Hard to believe that it’s been that long, but I do remember right where I was twenty years ago today. I had just recently moved to New York and I was living in the Bronx near Van Cortland Park. At the time I was working for UPS in Yorktown, NY, which was about 45 minutes north of where I lived. (For a little more historical perspective, I wasn’t yet a Yankee fan at the time. In fact, I was a downright Yankee hater and was thrilled at the fact that my Oakland A’s had just beaten the Yanks in the first game I attended at Yankee Stadium. My Anakin-like conversion to the dark side occurs ten years after Black Monday and is a story for another day…)
Since I was a UPS new boot, hired to drive for Christmas but not yet in the union, and because there weren’t a ton of packages to be delivered on October 18th, I was told that I could go home for the day. While driving home I was listening to the news (WCBS radio 880) and all the noise about the direction that the stock market was going. When I got back to my apartment in the Bronx I changed clothes and hopped on the 1 train to Wall Street.
It was pretty crowded downtown, although to me it didn’t seem all that different than normal. No one seemed too taken with what was going on with the stock market. I found my way to the Stock Exchange and stood in line with the tourists who were walking through the viewing area to look at the traders on the trading floor.
They made us cycle through the room about every 15 minutes, but I kept walking through until the the bell rang at the end of the trading session. The DJI had dropped over 500 points, more than 22.5% of its value, and I was standing right there.
That was pretty heady stuff for the California boy just moved to New York. I felt like I was a living breathing part of history. Hard to believe that now, twenty years later, that the DOW is now 12,000 points above where it was back in 1987.