I was in the Navy. We had a big inspection that day. After the personnel inspection was over, we were released onto North Island NAS. Some friends and I were headed to the EM club to get burgers for lunch. All of a sudden, we saw this "gold braid" Chief Petty Officer (all that means he is the Most Serious Guy you can deal with in the Navy, a totally clean record for 12 years to qualify) in full uniform. Chief Aviation Boatwain’s Mate. I remember he had 8 "hashmarks" on his sleeve, and was a big barrel-chested guy. He came around the corner and ran up the street toward us. He was shouting at the top of his lungs, "The president's been shot!" repeatedly.
I was 15, A sophomore in high School. I spent most of my time worrying about my hair. My mother gave me these permanents that made me look like an electrified schnauzer. I also wondered if I would ever get my period, go on a date, learn how to spell, (I am Dyslexic) or grow breasts...I was a very late bloomer. I was in the dance room waiting to try out to be a cheerleader. All the other girls had breasts, shining bouffant hair and pink lipstick. I really hated them but I thought if I got on the squad I might become a more sane version of them that would get a boyfriend and be able to spell discombobulated without a brain freeze. We were ordered to the auditorium on the intercom and told the president was dead and released from School. I walked home numb and then watched TV with my mom and little sister. It seemed like a strange dream. I had not experienced a personal death yet and this event seemed too awful to be real. I was sad but mostly, I think, for the loss of my feeling that the world was a good and safe place. The Ruby shooting, Jackie in her pink blood spattered suit, little John John. It was all quite shocking. I saw past childhood and saw grief and evil clearly for the first time. I Did not become a cheerleader, I got a pixie haircut, (the only safe hairdo ever, I still have one), and became less delusional about life... except about the opposite sex... that took me a little longer - about 45 years. 😻
I was in Grade 10, in a biology class. I think we were all too young, too immature to grasp the totality of the moment. The word spread. Ours teacher was a cold fish, and went on with the class. Our school leaders were not leaders. There was no announcement, we stayed until the final bell sent us home to our black-and-white televisions. We watched and watched and watched.
That evening, the synagogue was filled spontaneously. The rabbi gave a sermon that brought little comfort. The entire congregation rose, and we all said the Kaddish, the mourner's prayer. I had never spoken those words before, had only seen the adults stand and recite them. Some of us wept.
I was numb. It was too enormous to process, certainly too much to realize how the world had changed that Friday. That realization came later, seeped into my consciousness as floodwaters sometimes do, slowly, relentlessly, and I understood that nothing would ever be the same.
So many deaths followed: Malcolm, Marrtin, Bobby, 50+ thousand, and on and on.
When you think about it - that really was the beginning of the slide into the place we are in now. Mass shootings likely would have been impossible to comprehend and look at us now.
I think you mean "the PUBLIC beginning." to me, knowing what I know now, there was a whole lot of very bad shit we didn't know about then but know about now...we were sowing our own destiny on a lot of fronts.
after all, Tom, you were headed to Vietnam around then, right? QED...
Yes the public awareness. And honestly - look at the public "awareness" now - each shooting doesnt even get a raised eyebrow - one short news story and we move on - even the "thoughts and prayers" arent mentioned! As if it still doesnt touch us.
Boy was most of this country so oblivious for so many years - although oblivion lives among us right now. If it doesnt touch someone personally - ho hum.
i recall the moment i learned of JFK's assassination -- like it was yesterday. 60 years ago. i was 13 years old, having just started 8th grade at Rye County Day, a private school in Rye New York. Twenty-five 8th grade girls, all in our blue and yellow gym outfits, were heading back to the gym after La Cross practice; we were crossing the street that flanked the building. As I stepped off the sidewalk, I joined a group of girls huddled around a stopped car. Its radio was blasting, and the driver had stopped so that we could gather 'round to hear the shocking news. Many tears were shed there, in the street, around that random car. Very few words were spoken in those moments of initial shock. Who knew that the days of Camelot would recede into a rosy memory, as "the worst and the dumbest" started to crawl out of the woodwork -- into the vacuum ultimately left by JFK, RFK, and MLK? Later, I watched Jack Ruby murder Harvey Oswald on live TV. So much to process!
Don't want to think about this on Thanksgiving Day. Having said that, I was 10 years old, in sixth grade, and remember every single minute of that week+.
I was at home that day, newly married (my first marriage) and working the night shift at the old U.S. Post Office (the USPS was not even a gleam in the eye of some scurrilous congressman). I was listening to WINS Newsradio (a pioneer of all-news, 24-7 programming) when the bulletin came on: The President had been shot in Dallas!
I was stunned. How could this have happened? But then I thought: “He is in Texas, isn’t he.”
I knew that JFK was hated in many quarters of the country, not the least of them, the South. And he was in “enemy” territory, wasn’t he.
Nevertheless it was perhaps the most shocking news I had ever heard—experienced—in my young adult life. I was barely out of “toddler-hood” when the attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred and so that had had little impact on me, except that the grown-ups around me, and everywhere it seemed, were extremely agitated.
This, though, was calamitous news. The Camelot era had barely begun. Our glamorous and sophisticated President and First Lady were just beginning to make their imprint on the nation. As an African American I was particularly aggrieved because I had thought that a new era of progress in race relations just might be dawning.
And so I joined with so many of my fellow Americans who felt that something very precious had been stolen from them. I now believed that my newly-acquired bright, shining world had been plunged into darkness. It was excruciatingly painful and depressing.
Thanks for telling your story TC and allowing us to tell ours. I’m shocked at how little the msm is writing about it. I guess it’s ancient history to most of their staffs.
I was in high school English class ( in Massachusetts) with a very pompous teacher. I thought after the news came over the intercom, he would have a poem or some kind of words of comfort, but no. Later I remembered that just a few years before, Kennedy came through the city in some kind of parade or maybe he was campaigning and giving a speech. There was an intercom announcement that we could leave school if we had a note from home. Immediately, the sound of paper tearing from notebooks was everywhere but I was too timid to forge a note. At home, the tv was on constantly. Bless Walter Cronkite for his professionalism. It was the only time I remember seeing my father cry.
It was during the start of second period at high school, English, we had just got in the classroom and getting ready for a quiz, which we had every Friday. Just then, the principal, Brother Regan, came to the door from the school office and announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Everyone was shocked, what was going on? Someone had a transistor radio and turned it on and there was a reporter reading news reports live on air, then Brother Regan came back with news that Kennedy was dead…the rest of the day was a blur. After I got home, I was glued to the TV all weekend and Sunday morning I watched a live satellite feed of Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby. For a 13 year old kid, that was one weekend that I will never forget…
I’d just finished ‘A’ school at Damneck. A few of us had fair imitations of Vaun Meader imitating ‘I would like to say this about that,’ kind of thing at the EM club. Restricted on base for drunk and disorderly in Virginia Beach celebrating graduation (10th out of a class of 10). Watched the first and second instant replays of Lee Oswald being shot just outside a Dallas police station. I was on the wagon at that time waiting for orders to a destroyer out of Newport, RI. Didn’t begin to believe any of it until I quit drinking in 1991.
It was my sixth birthday and they let us out of school early without any explanation. I lived in the country but attended a ‘city’ school and as I waited for my father to pick me up in front of he schoolhouse, I watched the teachers leaving the building - some gathering in noisy clusters, crying, wailing, clutching each other. Some teachers simply walked silently out of the building and seemed to simply wander off aimlessly. After my father collected me, looking out the station wagon’s windows, I witnessed similar circumstances all over our small town and asked my father what had happened. His answer was honest and clear but so extraordinarily flat that I instinctively knew not to pursue the subject.
When we arrived home, my grandmother and aunt were there comforting my mother who was bawling. They all were. The television was on midday and they were all glued to it. My father joined them silently. Until my older sister gathered me and my younger brother up and took us outside, no one had seemed to notice that we were in the room also. As she bundled us to go into the yard, I saw my cake sitting on the kitchen counter. The icing was only half applied and the spreader lay next to it fully loaded with icing that never made it onto the cake. My sister told me ‘happy birthday’ and took us out to play.
Over the course of the next hours and days, I learned that there were things in the world much, much bigger than me. It was a good lesson. I think it’s when my love of current events took root because I’ve been a news junkie all my life. For years afterward, when people realized when my birthday was, they lamented that it had to fall on such a tragic anniversary. Over the years, that happened less and less - and yesterday, for the first time, it didn’t happen at all.
Happy belated birthday 🎂 I was just a little more than 3 years old when Kennedy was shot. But I understand those lamenting your birthday - my birthday is 9/11
if it cheers you up at all, it's also St. Cecilia's Day...patron saint of music. I think it might be specifically church music, but it's still music.
one thing I remember about the obit page on 11/22/63 is who else was on that page...I recall CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley and will now check...and yes, they both died the same day.
and why hasn't anyone ever made a good movie based on "Brave New World?"
Well, one hates to go back there, but it changed my life. I was working at NASA in Houston, in a bull pen of other supply types. Somebody brought a tv and we all watched as Walter announced his death. Stunned silence, except for one guy who said “it’s about time.” I remember the shock of that statement, and somebody who said he was a John Bircher. Young and ignorant, I had no clue. We all went home and were off work til the funeral. I sat on the bed watching tv and crying. Then the drama got more bizarre, Thanks to Jack Ruby. I remember somebody saying that John Birchers thought Ike was a communist. I had liked Ike (because he kicked Hitler’s arse) and thought that was crazy. Became a political animal and LBJ fan, in one fell swoop. I still think John Birchers and their ilk (by whatever name these days, Republican fits), are evil personified.
Rob Reiner has a new well researched podcast series that provides a credible and horrible reason for Jack Ruby's assassination of Oswald, and Oswald's assasination of JFK.
I had just turned seven and was in the first grade. The voice on the PA called all teachers to the principal’s office. Mrs. Green left me “in charge” of keeping the class orderly in her absence. When she returned her face was tear-stained, unsettling to a youngster. School was immediately dismissed and we walked home, as usual, but not knowing why we had an early release.
I was too young to immediately understand why the grownups were so upset, and have no memories of how our parents explained the situation to my siblings and me. I just know that the day instantly became part of my life DNA.
I was a freshman at UC in Boulder, Colorado, walking back to my dorm after class when I noticed students huddling in small groups. The usual noise and bustle of campus between classes seemed eerily disrupted. Approaching a group and hearing sobbing, I was hit with a wave of foreboding Someone blurted, "The President's been shot!" The shock was just overwhelming. I rushed to my dorm where a horrified crowd had gathered around the TV and our worst fears were confirmed. Later that day I gratefully went to the Denver home of my best friend, where her lovely family embraced me and we comforted each other in our collective grief. We hardly stirred from the TV for days, and all witnessed the additional horror of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. We all immediately realized the enormity of that act -- that Oswald was being silenced so we might never know WHO or WHY.
My family are Massachusetts natives. My now deceased mother was 17, a senior in high school, when Kennedy was shot. Thank you for sharing your memories of that day.
I was in kindergarten at Kempton Elementary in Spring Valley, CA, about 20 minutes east of downtown San Diego. My only memory of that day was that I was sitting at a table, there was a sheet of paper in front of me, probably some worksheet, on which in the upper right corner was written “11-22-63” and I remember thinking, “I need to remember this date.” That’s my only memory. I don’t remember why I thought I needed to remember that date. I don’t remember the TV, or my parents’ reaction, or anything else. Just that paper, that date, and my mental note to remember that date.
I guess I should be grateful that’s all I remember. Everyone’s memories in the comments here seem so fraught, so filled with fright, or a deep unease. The generation that consciously experienced it does not seem to be over it yet.
And the hate has reached its apogee today because if such an event were to occur, half the country would be openly, crassly, and orgasmically rejoicing. At least back then, with a few already noted exceptions, most of the nation had the decency to be affronted if not horrified.
I was in English class in tenth grade. The announcement came over the school intercom. Our wonderful teacher looked at us and said something about waiting to see. She did not try to go on with the lesson, but allowed us to talk of other things. Then the announcement came that the president was dead. We all bowed our heads, and some of us cried. I have to say, my Dad was a rabid Republican. He and his father would argue loudly after Sunday supper, while all of us sought to be elsewhere. He did not like JFK. My mother went along with him, I suspect because she did not care either way and it was easier. He was the Republican county chairman, and we all worked along with them on mailings and phone calls and handing out literature.
That day, I realized how harmful my father's approach was, that could lead to an assassination. They let us out of school early and I walked the mile home in the drizzle. I lived near the Soo Locks, and there was a freighter in the river that was blowing its horn at regular intervals, like a tolling bell. I thought about how the president's family was broken, and how the promise he showed as leader was extinguished. I didn't cry, but I felt grief and fear for the future.
We did not have a TV at home, but turned on the radio and got the news that way. Our family grieved, and I don't remember any discussion or talk that was celebrating the end of the Kennedy administration. At my Grandma's house that weekend, we watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald right in front of us. My Dad and Grandpa did not have a fight that day.
I was too young to understand what happened 60 years ago today, but had somewhat casually followed John Jr. in the news over the years, out of curiosity because we shared a birthday.
We're close in age then... Jackie and my mom were due the same day, but John came three weeks early and I was three weeks late. I've always had a fascination fir that family.
I was 15, A sophomore in high School. I spent most of my time worrying about my hair. My mother gave me these permanents that made me look like an electrified schnauzer. I also wondered if I would ever get my period, go on a date, learn how to spell, (I am Dyslexic) or grow breasts...I was a very late bloomer. I was in the dance room waiting to try out to be a cheerleader. All the other girls had breasts, shining bouffant hair and pink lipstick. I really hated them but I thought if I got on the squad I might become a more sane version of them that would get a boyfriend and be able to spell discombobulated without a brain freeze. We were ordered to the auditorium on the intercom and told the president was dead and released from School. I walked home numb and then watched TV with my mom and little sister. It seemed like a strange dream. I had not experienced a personal death yet and this event seemed too awful to be real. I was sad but mostly, I think, for the loss of my feeling that the world was a good and safe place. The Ruby shooting, Jackie in her pink blood spattered suit, little John John. It was all quite shocking. I saw past childhood and saw grief and evil clearly for the first time. I Did not become a cheerleader, I got a pixie haircut, (the only safe hairdo ever, I still have one), and became less delusional about life... except about the opposite sex... that took me a little longer - about 45 years. 😻
You spell pretty good here, Robin. A lot of big words! :-)
Spell check and goggle are my good friends . This is a town near us in North Wales.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. 😜
That is EXACTLY how it is spelled. I have been using that town and its spelling as a regular gag for decades.
"Everybody smile and say 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.'"
Thank you for this. “I saw past childhood…” How prophetic, and here we are, grief and evil galore
I was in Grade 10, in a biology class. I think we were all too young, too immature to grasp the totality of the moment. The word spread. Ours teacher was a cold fish, and went on with the class. Our school leaders were not leaders. There was no announcement, we stayed until the final bell sent us home to our black-and-white televisions. We watched and watched and watched.
That evening, the synagogue was filled spontaneously. The rabbi gave a sermon that brought little comfort. The entire congregation rose, and we all said the Kaddish, the mourner's prayer. I had never spoken those words before, had only seen the adults stand and recite them. Some of us wept.
I was numb. It was too enormous to process, certainly too much to realize how the world had changed that Friday. That realization came later, seeped into my consciousness as floodwaters sometimes do, slowly, relentlessly, and I understood that nothing would ever be the same.
So many deaths followed: Malcolm, Marrtin, Bobby, 50+ thousand, and on and on.
When you think about it - that really was the beginning of the slide into the place we are in now. Mass shootings likely would have been impossible to comprehend and look at us now.
I think you mean "the PUBLIC beginning." to me, knowing what I know now, there was a whole lot of very bad shit we didn't know about then but know about now...we were sowing our own destiny on a lot of fronts.
after all, Tom, you were headed to Vietnam around then, right? QED...
Yes the public awareness. And honestly - look at the public "awareness" now - each shooting doesnt even get a raised eyebrow - one short news story and we move on - even the "thoughts and prayers" arent mentioned! As if it still doesnt touch us.
Boy was most of this country so oblivious for so many years - although oblivion lives among us right now. If it doesnt touch someone personally - ho hum.
i recall the moment i learned of JFK's assassination -- like it was yesterday. 60 years ago. i was 13 years old, having just started 8th grade at Rye County Day, a private school in Rye New York. Twenty-five 8th grade girls, all in our blue and yellow gym outfits, were heading back to the gym after La Cross practice; we were crossing the street that flanked the building. As I stepped off the sidewalk, I joined a group of girls huddled around a stopped car. Its radio was blasting, and the driver had stopped so that we could gather 'round to hear the shocking news. Many tears were shed there, in the street, around that random car. Very few words were spoken in those moments of initial shock. Who knew that the days of Camelot would recede into a rosy memory, as "the worst and the dumbest" started to crawl out of the woodwork -- into the vacuum ultimately left by JFK, RFK, and MLK? Later, I watched Jack Ruby murder Harvey Oswald on live TV. So much to process!
Don't want to think about this on Thanksgiving Day. Having said that, I was 10 years old, in sixth grade, and remember every single minute of that week+.
I was at home that day, newly married (my first marriage) and working the night shift at the old U.S. Post Office (the USPS was not even a gleam in the eye of some scurrilous congressman). I was listening to WINS Newsradio (a pioneer of all-news, 24-7 programming) when the bulletin came on: The President had been shot in Dallas!
I was stunned. How could this have happened? But then I thought: “He is in Texas, isn’t he.”
I knew that JFK was hated in many quarters of the country, not the least of them, the South. And he was in “enemy” territory, wasn’t he.
Nevertheless it was perhaps the most shocking news I had ever heard—experienced—in my young adult life. I was barely out of “toddler-hood” when the attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred and so that had had little impact on me, except that the grown-ups around me, and everywhere it seemed, were extremely agitated.
This, though, was calamitous news. The Camelot era had barely begun. Our glamorous and sophisticated President and First Lady were just beginning to make their imprint on the nation. As an African American I was particularly aggrieved because I had thought that a new era of progress in race relations just might be dawning.
And so I joined with so many of my fellow Americans who felt that something very precious had been stolen from them. I now believed that my newly-acquired bright, shining world had been plunged into darkness. It was excruciatingly painful and depressing.
Thanks for telling your story TC and allowing us to tell ours. I’m shocked at how little the msm is writing about it. I guess it’s ancient history to most of their staffs.
I was in high school English class ( in Massachusetts) with a very pompous teacher. I thought after the news came over the intercom, he would have a poem or some kind of words of comfort, but no. Later I remembered that just a few years before, Kennedy came through the city in some kind of parade or maybe he was campaigning and giving a speech. There was an intercom announcement that we could leave school if we had a note from home. Immediately, the sound of paper tearing from notebooks was everywhere but I was too timid to forge a note. At home, the tv was on constantly. Bless Walter Cronkite for his professionalism. It was the only time I remember seeing my father cry.
It was during the start of second period at high school, English, we had just got in the classroom and getting ready for a quiz, which we had every Friday. Just then, the principal, Brother Regan, came to the door from the school office and announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Everyone was shocked, what was going on? Someone had a transistor radio and turned it on and there was a reporter reading news reports live on air, then Brother Regan came back with news that Kennedy was dead…the rest of the day was a blur. After I got home, I was glued to the TV all weekend and Sunday morning I watched a live satellite feed of Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby. For a 13 year old kid, that was one weekend that I will never forget…
I’d just finished ‘A’ school at Damneck. A few of us had fair imitations of Vaun Meader imitating ‘I would like to say this about that,’ kind of thing at the EM club. Restricted on base for drunk and disorderly in Virginia Beach celebrating graduation (10th out of a class of 10). Watched the first and second instant replays of Lee Oswald being shot just outside a Dallas police station. I was on the wagon at that time waiting for orders to a destroyer out of Newport, RI. Didn’t begin to believe any of it until I quit drinking in 1991.
It was my sixth birthday and they let us out of school early without any explanation. I lived in the country but attended a ‘city’ school and as I waited for my father to pick me up in front of he schoolhouse, I watched the teachers leaving the building - some gathering in noisy clusters, crying, wailing, clutching each other. Some teachers simply walked silently out of the building and seemed to simply wander off aimlessly. After my father collected me, looking out the station wagon’s windows, I witnessed similar circumstances all over our small town and asked my father what had happened. His answer was honest and clear but so extraordinarily flat that I instinctively knew not to pursue the subject.
When we arrived home, my grandmother and aunt were there comforting my mother who was bawling. They all were. The television was on midday and they were all glued to it. My father joined them silently. Until my older sister gathered me and my younger brother up and took us outside, no one had seemed to notice that we were in the room also. As she bundled us to go into the yard, I saw my cake sitting on the kitchen counter. The icing was only half applied and the spreader lay next to it fully loaded with icing that never made it onto the cake. My sister told me ‘happy birthday’ and took us out to play.
Over the course of the next hours and days, I learned that there were things in the world much, much bigger than me. It was a good lesson. I think it’s when my love of current events took root because I’ve been a news junkie all my life. For years afterward, when people realized when my birthday was, they lamented that it had to fall on such a tragic anniversary. Over the years, that happened less and less - and yesterday, for the first time, it didn’t happen at all.
Happy belated birthday wishes Connie.
Happy belated birthday 🎂 I was just a little more than 3 years old when Kennedy was shot. But I understand those lamenting your birthday - my birthday is 9/11
if it cheers you up at all, it's also St. Cecilia's Day...patron saint of music. I think it might be specifically church music, but it's still music.
one thing I remember about the obit page on 11/22/63 is who else was on that page...I recall CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley and will now check...and yes, they both died the same day.
and why hasn't anyone ever made a good movie based on "Brave New World?"
Well, one hates to go back there, but it changed my life. I was working at NASA in Houston, in a bull pen of other supply types. Somebody brought a tv and we all watched as Walter announced his death. Stunned silence, except for one guy who said “it’s about time.” I remember the shock of that statement, and somebody who said he was a John Bircher. Young and ignorant, I had no clue. We all went home and were off work til the funeral. I sat on the bed watching tv and crying. Then the drama got more bizarre, Thanks to Jack Ruby. I remember somebody saying that John Birchers thought Ike was a communist. I had liked Ike (because he kicked Hitler’s arse) and thought that was crazy. Became a political animal and LBJ fan, in one fell swoop. I still think John Birchers and their ilk (by whatever name these days, Republican fits), are evil personified.
https://youtu.be/NaL9oHh7nPc?si=xAmyWsdXDwtDM4qx
Rob Reiner has a new well researched podcast series that provides a credible and horrible reason for Jack Ruby's assassination of Oswald, and Oswald's assasination of JFK.
I’m going to give that a listen, but not right away.
Thank you, will check it out
Saw an interview with him - sounds really interesting.
I had just turned seven and was in the first grade. The voice on the PA called all teachers to the principal’s office. Mrs. Green left me “in charge” of keeping the class orderly in her absence. When she returned her face was tear-stained, unsettling to a youngster. School was immediately dismissed and we walked home, as usual, but not knowing why we had an early release.
I was too young to immediately understand why the grownups were so upset, and have no memories of how our parents explained the situation to my siblings and me. I just know that the day instantly became part of my life DNA.
I was a freshman at UC in Boulder, Colorado, walking back to my dorm after class when I noticed students huddling in small groups. The usual noise and bustle of campus between classes seemed eerily disrupted. Approaching a group and hearing sobbing, I was hit with a wave of foreboding Someone blurted, "The President's been shot!" The shock was just overwhelming. I rushed to my dorm where a horrified crowd had gathered around the TV and our worst fears were confirmed. Later that day I gratefully went to the Denver home of my best friend, where her lovely family embraced me and we comforted each other in our collective grief. We hardly stirred from the TV for days, and all witnessed the additional horror of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. We all immediately realized the enormity of that act -- that Oswald was being silenced so we might never know WHO or WHY.
My family are Massachusetts natives. My now deceased mother was 17, a senior in high school, when Kennedy was shot. Thank you for sharing your memories of that day.
I was in kindergarten at Kempton Elementary in Spring Valley, CA, about 20 minutes east of downtown San Diego. My only memory of that day was that I was sitting at a table, there was a sheet of paper in front of me, probably some worksheet, on which in the upper right corner was written “11-22-63” and I remember thinking, “I need to remember this date.” That’s my only memory. I don’t remember why I thought I needed to remember that date. I don’t remember the TV, or my parents’ reaction, or anything else. Just that paper, that date, and my mental note to remember that date.
I guess I should be grateful that’s all I remember. Everyone’s memories in the comments here seem so fraught, so filled with fright, or a deep unease. The generation that consciously experienced it does not seem to be over it yet.
Nor are any of us, consciously or not. It has been a chain of events with hate as the driver, in so many ways
And the hate has reached its apogee today because if such an event were to occur, half the country would be openly, crassly, and orgasmically rejoicing. At least back then, with a few already noted exceptions, most of the nation had the decency to be affronted if not horrified.
So true, an indictment of our “rich rule.”
I was in English class in tenth grade. The announcement came over the school intercom. Our wonderful teacher looked at us and said something about waiting to see. She did not try to go on with the lesson, but allowed us to talk of other things. Then the announcement came that the president was dead. We all bowed our heads, and some of us cried. I have to say, my Dad was a rabid Republican. He and his father would argue loudly after Sunday supper, while all of us sought to be elsewhere. He did not like JFK. My mother went along with him, I suspect because she did not care either way and it was easier. He was the Republican county chairman, and we all worked along with them on mailings and phone calls and handing out literature.
That day, I realized how harmful my father's approach was, that could lead to an assassination. They let us out of school early and I walked the mile home in the drizzle. I lived near the Soo Locks, and there was a freighter in the river that was blowing its horn at regular intervals, like a tolling bell. I thought about how the president's family was broken, and how the promise he showed as leader was extinguished. I didn't cry, but I felt grief and fear for the future.
We did not have a TV at home, but turned on the radio and got the news that way. Our family grieved, and I don't remember any discussion or talk that was celebrating the end of the Kennedy administration. At my Grandma's house that weekend, we watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald right in front of us. My Dad and Grandpa did not have a fight that day.
I was too young to understand what happened 60 years ago today, but had somewhat casually followed John Jr. in the news over the years, out of curiosity because we shared a birthday.
We're close in age then... Jackie and my mom were due the same day, but John came three weeks early and I was three weeks late. I've always had a fascination fir that family.