80s News Today

The sun shot down on Denton, Texas, that September 9, 1980, like a cosmic spotlight, illuminating a new shrine to the American Dream— Golden Triangle Mall , the first enclosed shopping emporium in Denton County, a glittering, air-conditioned mecca at the crossroads of Loop 288 and I-35E. Folks had watched it rise, a leviathan of brick and glass, out there on the edge of town, where the asphalt began to fray and the prairie still whispered its ancient secrets. They'd seen the cranes, like skeletal birds, picking at the sky, seen the trucks rumble in and out, disgorging their loads of destiny. And in the town, a subtle shift had begun, a low hum beneath the surface of everyday life. Old Man Hemlock, who’d sat on his porch for eighty years watching the world turn, swore he felt it, a cold spot in the pit of his stomach that had nothing to do with the heat. "It's a hungry place," he'd rasped to anyone who'd listen, his eyes cloudy with unspoken premonitions. ...

A good book serves as a vacation, a portal to another world. But what do you do when you are already on vacation and the weather turns? The sky over Ocean City, Maryland, in August 1982, is a bruised purple, the color of a bad cut. You can feel the storm coming, a low thrumming in your bones, a promise of broken skies and a good old-fashioned electrical show. The air smells of salt and fried clams, and the gulls are screaming like they know something I don’t. I’m holed up at the Sea Scape Motel, room 204, with its peeling wallpaper and view of the angry Atlantic, which suits me fine. I'm staring down a long, wet afternoon with nothing but the television’s blurry offerings for company. Not good. Not good at all.  So, I pull on my sneakers, the ones with the perpetually untied laces, and head out into that heavy, humid air. The Phillips Square shopping center isn’t far, and I figure Welsh Drugs might have reading materials to keep the brain busy. I zip up my windbreaker and...

There’s a chill in the air, folks, and it isn't just the autumn breeze whistling through the pines. No, this is a different kind of cold, one that seeps into your bones and rattles your teeth. It’s the kind of cold that crawls out of the screen of your Apple II, wafts across your den, and makes the hairs on your neck stand at attention. You see, somewhere in Baltimore, Silas Warner, a mad genius with a penchant for chaos, has unleashed a beast called Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple II.  You boot it up, see? And the screen, it just glows with this sickly green light, like swamp gas rising from a graveyard. Then, there it is: the castle. Not some fairytale palace, mind you, but a looming, oppressive fortress, all sharp angles and shadowed passageways. You’re a prisoner, they tell you, a captured American G.I. in the heart of Nazi Germany. And your mission? Escape. Easy, right? Just walk out the front door. But Castle Wolfenstein is a labyrinth of terror, a 60-room nightmare where t...

It was September, the leaves were just beginning to whisper of autumn, but in the electronic ether, a full-blown winter offensive had begun! Eastern Front (1941) ! By God, the very title practically thundered across the pixelated battlefields of our collective imagination! This wasn't Pong. This was the mind of Chris Crawford, a man whose intellectual gears whirred with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker and the strategic cunning of a Prussian field marshal. Crawford, a name that would echo through the hallowed halls of nascent game design, wasn't just making a game; he was forging a paradigm shift! He was taking the sprawling, agonizing complexities of World War II's Eastern Front—that brutal, continent-spanning clash of steel and snow—and cramming it into the memory banks of an Atari home computer. Eastern Front (1941) wasn’t just a game; it was a time machine, a teleportation device to the brutal, sprawling theater of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Sov...

ZAP! The television screens of America flicker to life, and there he is—George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President, patrician to the core, Yale man, Skull and Bones, the buttoned-up Brahmin with the reedy voice and the awkward hand gestures, sitting in the Oval Office, that hallowed cockpit of power. Bush, a man whose very name whispered of New England gentility and a Thousand Points of Light, sitting behind the stately Chesapeake & Ohio Desk. The President, whose very essence screamed YALE! and PREP SCHOOL! and NEW ENGLAND ARISTOCRACY!—the very paragon of the Establishment!—was about to do something so . . . so shocking, so utterly out-of-character, so absolutely WILD! It began as the typical, understated George Bush Speech, until he turned to his left, and retrieved a clear baggie from his desk drawer. The label atop the bag read, "EVIDENCE," and the viewer could see several off-white rocks inside. "It's as innocent-looking as candy," Bush intoned, ...

The air in the White House on that crisp morning of September 4 in 1981 was thick with the scent of hot dogs and quiet, nervous ambition. A symphony of whispered conspiracies and clinking porcelain, it was a tableau of power, played out over ice-cold Coca Cola and a mountain of piping-hot tater tots. And at the head of the table, bathed in the soft glow of a nearby chandelier, sat the man himself, Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator. Reagan, hair slicked back like he'd just walked off the set of Bedtime for Bonzo and sporting a perfectly-tailored suit, held court, his face a mosaic of folksy charm and steely resolve. He was discussing the new school lunch regulations, a topic that, to the untrained eye, seemed as mundane as a day-old donut. But to the men and women who orbited his sphere of power, every word, every gesture was a signal, a harbinger of a new era. And today, the signal was coming in loud and clear, a signal that would send shockwaves through the very foundation of...

On the second day of September, 1981, a Friday, there came a whisper, a rustle, a certain... frisson of anxiety that ran through the immaculate, polished floors of the Gertz department store in Jamaica, Queens. It was the last gasp of summer, the city still sweating and groaning under a thick blanket of humid air. But in this cool, artificially-lit cathedral of consumerism, a chill had set in. The rumor, which had been circulating for weeks in the coffee shops and beauty salons of the borough, was now an Official Thing, a capital-O, capital-T statement from the high-and-mighty Allied Stores Corporation—the Gertz flagship, the very sine qua non of Long Island style, was to CLOSE. The Gertz in Jamaica! Good heavens! It was like hearing the sun was going to take a permanent vacation, or that the Long Island Rail Road was suddenly going to start running on time. This was not just a store; it was a landmark! A monument to a bygone era of shopping, of a certain kind of refined, leisurely...