When I first opened the Millennium Museum, the
original intent was simply to catalogue and comment on items I already owned or
had yet to encounter, and there was a heavier emphasis on “collecting.” It
wasn’t until much later on that I started to notice and pick up on recurring
themes within each item.
From there, what began as a checklist gradually
turned into a jigsaw puzzle; the weekly posts served to complete the larger picture.
(Is it a conventional jigsaw puzzle or one of those “Puzz-3D” things that were
so popular around 2000? I’m not really sure.)
With the new focus in mind, I looked at the older
stuff from almost all of Series 1 and 2. The articles lack content, depth, and
plain old “good writing,” but within that you can see how the Museum itself has
grown and changed over the course of a year.
The “ABC 2000 Millennium Highlights” video should be
the best place for me to start. I’ll be blunt: I’m sorely, sorely disappointed
with what I wrote for it—a picture and a short paragraph with a snarky,
unprofessional tone. In context, though, the Museum started as a Cake
Wrecks-type blog, and I thought I wouldn’t need to put too much work into it.
I bought this videotape in June 2012 at our local
Salvation Army Thrift Store. I’d already been there several times, and the
place had at least three dozen copies on the shelves. Naturally, I looked right
past them every single time…until 2012, when the different concepts and items
that would eventually form the blog that you’re reading right now first came
together. In fact, this was the first thing I actually bought specifically for the site. The original idea was to report
on things I already owned, but I realized that sticking to that plan would mean exhausting my material.
Right at the beginning, this is a record of recent
history; a snapshot of a moment in time. We’re seeing the classic ABC News
lineup—Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, Sam Donaldson, and the others, all at the
height of their power and jubilant at the prospect of a new century. Together,
they take you all around the world, and you get to see how countries such as
Russia, Australia, France, the United Kingdom, China, and many others rang in
the New Millennium.
The program on the tape looks primitive compared to
what we’re used to today, but I think that’s only because it’s actively trying to look high-tech. We’re marking
our journey around the world with a spinning CGI globe, which was actually
pretty well-detailed and lifelike for 1999/2000. The set looks a little bit
old-fashioned in places, but again, that’s what we were used to. Nowadays,
everything looks modern
by virtue of looking timeless. (I’m
convinced that much of the “set” we see on the major network news shows is a
green-screened background with a few physical elements.)
Our first stop is the island nation of Kiribati,
which competed with the neighboring Tonga to be the first one to ring in the
New Millennium. The small nation successfully petitioned to have the
International Date Line, at the 180th Meridian, moved so that all of
the islands within that area could celebrate at the same time. Fourteen years after its little victory,
however, Kiribati is in some major trouble: Sea levels have risen thanks to
climate change. Most of its inhabitants have fled to neighboring Australia, New
Zealand, and Fiji, but they no longer
have a place to call home.
Peter takes us to Tonga, Fiji, Australia, and
finally to New Zealand, where he has a chat about possible Y2K problems with
Jimmy Walker of New Zealand's National Incident Monitoring Center. Mr. Walker
cheerfully states that there are no problems outside of the national analog
cell-phone network being jammed (par for the course on Christmas, Mother's Day,
etc.) He also pulls out an ATM receipt dated 1/1/00, 3 seconds into the new
year.
We zoom to London, where we join Charlie Gibson.
Here, in our “preservation of history” segment, we get a history lesson about
“Auld Lang Syne.” Way back when, Scottish poet Robert Burns traveled throughout
his home country, collecting poems along the way. “Auld Lang Syne” was one of
these—it's stated that he overheard an old man singing it, and he immediately
transcribed it. Later on, Burns would clean up the verses and add a new melody.
Its title literally translates as “for old time's sake,” and it was a
traditional parting song. As the people of Scotland left in search of a new
world many years after Burns died, they took the song with them. Many people heard that song, most notably a big-band
conductor named Guy Lombardo. To this day, ABC's “New Year's Rockin' Eve” special plays
that Guy Lombardo recording at midnight (New York time).
More interesting is Cokie Roberts’ coverage from
Vatican City. At the time, she did coverage for ABC World News Tonight, and, as
she mentions in the video, her mother, Lindy Boggs (1916-2013), was the U.S.
Ambassador to the Holy See, a position now held by a one Ken Francis Hackett.
In a special mother/daughter interview that went out, Ms. Boggs said that, for
her, the best part of the past century was having “members of the family who
are able to express what our country is all about; what world peace is all
about; and what this celebration is all about….This celebration is absolutely
marvelous.”
Meanwhile, in Bethlehem, we hear the following from
field correspondent Bill Blakemore: “This is the night they’ve been waiting for
a long time…The year 2000 is supposed to be a year of great peacemaking here in
the Middle East, with the Israelis, Syrians, and Palestinians, all in different
peace negotiations. There is some hope here that, by the time this millennium
year is over, it will be, as one Israeli said, ‘a very different Middle East,’
with the Israeli conflict well towards being something in the past.”
Unfortunately, this has not come true. On Tuesday, February 12, 2014, the Syrian
cease-fire agreement ended, and the fate of the region is uncertain.
Most touching of all is Peter Jennings’ little chat
with perennial New Year’s host and “America’s oldest teenager,” Dick Clark, who
had hosted the “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve!” on ABC since 1972 and, for those of us
born in the 80s and 90s, he was New Year’s Eve personified. Here he is, in his prime, with a healthy glow about
him, and rarin’ to go for the ball to drop.
All that changed in 2004, when he suffered a stroke
less than a month before the 2004/2005 New Year’s Eve broadcast (“At the stroke
of midnight,” someone no doubt quipped). From that point on, Dick became ever
more marginalized until his death in 2012. Ryan Seacrest now hosts the special,
but it’s still “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve!”, and so it shall be for
many years to come.
(I’ll pause here to mention that 2013’s celebration
featured the most amazing tribute to Dick Clark. Throughout 2012, New Yorkers
in and around Times Square wrote their memories of watching his specials and
posted them in a special exhibit. On that New Year’s Eve, those memories
showered out over the crowd as midnight confetti. That there was one of the
very best sendoffs anyone could ask for.)
The Jennings/Clark interview carries even more
weight when Peter mentions that he’s going to give up smoking as a new century
resolution.
On that bright and innocent and jubilant night, the
future seemed wide open.
On a bright and innocent day more than a year later,
terrorists flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.
On that dark
and markedly less innocent day, Peter Jennings’ old habit came back in full
force in response to the horrifying events that had transpired.
On August 7th, 2005, lung cancer claimed
Peter Jennings’ life, just as 9/11 claimed the life of the Millennium Era, and
with it, the dream of living in a fully interconnected and empathetic world.
That's what the Millennium Museum is all about...keeping the memory of that dream alive.
