Remembering JFK
It took I Eat Gravel’s post to remind me about today’s sad anniversary, the 45th remembrance of Kennedy’s assassination. Though I was born during President Kennedy’s administration, I have no memories of him. What I remember are the childhood stories of PT-109, his assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs, Viet Nam and the Race to the Moon.
A few years after 1963, I distinctly remember helping my father pack in one of our family’s moves and finding his press clippings of the assassination. Along with JFK articles were newspapers from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. I was too young to ask him about what thsse men meant to him, but as I have grow older with a son of my own, I’m beginning to have an idea.
I was in second grade. When the principal first announced on the intercom, “The president has been shot in Texas,” I remember imagining that Kennedy had lost a pistol duel (in my imagination, he was in a cowboy hat). It was confusing to me, but that’s what I assumed had happenned.
A little later, that same voice said (I remember it pretty clearly), “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is dead.” We were sent home early. Many grown-ups were crying – I wasn’t sure why it was so important.
The thing is, my parents were republicans who really disliked Kennedy. So, I was surprised, when I came home, to find my mother crying in front of the television.
Good catch nemski. This is very important.
I was 10 years old the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was cleaning the nuns lunchroom after they had finished eating. They listened to the radio while at lunch and for some reason that day they forgot to turn off the radio .I remember hearing the announcement that JFK had been shot, I went to my classroom and told the nun who was teaching me that I just heard an announcement that JFK was shot in Dallas, obviously sister was shocked and flew to the lunchroom, she asked me to get all the other nuns to the lunch room. I do remember getting them all there but I don’t remember much after that until the day of the funeral. I remember the day of the funeral because it was televised. All my aunts and uncles were in tears. The whole neighborhood was in tears, heck I was in tears.
It was a depressing day and my wakeup call, next came Viet Nam.
I was a sophmore in high school, in an art class learning how to silk screen, when the announcement came over the PA system. School closed, the buses took us home, and then the whole bizarre next few days played out. Ruby shot Oswald on TV in the Dallas jail. Walter Cronkite got the nation through it all. In those days we trusted our anchors. The horse with no rider being lead down the funeral route. Jacqueline being a rock for the country. John-John saluting. We were all stunned, shocked, and so very very sad. We had no idea what was in store less than five years later in the horrible spring of 1968. But we knew that the world was changing. Camelot had ended.
What a tragic and scary time that must have been to live through. I wasn’t alive yet when Kennedy was assassinated — I’m 26 now — but I can still feel a glimpse of what it must have been like. I’m sure many people felt like something very important was stolen from them. I hope that my lifetime can take it’s course without having to know such unfairness.