Posted on 11/22/2014 6:13:15 PM PST by GOJPN
22 November 1963. 51 years ago. Do you remember where you were and what you were doing that day? I was in phys ed class and had just finished running the cross country course. As I walked up the locker room door, Coach Waite was sitting on the steps with his face in his hands. He was crying. I asked what was wrong and he told me that President Kennedy had been shot and killed. That was a bad day for me.
I was five years old, at home with my mother and younger brother and doing my best to antagonize both (in the days before the state implemented mandatory kindergarten). I remember mom had put my brother down for a nap and was trying to fold laundry when the first bulletin aired on NBC. It was read by Don Pardo, who happened to be the on duty staff announcer for the network and their local flagship, WNBC-TV.
Pardo had to read the first two bulletins off-camera because in those days, the networks didn’t have cameras in their newsrooms, and it took a few minutes for the tubes to warm up so they could actually transmit pictures. An editor ran to the announce booth, shoved some wire service copy at Pardo and said we’re breaking into programming and you’ve got to read this now. He delivered both without having a chance to proofread the copy and did an excellent job, considering the circumstances.
Of course, Mr. Pardo passed away in August, 50 years after the JFK assassination and 70 years after joining the announcing staff at NBC. For years, it was assumed that his original bulletins had been lost forever, since the network didn’t start recording until about four minutes into the coverage, when Chet Huntley, Bill Ryan and Frank McGee began providing updates. They were also unseen for a couple of minutes, since the TV cameras still hadn’t warmed up.
All of that was lost on me. I was too intent on waking up my brother, which earned me a swat on the bottom from mom. I couldn’t figure out why she was crying until she told me the President had been shot.
I think my grandmother said a few things about Kennedy that were uncomplimentary, because Mom repeatedly tried to shush her. Perhaps she was just irate over her soaps being pre-emptied, but I wish I could recall what was said.
It’s a sad thing for our Country, that’s for sure, but we have had a great life - Hubby and I. Getting on in years, but still healthier than we thought we would be just to name one of our many blessings thanks be to God.
I was at home alone with our 7 month old son, my husband was at his AF recruiting office. I had TV on when the bulletin came on that the President had been shot. Phone lines were tied up and I was in panic mode. Then about 30 minutes later they announced his death. I think my husband finally called and told me they were on full alert.
When he got home, we were shocked to realize that we knew exactly where Dealy Plaza was. Until July ‘63 husband had been stationed at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. We had driven through Dallas numerous times (this was before interstate highways) and we always took the wrong turn coming out of the Dealy Plaza underpass.
Then 2 days later, we watched Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed on live TV.
It is hard not to connect the trauma of that time to the miscarriage I suffered a week later.
It was just after lunch across the Potomac from Washington DC. I was in 7th grade shop class waiting for class to begin.
Our shop teacher was a notorious wise guy and a practical joker, so when he rushed in and said President Kennedy had been shot we suspected it was some kind of prank he was pulling.
Of course it wasn’t, and if I recall correctly school was cancelled at that point. We lived in Arlington and I could have hiked three miles to watch the burial procession but none of my friends were up for it.
Some of my friend’s parents were pretty close to the Kennedy administration. One dad was an AF captain who been one of Kennedy’s drivers, another was a lawyer who worked with Robert Kennedy. So the assassination affected them more than most.
That whole year is a jumble in my memory. At the very same time that Kennedy was shot the Beatles and the whole English music invasion was exploding on the scene. Vietnam was almost totally unknown, it meant something only to the very few who had been there as advisors. The civil rights riots that would burn a dozen American cities were yet to come. Lyndon Johnson hadn’t had a chance to turn America into a welfare state and blow up the black family. It seems like Oswald’s bullets marked a big turning point in more ways than one.
I was supposed to be in Junior High School, but since it was being built I was in the High School with the rest of my class when the news came over.
We were sent home. Still remember walking up the stairs to get my coat and listening to the only sound, of lockers slamming and kids sobbing.
I remember thinking, ‘this is what it was like for Lincoln’.
Thought of it today, as I got ready for work. Think of it every year, without anything prompting it.
Sad sad day.
Did you run across Maddox and Turner Joy?
A friend told me her memories of Catholic school that day: All of a sudden, a television appeared in every classroom A television! They didn’t even know the school had televisions!
I used to have a conservative boyfriend back when I was apolitical, and his birthday was November 22. He made a joke that the assassination was a birthday present. I was visibly ticked off. We all loved the Kennedys in our dopey apolitical days.
Your post pretty much sums up my experience as well. I was about a month shy of three years old when Kennedy was shot, so I don’t really remember it happening. We had two deaths in the family not long after that, and I remember those events well, in addition to all the turmoil of the latter Sixties that you mentioned.
I was ten years old and in the fifth grade at George S. Patton elementary in Fort Ord, California.
As I recall it was sometime in the morning when our classroom door opened and an administrator beckoned our teacher out into the hall. She left the classroom and closed the door behind her. All of us kids were a bit curious about that, because it was highly unusual. We could hear them talking in the corridor, but their words were muffled.
When our teacher came back into the room, she was visibly upset - right on the verge of breaking out in tears, but she held it together long enough to tell us that the president had been shot, and that school was dismissed.
At that moment, the world stopped for me, as I’m sure it did for nearly every kid in my class. We were all too stunned to even move for a moment or two. This was just too big a thing to digest for most of us.
I don’t remember anything else until I was on my street nearing my house. It seemed the whole world had gone silent. I can remember seeing kids all up and down the streets, all walking like they were in a daze. None of us spoke. It was like some zombie funeral procession.
When I got home, some of my siblings were already there, and Mom was already glued to the TV broadcast. I sat down in the living room to watch, and I don’t remember moving from that spot for days afterwards. I think the whole family slept by the TV during that time - following the events during every waking moment.
As others have said, I mark the Kennedy assassination as the moment our world came unglued. Those of us who lived through it, know that it was as large a psychic trauma to the nation as 9/11 would be, decades later.
How times have changed. I doubt if one in a thousand middle schools even have such a class today.
American kids can hardly speak or write their own mother tongue nowadays.
cutie, eh?I got out of school that day to go down and take some photos, but I had a date that Friday night with Trish Eagan. So I drove my parent's 1963 Chevy Impala into the garage for a quick hand wash from a bucket without anyone seeing me.
I had the radio on the Mighty KLIF listening to pop hits: the Surfaris' "Wipe Out," Eydie Gorme's "Blame It on the Bossa Nova" and Elvis' "(You're The) Devil in Disguise" when there was breaking news, the announcer intoned, "Three shots have been reportedly fired in the Presidential motorcade."
I though, "What dumb son-of-a-bitch would do that?"
Just that instant my grandmother opened the door into the garage from the den and said, "Danny, someone shot the President--"
The rest, as they say, was history.
Within two weeks my world had turned upside down. My Lake Highlands High School Wildcats football team that was winning like a house a fire-- averaging 44 points per game-- going into the play-offs playing Rockwall. We lost the night Kennedy was killed, 40-0.
My Dad was made the Project Manager of the Blue Mesa Dam project in Gunnison, Colorado, and we moved there pronto where my cousin Wicky and I were hated because we just move from Dallas, the city that killed Kennedy.
And, Trish, sweet, sweet Trish-- She of the dark smooth complexion, huge brown eyes, long lovely legs and magnificent bosom-- Well, I lost her even though we tried to get back together a few years later when I was closer, being a freshman at Louisiana State College in Monroe, Louisiana.
Yet distance, as she almost always does, did us in.
However, years later in Hollywood I used those days to write a screenplay about what 'really happened' with the Kennedy Assassination. Extra Shot was a fine piece of speculative fiction, if I do say so myself, that had The Trish character's father being a Cuban hitman who pulled the trigger on JFK from the grassy knoll and my film producer character discovering this from a roll of 17 year old film that had a picture of the gunman doing the deed. My character finds out he knocked up Trish that night and she had his son but he never knew until he tracked her down 17 years later after finding the film--
Yadda yadda yadda-- The ending took place in the White House as my character bring the 'bad guy' down.
The script was optioned twice but never produced.
I recall my agent told me the last producer wanted Valerie Bertinelli to play the Trish character and Mark Harmon mine but he could never get the deal's financing together and eventually the option reverted back to me where it is still.
So, big, that is my day that Kennedy was shot tale and yes, I am old!
But I keep on ticking even as fate... 
tries it best to do me in--
motorcade = motor car parade = MOTORCarparADE
Ah yes....What a day. C.S.Lewis died. The real tragedy of that time....
So you attended Northeast Louisiana State College in the sixties? My brother graduated from there in 1964.
I was two days shy of my 5th birthday. I have no recollection of what I was doing at the time of JFK’s assassination. I probably barely knew of such a thing as President of the United States.
Oswald was shot on my birthday.
Right, Otter? Right on, Bendy... 
got a refill when you're ready.
So, abb, I missed your brother... 
but Cee Campbell helped me pass the time--
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