MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

How a hand-holding charity stunt launched a social network, way back in the 1980s

- ALEKS KROTOSKI

In 25 May 1986, 6.5 million people joined hands over 6,638km (4,125 miles) from New York to Los Angeles to do an impossible thing. They were part of Hands Across America, a fundraising stunt to improve awareness about hunger and homelessness in the world’s richest country. I was there. We held hands for 15 minutes. It was thrilling.

Hands Across America was organized by a team of people who had their internal threshold of reality skewed by successfully carrying off previously impossible things. The team was the USA for Africa, who, a year before had raised $64m (about £45m) for famine relief with the charity single We Are The World. As Marty Rogol, the executive director of the USA for Africa, explained to me, “we were probably a little full of ourselves in terms of what we could accomplish.”