Where were you?

Let's play this game again. Where were you, thirty years ago today? When Richard Nixon resigned the office of President and flew off into the dustbin of history?

I was off in the wilds of Norway (Trondheim, as I recall), doing the Youth Hostel and Eurailpass summer-in-Europe thing, where the International Herald-Tribune - published in the morning in Paris - arrived by train about 5 p.m. the next afternoon. Whenever you saw someone who looked American, you'd stop them and ask if they'd heard anything. Invariably, they'd pull out the same copy of the Herald-Trib that you had. Finally, I saw a local paper with the headline "NIXON STORGT". Below the headline was a photo of Ford, and a caption with a word about 50 letters long, and someplace in the middle of that word was something that looked like "president". So, while we figured that something had happened, we really weren't sure what. At the youth hostel that evening, someone whose English was better than my Norwegian told us that Nixon had "gone by himself" and made the little gesture with two fingers of someone walking.

In the hindsight of many years, I regret not picking up a copy of the "Nixon Storgt" paper.