When I was a young lad, I played baseball everyday...all day long till the street lights went on.
I vividly recall swinging a baseball bat with all my might, at the telephone pole in front of my house.
Suddenly all the lights went out....across the entire Northeast USA.
@DCPatriot The 1965 blackout!
9 November 1965. Nine days before I turned ten.
At about 5:20 or so, I still remember . . . I was sitting at the dining room table finishing a surprisingly small load of fifth-grade homework. My kid brother was playing with our dog. My father was watching the 5:00 newscast on local WPIX (Channel 11) on the small TV set we kept in the dining room. (We were news hounds in our household, even though nobody then had any inkling I'd actually
become a professional journalist in due course---and my father didn't live to see it, he was already dying of cancer and would be gone the following June.) My mother was just about to serve dinner. (If I remember right, it was roast beef.)
Then the lights in the house just faded out kind of slowly. I went to the front of the house and looked as far down the street as I could see, then I went outside. Our block was dark. So was the next block, where one of my father's cousins lived. We called my father's favourite aunt on the westmost side of town and
she was dark, too.
From there, the most nerve-wracking part of it was waiting to hear about my maternal grandparents---they both worked in Manhattan and took the subway home to the Bronx, and the phones weren't gone just yet.(My paternal grandparents also lived in the north Bronx but Grandpa Walter retired from the New York Police Department the same year I was hatched.) We were petrified that they might be stuck on a train between stations and, since we flipped the radio on, we already knew it was a cluster-you-know-what in the city. About 20 minutes after the lights went out Grandma Diana and Grandpa Morris called us, they'd made it back to the north Bronx safe and sound and had barely walked into their apartment when the lights went out.
For the rest of the night we had candles lit all around the house, we huddled in my parents' bedroom, we had our roast beef in there on TV trays, and when not staying glued to the radio there the four of us were playing Monopoly by candlelight on my parents' bed. I think we were all asleep somehow by about 10:30. We got our power back at five the next morning.
And to think the whole thing started with a failed protective relay setting in a power station on the Canadian side (Queenston, Ontario) of Niagara Falls . . .