There’s so much happening these days, it’s almost impossible to keep up. But before high-speed internet became ubiquitous, things really did feel like they moved at a slower pace. Americans got their news from the same newspapers, watched the same nightly TV anchors, and actually had time to talk about current events before the news cycle moved on. So you’d think the 1975 explosion in LaGuardia Airport that killed 11 people and injured another 75 would be something millennials and older generations would know plenty about. Instead, as this recent Slate article highlights, it’s a bombing that’s largely been forgotten.
I’d certainly never heard about LaGuardia getting bombed before I read the article. Part of that’s probably due to me being negative 13 years old when it happened and New York City being a long way from Watkinsville, Georgia. And yet, I still learned about plenty of other events that happened before I was born. From the racists who blew up Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 to the Unabomber, I thought I knew a good bit. But as the Slate article makes clear, I’m far from the only fully grown adult in this country who never learned that someone set off a bomb inside Laguardia on Dec. 29, 1975. Odds are, you didn’t know about it, either.
Despite being known as “one of the greatest cold cases of the 20th century,” with no deadlier terrorist attack taking place in the U.S. until the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, even the survivors reportedly feel forgotten. They didn’t take Slate phone calls seriously at first:…