This Is the 1979 News Broadcast That Got Me Psyched to Watch the Eclipse With My Kids

After a jammed summer of juggling work deadlines and trying keeping the kids sane and squeezing in desperately needed vacation time, while attempting to get a decent night's sleep on occasion, and call up a friend, and try not to totally lose my mind—in other words, the usual—I only had about 0.3 percent of my brainspace left to care about the total eclipse of the sun. Granted, here in New York we got just a partial eclipse, but still, it was a fairly big deal. A bigger deal, cosmically speaking, than finally climbing off the waitlist at the PreK program we were gritting our teeth to get into.

I was vaguely looking forward to seeing what this whole eclipse business was all about, but it wasn't exactly top of mind. Until two things happened: First, I was chatting with someone at a friend's party the other day, and she turned out to be a physicist, a very passionate astrophysicist who insisted that I drive, with my husband and kids, to a total eclipse viewing point (Wyoming! South Carolina! Oregon, even!) because we shouldn't even consider missing this mind-blowing once-in-a-lifetime experience. 

Alas she didn't convince us to undertake this road trip, since we would've had only four days to plan the whole thing. And it would've meant paying something like $2500 for a night in a last-minute hotel room, or $100 for an outdoor tent campsite like she was doing, in Casper, Wyoming. So we decided to stick with plan A, and to watch it at our public library branch viewing party here in Brooklyn.

But it was the second thing that happened that got me extra excited about this whole eclipse thing: It was this 1979 ABC News segment, rebroadcast on NPR this morning, that looked ahead to August 21, 2017, as the next date when a total eclipse would happen here in the U.S. I was a little kid at the time, and if I heard the broadcast then I most definitely don't remember. But the fact that I could've theoretically heard that news segment, and looked forward to 2017 way back in 1979—and that now we're actually here—made me stop and think: Damn. Damn.

And sure enough, as everyone knows by now, the eclipse actually did happen today, August 21, 2017. The moon didn't call in sick. The sun didn't flake. It happened. So I went out with my family, sporting our cheap cardboard eclipse-proof glasses, to watch the moon cover up 70 percent of the sun, right along with a big sweaty mass of people crowded on the Brooklyn sidewalk on this sweltering day, all of us looking up at the sky, just for a quick second. Then doing it again, and again, and again.

And yeah, it was mind-blowing. The next time it happens stateside, in 2024, is coming up fast. Better book that hotel room now.