I was working as a temp at Fred Jones Manufacturing, about of mile, as the crow flies, from the Murrah building. The week before our fire alarms had gone off. Someone on the third floor had run into one of the sprinklers with a forklift. Because of all the volatile chemicals present in the building, once the alarms went off we had to evacuate, even though we knew in five minutes what had happened. But alarms in our building went off simultaneously at the nearest fire station so we were required to wait until we had an all clear from the firemen before we could return. When we felt the blast we just figured this time someone had dropped a forklift. We got up and prepared to head downstairs expecting to evacuate again. On our way to the stairs we looked in the offices to the east to see if they, too, were preparing to leave the building. ThatÂs when we saw the smoke and all the papers flying around in the street below us. All the plate glass windows on the ground floor shattered, and you could smell the stench. Many of the smaller windows on the upper floors were cracked, and the blast put a crack in the east wall of the building, originally completed in 1916, that was not there before. Two of the men I worked with lost their wives. They both worked for HUD and were at the sign-in desk when the bomb went off. One had been married about 12 years at the time. They had spent most of their first ten years of marriage trying to have a child. Finally, about a year before the bombing they had a little boy. Until about a month prior to the bombing he had been in the day care center in the Murrah building. They had taken him back the week before the bombing for a birthday party. They took lots of pictures of all the kids at the party. He was asked to take those pictures and go to Denver to testify during the sentencing phase of the trial. Poor man, he was so grief-stricken at losing his wife that he moved back in with his mother to have help with the little boy and never again lived in the house heÂd shared with his wife. Another man had a "near miss" with his wife. She also worked for HUD and, under normal circumstances, would have been right there with the other two menÂs wives, but her job involved travel to Indian communities. She had a regularly scheduled travel date that conflicted with their only childÂs, a daughter, soccer game so she traded and traveled on the 19th to be home for the girlÂs soccer game. My daughter and her best friend, just two years out of high school, were both working evening shifts. My daughter was waiting tables at a restaurant near our apartment, and her friend worked at the sign-in desk at what was then the Westin Hotel downtown. I think itÂs now a Sheraton. Being accustomed to staying up late they didnÂt wake up until maybe 10 am. Once they heard the news they took off together to see what they could do to help. First they tried the Oklahoma Blood Institute which had put out a call for O negative donations (my daughter is not O negative, not sure about her friend), but every donation center was swamped. They had to turn away people because there would simply not be enough time in the day to take that many donations. They went to a fabric store to buy ribbons. No ribbon color had yet been selected to represent the city and the tragedy so they picked purple. Late that first night they took their spools of ribbon downtown and tied them around all the poles along the marked off perimeter of the area. The next night a policeman would remember having seen my daughter tying ribbons. Next they tried volunteering for anything that was needed. Again, they were turned away everywhere because everyone was swamped with people volunteering to help. They finally managed to convince someone, Red Cross I think, that they had something to offer most of their other volunteers didnÂt. They were young, worked evenings, and were accustomed to being up very late. They could be there to help in the middle of the night when most of their other volunteers needed to get some rest. Mostly they just served drinks to the rescuers, police, and others working on the rescue effort. This is when the policeman remembered seeing my daughter tying ribbons the night before. My daughterÂs friend "caught" a rescue worker buying himself a soft drink from a vending machine on the hotelÂs first floor. She "scolded" him and pointed out that one flight up, on the Mezzanine, rescue workers were being provided drinks for free. I remember a news article where some of the rescuers who came from New York remarked about how in 1993, the first time the World Trade Center was attacked, street vendors showed up charging outrageous prices for coffee and sandwiches. Here, we pretty much fed them for free. Cots were set up in the convention center for the rescuers to sleep rather than them having to pay for hotel accommodations, and the governorÂs wife worked with local florists to see that a rose was placed on each cot every night. Whenever the rescue effort put out a call for supplies, I specifically remember boots for the search dogs, in short order they would be literally inundated. WeÂd hear the local news people ask for something then the next thing you hear is, "Please, we have enough of this, no more!" I have a friend who was still active in Boy Scouts then, both his sons were in Scouting. He remembers sitting at the Channel 5 location with a semi trailer taking donations. He says the line of cars waiting to drop things off was enormous. He especially remembers a little old lady; he says she probably could hardly walk, driving up bringing goods and then insisting on also writing a check to help out. Sometime in the late Â90s I took my first, and so far only, tour of the Crystal Bridge. I donÂt remember where in the gardens it is, and I donÂt even remember what exactly it is, but somewhere is a tree, small when I saw it, with a plaque in front of it that states the tree is a thank you gift to the city from rescuers who came from Arizona. I canÂt explain how perplexed I was when I read the plaque. They came to help us. It is we who should thank them, but there I was staring at a tree these Arizonans gave us in thanks. I think that gesture says a lot about who we are and how we were perceived in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. We have another anniversary this week. While the environmentalists co-opted it some years ago for "Earth Day" for me it will always be the anniversary of the run of Â89. Thousands of brave souls came looking for a new life, but one that they would have to carve out of the wilderness by their own efforts and hard work, having no one else to rely on but themselves and their neighbors. Less than twenty years later Oklahoma Territory joined with Indian Territory, another situation where people had to make a new life in the wilderness by their own work except that it was forced on them and not their choice, to form the State of Oklahoma. We are the sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters of these pioneers. Through oil booms and busts and the associated economic ups and downs, the Dust Bowl, killer tornadoes, and the Murrah Building bombing we have continued to exhibit what Howard Witt, writing for the Chicago Tribune on the occasion of the bombingÂs 10th anniversary, called our "Âessential prairie stoicism--the same ÂOklahoma spirit for which they were lauded in the aftermath of the bombing, when Oklahomans demonstrated extraordinary decency, humility and bootstrap resiliency" based on "deep religious faith and unblushing middle American values." I agree with Dawn. April 19, 1995 was both our worst tragedy and our finest hour. I have never been more proud of my state and its people than I was in those dark days of April. IÂve always said that no matter how much nicer, prettier, easier other places might be to live, I wouldnÂt want to live anywhere else, and my fellow Okies are the reason. You are the best people in the world, and that goes just the same for all you "transplants" and "adoptees." YouÂre here now, and as my Granddad would say, "youÂre ourÂn." Debra

I was about a year old and living in Oslo, Norway, so I have no memory of this day. However, when I moved to the US and learned the history, I visited the memorial in Hawaii and I got more of an understanding of what happened. I'm not sure the memorial tells the story of what really happened, it so pristine and linear. Here is a link that might be useful: 73rd anniversary

Please understand that I do not mean to minimize the hurt and sorrow that resulted for many as a result of this explosion, or the useful results that may have been generated as a result, in what I am about to say. We have had so little military style activity in this part of North America that such events strike us harder than in many other parts of the world where such militarily-related experiences have long been much more common. There were millions of our compatriots killed in World Wars I and II ... but most of them were elsewhere - in someone else's back yard. After the Revolutionary War, we had the War of 1812 (which was Britain and the U.S., mostly, as it was 55 years before Canada became its own more or less independent entity). There'd been a bit of a rebellion in 1837 in two provinces of what became Canada ... but if anyone was killed during that fuss, I can't give you any indication of how many ... but it did result in the old country offering some more democratic systems in our fair land. Then there was the War Between the States/Civil War in the early 1860s, which was a fairly major set-to. And when I was thinking along these lines a while ago ... I thought that to be the last such military-style adventures that our part of the world had seen in our own back yard. But ... then I remembered that we Canadians had had a rebellion in the west, saying that they wanted a fair shake, and that was in 1885, the year in which the last spike was driven in the mountains of what became British Columbia on our transcontinental railroad. A contingent of military was sent out from central Canada to cool them off some and also in 1885 there was a bit of a battle in what became Saskatchewan, against Louis Riel and Gabriel DuMont and other rebels ... but if there were casualties, it wasn't more than a dozen or two. Such a small issue that it was some time before I even remembered it. Though we also have lost millions in overseas adventures in the last somewhat over a couple of centuries, we have very little idea of the horrors of war happening in our own back yard. ole joyful

Thalt was great, a good read and I could visualize the entire scenes. We had an electric washer but it had the ringer on it too. My mom told the story that I was a very serious child who liked to sit in my rocking chair and watch her work. While ringing the clothes and me staring at her, she was always agitated and that's not a pun lol. They got stuck and you had to yank on them. I was never one to talk much but on that day I looked at her and said Mommy Belax. She looked back and laughed so hard. Words from a child and she was guilty. She didn't care it I tried to say Relax and failed or that Be Lax was the message, either one applied lol.