This Just In – It’s really true that 1993 was 30 years ago.
Seriously.
I was talking to my son this week and he mentioned something that happened in 1998 and I said “Yeah, 25 years ago.” He paused … perhaps realizing that those grey hairs in his beard were earned.
“Well, when we were in high school,” he explained. Yeah. That was 25 years ago.
That brought me to the next level realization … that 30 years ago it was 1993. The math – amazing!
Along with a bunch of other kids, Brian (the son in question) was among a couple dozen kids who piled into eight cars at New Hope Elementary School in January and drove to Washington D.C. to see Bill Clinton get inaugurated.
It was cold. It was muddy. We sang “Nah Nah Hey Hey” and waved goodbye to George H.W. Bush as he flew in his helicopter over the crowd and off to Andrews Air Force Base to head home to Houston, Texas.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime school field trip, including Brian’s class and some older kids who knew Brian’s teacher either from school or soccer and came along for the ride. Speaking of that ride, in my back seat was Jeff Nieman, our new District Attorney. Well behaved then and now, I knew that kid was going places!
In 1993 I was in journalism school at Carolina and there was a fairly new thing coming into focus: “the Internet” was its actual name, but many catchy monikers attempted to capture the action – the excitement of this changing landscape in mass communications.
The Information Superhighway, the World Wide Web and the very catchy “it’s a series of tubes!” as described by Alaska Senator Ted Stephens.
In J-School it felt at times like learning to master the buggy whip after Henry Ford set up shop. We learned copy editing and page layout techniques in class. On my own time I was dabbling in HTML to learn how to create web pages. <b> Yes, Really! </b>
In those days, if someone had learned about something in the news, they’d say they “read it in the paper” that morning. What? That was HOURS AGO!!! Also true – most of us subscribed to a daily edition of a print newspaper – and there was more than one to choose from in Chapel Hill.
In 1993, Bill Clinton was a newbie in the presidency, telling us pridefully that “the era of big government is over” and winning legislative battles by taking conservative policies and making them his own. Our youngest president since JFK, he was Fleetwood Mac, not Perry Como.
Just two years later came the Oklahoma City bombing – an attack on a federal building by a right wing, government-hating white supremacist named Timothy McVeigh. A truck bomb filled with fertilizer detonated in front of the building at 9:02 a.m. on a quiet Wednesday morning, injuring hundreds and killing 168 people including 19 children on the two-year anniversary of the Waco siege. McVeigh was arrested 90 minutes after the bombing for driving a car without a license plate and carrying a concealed weapon.
Prosecutors had a mountain of evidence against McVeigh and Terry Nichols, his co-conspirator. They received some great advice from an official overseeing the prosecution from Main Justice (in DC).
“Do not bury the crime in the clutter,” said Merrick Garland.
Good advice. Smart guy. Decades later, still cool-headed, our Attorney General’s skills are about to shine in the bright light of day.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our biweekly newsletter.
