VCRs in that immediate neighborhood. Yet it is a fair guess that, on the long curve of history, 1986 will be identified as the year that the videocassette recorder ceased to be a novelty, or a luxury, and became a fact of American home life, right there with the television (or the televisions) and the handheld radios and fast outdistancing the ghetto-blasters, which have begun to look archaic." From "THE VCR-ING OF AMERICA : Videocassettes Have Fast-Forwarded Into Our Lives."
More here.
And on that day, here is an article from the LA Times:
"Early in December two sixth-grade classes from an elementary school in East Los Angeles came downtown to tour the Los Angeles Times and meet a live editor.
On an impulse I asked the youngsters how many of their families had videocassette players. A thicket of hands went up; it looked as if at least three-quarters of the students were saying they had VCRs at home.
Their parents did the movie renting, they said, but frequently following orders, or requests, from the kids. "Ghostbusters" seemed to have been at the top of the year's hit parade, although one young man said that "Nightmare on Elm Street" had been seen at his house, and he shuddered pleasurably at the recollection.
Two classes as a sampling don't necessarily prove a point, and there may simply be a wizard salesman of VCRs in that immediate neighborhood. Yet it is a fair guess that, on the long curve of history, 1986 will be identified as the year that the videocassette recorder ceased to be a novelty, or a luxury, and became a fact of American home life, right there with the television (or the televisions) and the handheld radios and fast outdistancing the ghetto-blasters, which have begun to look archaic." From "THE VCR-ING OF AMERICA : Videocassettes Have Fast-Forwarded Into Our Lives."
