English soccer player Tom Huddlestone was born. Conservative activist Terry Dolan died. And The Grateful Dead played at the Henry G. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, Calif.
These events aren’t particularly interesting on their own. But they all occurred on Dec. 28, 1986, the day about which Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten is writing a book, called “One Day.”
“That’s the most important thing, that it has no significance,” Weingarten said in a phone conversation. “Many people’s initial reaction was it’s a great idea, but you got a lousy day.”
Weingarten asked some kids at a table next to his in a restaurant to choose the date at random; his waitress picked the year. That the date was a Sunday, he said, “sets the bar way higher.”
His research so far, he said, “is persuading me that the idea is sound, that there is no such thing as an ordinary day.”
“I think coaches and sportswriters who view themselves as the guardians of some sort of untouchable shroud should stop whining about how their sacred game has been turned into a circus.” — Tony Kornheiser, Dec. 28, 1986
When Weingarten was an editor, he liked to force reporters to look for stories in aleatory ways: “Once I assigned five writers to hammer a nail into the phone directory, and wherever that nailpoint stopped they had to find the person and write a story,” he said. “They turned into five riveting stories.”
Fame, Weingarten said, “is what we happen to notice as the world flashes by. Many of the things in this book will have made a track in the public record, but I’m hoping a lot of it won’t.”
Weingarten’s hoping people will help him by sharing their own memories of that day. He’s set up a Facebook page and encourages people to email him at oneday122886@gmail.com or Weingarten@washpost.com. “I very much want not only information but ideas,” he said. He’s particularly interested in hearing from journalists: “their own life experiences, but also their thoughts on how to report this; what sourcing they might suggest, etc.,” Weingarten writes in an email.
So where was Weingarten that day? He isn’t sure, but something he wrote was published in The Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine. He’d been in a car accident six weeks earlier and barely survived. The article was about trying to maintain the feeling of awe he got from cheating death, which softened as the weeks passed and he found himself cataloging life’s myriad small events instead.
“It tuns out to have been literally about the meaning of life,” Weingarten said.
