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| Re: Happy 49th anniversary of the Blackout Night (2043169) | |||
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Re: Happy 49th anniversary of the Blackout Night |
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Posted by Mitch45 on Tue Jul 14 14:58:49 2026, in response to Happy 49th anniversary of the Blackout Night, posted by Catfish 44 on Mon Jul 13 22:16:57 2026. I remember it very well. It had been a hot sticky day. I was 12 years old. My dad and I were in my parents' basement in Queens watching "CPO Sharkey", a Don Rickles sitcom in which Rickles played a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy with an incompetent staff. About 10 minutes into the show, the picture on our old Zenith black and white TV started to waver and we thought that the picture tube was blowing out again. The picture got worse and worse, and then the TV went off. Then the basement lights went off. My mom called down from the kitchen to say that the lights there went off. I ran upstairs and looked out the door and saw that the streetlights were out too.My dad immediately went to the phone (dial phone, on the wall, you remember) and called my grandparents in Brooklyn to see if they had power. Surprisingly, the phones still worked, and my grandparents were fine, they had candles and relatives looking in on them. We all went out on the front porch, as it was slightly cooler out there. My dad later went in to go to sleep and my mom and I hung out on the porch talking with neighbors until 11:30. The next morning the power was still out. My dad had a portable radio and was listening to the news. Since he couldn't get to work, we sat down to play a game of chess. He beat me in the first game and we were partially through the second game when I noticed that the electric clock in my parents room had started working again. This was about 10 am. My dad again called my grandparents, they were still fine. Most TV stations hadn't restarted yet so my dad listened to the news - they were telling us not to turn our a/c's back on so that the system would not get overloaded. And it was then that we first heard of the lootings and the arrests. My dad had walked home from CCNY to our apartment in the Bronx during the 1965 Blackout and everything had been peaceful. He was pretty disgusted at the lootings. Later that day I wrote a letter to my brother in sleep away camp about the blackout. This was nearly 50 years ago and I remember it so clearly. |
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