My First "Remember Where Were You When So-So" Happened Moment

Everyone has a “remember where you when so-so happened moment.” Most of them, if not all, are ones that brought the nation and possibly the world to a halt. The Hindenburg. Pearl Harbor. JFK’s and John Lennon’s assassinations. Challenger. O.J. Simpson’s Bronco chase and not guilty verdict. 9/11.

For me, my first remember where you when moment happened locally on the afternoon of May 25, 1979. I don’t think I’d be far calling the moment Chicago’s 9/11 when American Airlines Flight 191 with 272 passengers and crew aboard crashed into a nearby hangar and trailer park 31 seconds after takeoff from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport killing all aboard and two more on the ground after its left engine separated as the aircraft taxied down runway 32R.

Unlike the passengers and crew aboard the doomed DC-10 bound for Los Angeles who no doubt had holiday plans that three-day weekend in what officially marked the start of summer, I had nothing on my agenda. My being only nine-years-old then I am not even sure what an agenda was. What I did know upon coming home from school at 2:30 that Friday afternoon is that I didn’t expect to be glued to WLS-TV channel 7 news.

Living in Chicago at the time, Channel 7 news was my preferred station (in Dallas, Texas where I live now, the local station is WFAA on channel 8). I watched veteran news anchors Fahey Flynn (with his signature bowtie) and Joel Daly anchor the special report back and forth from the news desk to the live coverage from eyewitness reporters on the scene at the northwest corner of Lee and Touhy Avenues near the airport.

The first images I saw on TV were of billowing black and white smoke as first responders descended within minutes of the crash only to be told within almost a half hour of their immediate arrival their rescue services would not be needed.

The scenes seen live of the smoldering remains of what was a DC-10 and then the next morning on the front covers of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times that showed a front landing gear, the tail engine and a piece of fuselage that landed on a trailer home, let alone the left engine lying on runway 32R were not what haunted me. Not even the photos of first responders placing numbered flags at the crash site marking fatalities who would soon be moved to a makeshift hangar to serve as a morgue near the airport.

The picture, taken by pilot Michael Laughlin, was what would haunt me. The shot would join other infamous front-page photos of troubled jetliners that got readers attention seconds before disaster struck that would of course include 9/11, Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 in September 1978 and Air France Flight 4590 in July 2000.

My morbid interest in the nation’s worst air disaster would not come up again until 15 years later on Halloween night October 31, 1994. For some reason early that day my mind was on American Airlines Flight 191. I couldn’t put my finger on it as to why other than the fact my parents were coming back from Chicago that night after visiting my grandparents in the “Windy City.”

While I didn’t think anything tragic was going to happen to my parents aboard the flight coming home, I still had this ominous feeling something else was going to happen that night.

When I came home on a lunch break from work, mom told me that an American Eagle twin engine Aerospatiale ATR-72 carrying 68 passengers and crew went down in a field in Roselawn, Indiana killing all aboard.

This wasn’t the first time I found the events surrounding the May 25 jet crash to be more than just a series of coincidences.

Wreckage of Delta Airlines Flight 191 - 8/2/85

I’d have thought nothing when DFW like Chicago experienced its own 9/11 moment six years after the O’Hare jet crash the early evening of August 2, 1985. During Friday evening rush-hour traffic, a Delta Airlines Lockheed L-1011 TriStar arriving from Fort Lauderdale, Florida crashed in a freak thunderstorm as it attempted to land at Dallas/ Fort Worth International Airport killing 137 passengers and crew and one on the ground. Of the 163 aboard, 24 survivors, all of whom sat in the charred tail section which was intact upon impact survived.

The number assigned to the ill-fated L-1011 was “191.”

Mention Lee and Touhy Avenues let alone May 25, 1979, to someone and chances are they will have no idea why you’d even mention the place or date. They wouldn’t understand the significance.

Lee and Touhy Avenues, let alone O’Hare airport are not Pearl Harbor, Dealey Plaza, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Lightbulbs don’t immediately turn on when one mentions May 25, 1979, the way one knows what happened and where they were on Dec. 7, 1941, Nov. 22, 1963, or 9/11.

The ones who know the significance of Lee and Touhy Avenues if not May 25, 1979, are those like me who lived in Chicago at the time and recall the eyewitness news reports, the front pages of the city’s newspapers in the days to follow, and/or knew someone aboard the flight.

For a lot of people Memorial Day weekend is nothing more than another holiday to mark the beginning of summer vacation – a chance to hold family barbecues.

Memorial Day is not, however, like July 4 or Labor Day. The holiday has always been a time to honor the men and women who died during their service in the U.S. military. The day has never been a time for celebrations.

For the families of the 274 lost 45 years ago that sunny Chicago afternoon, the three-day weekend is as much a time for mourning and reflection as it is for the ones who died in the line of duty.

©5/29/24

The Force is back!

In honor of "May the 4th" here is my original review of the much-loathed Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace written 25 years ago.

Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace «««½

PG, 133m. 1999

Cast & Credits: Liam Neeson (Qui-Gon Jinn), Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala/Padme), Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker), Pernilla August (Shmi Skywalker), Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu), Ian McDiarmid (Senator Palpatine), Hugh Quarshie (Captain Panaka), Kenny Baker (R2-D2), Anthony Daniels (C3PO), Frank Oz (Yoda), Ray Park (Darth Maul). Screenplay written and directed by George Lucas.

"Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace" invokes a keen fun, familiar sense of déjà-vu filled with both moments of greatness and silliness.

I have read all the negative reviews in Time, Newsweek, Variety, and Rolling Stone commenting how short Phantom Menace is on the emotional human element and only big on digitized special effects wizardry. Many would say "Return of the Jedi" (1983) was the same way. What director/creator George Lucas, who hasn’t been behind the camera for over twenty years since "Star Wars" (1977), lacks in fast paced storytelling and borrowing sequences like the chariot race from "Ben-Hur" (1959) and battle scenes from "Spartacus" (1960) and "Braveheart" (1995), he makes up for it in The Phantom Menace providing us with interesting new worlds and incorporating cultures and celebrations seen in various countries today and making them a part of his intergalactic planetary outposts and vivid imagination.

The much talked about ten-minute pod race brings back memories of the scenes in "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) where Tie Fighters pursued the Millennium Falcon in the asteroid field and of the speeder bikes in "Return of the Jedi" that could be the 21st century’s answer to police motorcycles.

There is a much more exciting and well-choreographed lightsaber clash that takes place above a chasm similar to Cloud City in "The Empire Strikes Back." Whereas Darth Vader was the product of a grade school kid’s nightmares back in the late 1970s, we get a villain who says even less but whose looks are just as frightening all the same; a horn-rimmed, red and black faced devil with rotting teeth who might as well be called the Prince of Darkness named Darth Maul (Ray Park).

We meet old favorites like R2-D2 and C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels), who even at birth, vows he will never set foot in a starship and Yoda (Frank Oz), the wise old but notably younger (simply because he has more hair) Jedi Master who presides over his own council of Jedi Knights.

Instead of hundreds of cuddly, furry little teddy bears called Ewoks who often made the young ones laugh in Return of the Jedi, we meet a clumsy digitally enhanced character with the voice of a real actor played by Ahmed Best. He is called Jar Jar Binks who speaks in a dialect we cannot quite understand but can, to an extent, comprehend and sticks his tongue out to pick up food much to Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn’s (Liam Neeson) annoyance. The creation who eats up the scenery, however, is Watto, a short, flying blue bird slave owner who makes bargains the way Robert De Niro’s young Don Corleone in "The Godfather Part II" (1974) did and seems to speak in both an Italian and Spanish accent but whose dialect is still completely alien to us.

The planet, Tatooine, isn’t just a sandy desert as we saw in the original but a spaceport with a hodgepodge of homes designed like those adobes the ancient Indians lived in that were built on top of each other. While lush green forests, much like the one in Return of the Jedi’s Endor, boast of what look like Aztec statues. The pod race is a thrillingly, clever futuristic rendition of the Olympics. Aliens of all sorts wave flags signifying their racer’s nationalities from different planets while the slug crime lord, Jabba the Hutt, bites off a lizard head and spits it out on a large gong that signals the start of the race.

Like Jedi though, whose sequences looked as though they were broken down into chapters that screenwriters Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan had a hard time trying to fit together, Menace’s storyline is bogged down with a plot about intergalactic politics between a Trade Federation who want to take over the planet of Naboo run by a young queen (Natalie Portman); an attack Qui-Gon and his Jedi apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), are assigned to stop.

When the group takes shelter on Tatooine, Qui-Gon meets young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd). Sensing the boy is “The Chosen One”, he decides to train him as a Jedi Knight. Here, Lucas, who also doubles as the movie’s scriptwriter, cleverly incorporates subplots from The Bible’s New Testament.

When Qui-Gon asks Anakin’s mother (Pernilla August in one of the film’s best performances) who the boy’s father was, her response is there wasn’t one.

“I carried him, I gave birth,” she says. “I can’t explain what happened.”

Perhaps on that level, the mother could be like the Virgin Mary who was told by angels she would give birth to Jesus. What’s made the Star Wars trilogy so timeless in the twenty plus years it’s been out is how some people think the film’s ideas reflect issues we face today. They have compared lines like Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try” to mean in today’s world, you should finish what you started. Even President Ronald Reagan borrowed from the series’ slogans during his term of office in the early 1980s calling Russia “The Evil Empire” and starting up the “Star Wars” defense system.

I have no doubt some fans will take the prequel’s aspects on good and evil to mean a number of things we face in our lifetimes. When Anakin quotes his mother saying the biggest problem in the universe is no one helps each other, the statement could apply to what we often witness in society today. The thought of this brave, innocent, mischievous boy who most everyone knows in episode three will grow up to become Darth Vader might have ourselves asking “how could young boys grow up to become killers?”

The Phantom Menace is more than that. The film is what Greg Hehn, a friend of mine and co-worker calls a “popcorn movie.” It is short on violence (other than a few laser battles and sword fights which look like harmless fun), great for the kids and big on adventure and fantasy. Such is the reason why this series is still popular today. We can cheer on our heroes and applaud when the villain gets his just reward and maybe even a shed a tear or two when the hero dies.

Portman’s dual role as the Naboo queen and servant isn’t as feisty or ambitious as Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia was in the first trilogy but she makes a good authoritarian leader. While McGregor, who reportedly studied Sir Alec Guinness’ Oscar nominated role in the original Star Wars before playing the younger version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, invokes the older character’s mannerisms and wisdom. Neeson’s performance bears resemblance to the mentor relationship the older Ben Kenobi had with Mark Hamill’s Luke in the first set of films.

The one performance that doesn’t quite work though, and I can only hope will get better in the next two movies (Anakin will be played by Hayden Christensen in the next two films) is with Lloyd who looks as though he needs more acting classes, or Lucas just doesn’t know how to get his actors to be convincing with his dialogue. No matter how silly it might sound coming out one’s mouth, if an actor is supposed to utter the word “Yippie!” in reaction to being told by his slave owning boss that he can go home for the day as in one early scene between Lloyd’s Anakin and Watto, I would think he would do it with some emotion.

The same applies to if a young kid like Anakin; old enough to a point to understand slavery, was told by someone he is a slave as in one early scene, he’d express his anger at being told such a thing. Hearing Lloyd utter such lines, it’s almost as if he was just reading the words off a set of video cards the way newscasters do. The end result is a far cry from watching Harrison Ford’s Han Solo yell out “Yahoo!” at the conclusion of the Death Star battle in Star Wars.

I didn’t walk in expecting The Phantom Menace to be anything like the first Star Wars. This was a major mistake practically everyone I know did and the end result was disappointment from both fans and critics. I learned my lesson years ago when one places high expectations on something only to walk out pissed when their favorite filmmaker fails to deliver. The only solution is to not get caught up in all the hype and false promises and decide for oneself after seeing it.

When Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who will later become the dreaded Emperor of the Imperial Empire, tells Anakin, “We will be watching your career with great interest,” it is a message to the fans who will be watching as well when episode two comes out in May 2002 and ending with episode three in May 2005.

The best in the whole series was "The Empire Strikes Back" because it showed the saga wasn’t just about a battle between good and evil. The trilogy grew into a personal struggle between father and son; the dark side of “The Force” versus what I can only assume is the light side.

I like movies with dark themes. "Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace" is Lucas’ way of saying, “Be patient because the best is yet to come.”

In the character’s case, that probably means the worst. Those planetary celebrations and ticker tape parades we see in The Phantom Menace after all happened, as an older Ben Kenobi said to Luke Skywalker in the 1977 predecessor, “before the dark times, before the Empire.”

Originally Published ©5/19/99