Janice Williams Loves Austin

A lot of people are playing Where Were You When You Heard About Michael Jackson? today. Yesterday I was at my new job. I got an email from a radio-related website with a bulletin that Michael Jackson had been taken to the hospital. That didn’t strike me as alarming or particularly newsworthy, but just about the same time I read it, my boss/friend/co-worker Shalonn across the hall shouts, “Holy shit, Michael Jackson died!” She was looking at the TMZ website, which was the first to break the news. Our crew started buzzing and everyone was checking the more reliable websites to see if we could get confirmation. We aren’t in “radio” so it isn’t like we are going to pass the news along, but since at least Shalonn and I have a radio background, I know we both had that feeling of checking the facts and passing along the news. I sent out four text messages and immediately got back “No, he’s just in the hospital” texts from two. As the news has reported today, the internet slowed to a crawl and it was hard to get info because so many people were searching. Reuters had the confirmation up for a moment and then pulled it off. Then they posted it again, but only quoted TMZ, so that isn’t confirmation. Pretty quickly, though, it was all true. My mother called, my friend Marsha called, I was getting more texts. Once I realized I wasn’t doing ANY work any more, I decided to go home. When I got on the elevator with another guy I wanted to share the news with him and then thought that was silly. Then the door closed and he said, “Did you hear about Michael Jackson?” Yes, it is one of those noteworthy moments in American pop culture.

I’ve heard a lot of people comparing this to their other moments of great importance, so here are some of mine:

ELVIS PRESLEY:  I worked for the Canyon News and was coming home from work in my 1971 Mercury, driving up VFW hill outside of Canyon, listening to KQIZ AM radio. They reported that Elvis was dead. I was floored! Obviously, Elvis had been a part of my whole life and his Girls Girls Girls album was one of the oldest records in my record collection. I got home and went in the house and Mom was fixing dinner at the kitchen counter and I told her. We talked a lot about our cousin Donna who had just been to his concert earlier that year in Amarillo and loved him.

JOHN LENNON:  Now this was the sad one for me. I was on the phone at my little one bedroom house in Amarillo, talking long distance to my boyfriend Scott in Plainview, also a radio person. We were talking and then he was interrupted by his roommate Gary and he said, “Hey, Gary just came in and said that John Lennon was just murdered in New York.” I was speechless. Scott was so blase about it and it affected me so deeply that that was the beginning of the end of our relationship. I hung up from him and my boss from the radio station called to make sure I had heard and to see if I would be able to handle the morning show the next day. After that, I went up to the station to get together with Jamey and others to play John Lennon and Beatles music and have a little memorial on the radio station.

PRINCESS DIANA:  Like all girls, it seemed, I had a great admiration for Princess Diana. I had been in Dallas visiting my sister when she married Prince Charles and Mackie and I (both single) got up at about 3 a.m. so we could watch her wedding and we cried all the way through it. The night she was killed, Mark had a gig and I was home just watching TV and cleaning house. They broke in with the news about the car crash. Strangely, my mother and I called back and forth that night and discussed how serious it was and then were on the phone when the news broke that she died and we were both so sad. Why we didn’t call my sister that night I have no idea. I don’t know if we assumed she knew, or was busy, or had little boys to tend to, or what, but she did not know this was going on. She didn’t know until her husband brought the paper in on Sunday morning and she saw the headline and I’ve always felt bad about that. That was the kind of news that needed to be shared to make it more bearable. When Mark got home from his gig, I expected to be the first to tell him, but he said the news had spread throught the club he was playing at. I lived in Dallas by this time and on the morning of her funeral I got up early and went to Mackie’s house again and we watched it at 4 in the morning and cried some more.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY:  Okay, I can’t say I remember the moment, but Mother tells me we were at the grocery store and a woman came in and said that the President had been killed. The manager called someone and confirmed it. I do distinctly remember much of the TV coverage in the following days and the funeral cortage.

and other big events:

WHEN REAGAN WAS SHOT:  I worked mornings in those days and I was driving home from the radio station when I heard the news on one of our competing stations (I hope my station was announcing it, too, but I was not listening to them). When I got home I did call the station to make sure we were covering it and then I settled down to watch CNN all afternoon. Mother and I, again, were on the phone back and forth. In that need to share big news, I remember the postman coming to my door to mail in the box and me leaning out to make sure that he had heard the news. He had, from another neighbor.

THE SPACE SHUTTLE:  I had only been in Dallas a few months and was working in a loud cassette-making business, a part of Zig Ziglar’s company. We always had the radio on with KVIL in the background. That day we were busy and the machines were clacking, but I had the thought in the back of my head that they sure were talking a lot on the radio for a music station. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I just knew it wasn’t music. About that time, my sister called from her office and let us know that the space shuttle had blown up. My department had about the only TV in the building so we went and saw a bit of the news and then had to go back to work with the radio keeping us updated.

AND 9/11:  Of course, no day in my life has been as pivotal as 9/11. I was mostly unemployed at the time, just working part-time for KVET, recording their all-night shows in advance and doing some weekend shifts. We had had our kitty Nathan Jr. for just a few months and he was absolutely the most fun thing I had going in my life at that time. That morning Mark and I slept incredibly late. When we did wake up we were playing with Nathan and admiring him and weren’t eager to get up and get the day started. When we did get up, Mark headed into the living room and office and I heard him hit the answering machine button and heard my sister’s voice. Message after message she is screaming into the phone for us to wake up, the country is under attack, etc. etc. I expect it was horribly frightening for her to not be able to get us to comprehend that this horrible tragedy was going on. Obviously I called her back before we heard all 10 of her messages and we had the TV on by now and all of the plane crashes had happened by that time (but of course we didn’t know what was next or that it was over). We stayed glued to the screen all day long. Later in the evening I realized that my voice-tracks for KVET that would be airing at midnight would be hugely inappropriate in light of the day’s events. I got in the car and headed toward the station and then turned on the radio and KVET was carrying ABC news coverage uninterrupted. At that point I pulled over and called the station. Another weekender was on the air monitoring things and running the board and he said that the station was running ABC until further notice so my show would not air. That was a huge relief and I went home. I was grateful that I was NOT on the air as that occurred. Some radio people love the challenge of managing a crisis on the air like that, but not me. I’d rather experience it out here with the real world, I think.