Where Were You?

Twenty years ago, on a nice Friday night in June, I went on a memorable first date with a man I'll call Brian. (Not his real name.) We had dinner at my favorite restaurant in Schaumburg, then, since it was such a nice evening, we decided to drive into downtown Chicago and go up to the observation deck at the top of the Hancock Building. Brian and I were enjoying the view when we noticed that we were the only people up there who were actually enjoying the view. Everyone else was gathered around the small gift shop, intently watching something on the attendant's tiny television set.

Curious, we walked over to see what was happening. What could possibly be so mesmerizing? (In those more innocent days, we didn't automatically assume that something terrible had happened. We also couldn't just check our phones. Smart phones and Twitter hadn't been invented yet.) Can you guess? It was the O.J. Simpson white Bronco chase, and today, June 17, is the 20th anniversary of that weird event in American pop culture.

There's been quite a bit of retrospective "where are they now?" coverage of the Simpson anniversary, and the trial itself has been credited with, or blamed for, giving birth to everything from reality television to the Kardashians. (Robert Kardashian, father of Kim, Kourtney, Khloé and Rob, and ex-husband of Kris, was one of O.J.'s best friends and served as a member of the "Dream" defense team. It was from his house that O.J. disappeared on the day of the Bronco chase.) If the Kardashian name hadn't become well known during the trial, would the E network have been willing to take a chance on a reality show about the family? No way to know, and anyway, I digress.

People who are old enough say that they'll "always remember where they were" when they first heard of JFK's assassination, the Challenger explosion and the events of 9/11. The white Bronco chase is sometimes included in that category, which tells you how big of a deal, or at least how surreal, it was at the time. The television networks all cut away from regular programming to show it live, presumably not wanting to miss the excitement if O.J. blew his brains out, which he apparently was threatening to do. Eventually he came home and surrendered to police, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Twenty years later the world is different in all kinds of ways. Robert Kardashian's children rule the reality TV universe. We have a black family in the White House, not something that would have been predictable given the polarizing racial divisions the O.J. case exposed, and his attorneys exploited. And of course, O.J. is rotting in jail, although for a separate crime. A fitting outcome to a very strange story.