Twenty-Five Years Ago Today

I am reading a book called Twenty-Five Years Ago Today (only 99 cents for the Kindle edition!) about an intrepid reporter who writes a column of the same name and is intrigued by a cold-case murder.

It got me to thinking about where I was and what I was doing on June 14, 1988.  With a little help from Bing I learned it was a Tuesday so I am pretty sure I was hard at work at Kemper Insurance Company in Long Grove Illinois as the Claims Systems Manager.  I probably was working on the new distributed claim reporting system "FOCUS" (Friendly Online Claim User System) that gathered data daily from our dozens of regional offices. These claims would be number crunched in batch mode at night, "real time" processing being quite a ways off in the future.  I went home after work to the custom home on two acres that we'd built the year before, also in bucolic Long Grove. 

The Big Story of the day was this:  A wildfire started in Montana just north of the boundary for Yellowstone National Park. Eventually, over 750,000 acres of Yellowstone – 36% of the park's area – burned before firefighters gained control in late September.  And a few days later came this news: Five workers died from exposure to poisonous gas at a metal-plating plant in Auburn Indiana in the worst confined-space industrial accident in U.S. history.

Today's Big Stories - June 14, 2013: 1) Two people have died in the 15,700-acre wildfire that has forced the evacuations of about 38,000 people in the Colorado Springs area.
2) A ground-rattling explosion Thursday at a Louisiana chemical plant ignited a blaze that killed one person and injured dozens of others.

A little eerie, no?