It was my fifth birthday and all the adults were glued to the TV for at least three days. I was a child but I remember that period well. Especially when Caroline Kennedy put her hand under the flag draped coffin to get closer to her late father. That I remember very well as well as the funeral.
The main reason we mourn after all these years is because we are not sure at all that LHO pulled the trigger. For so as long as that case remains an open mystery...the pain will not ebb.
Fourth grade, I was pushing the film projector cart back to the media room when the teacher with me asked if I knew that Kennedy had been shot. I thought the joke wasn’t very funny. An hour later I was home early, glued to the TV.
7th grade...math, I think.
We left early. Got home to my tearful mother and the drama narrated by Uncle Walter on CBS. We went out that night to buy newspapers to preserve the headlines.
Sunday morning we watched LHO get shot, live!
Probably the most astounding few days I can recall.
Not one jot or tittle of this travesty should remain classified.
This cover-up has been a perpetual violation of the trust of the American people, past, present and future.
I was six years old and don’t remember it.
After reading your post, the first thing that came to my mind is, the CIA/FBI is still trying to kill people that don’t go along with the deep state.
The principal giving a speech over the scratchy intercom. The little wooden box over the chalkboard at the front of the class that almost never squawks at us, other than the morning National Anthem and announcements. Teachers crying in the stairwell. Everyone walking around muted. Traffic moving slower, less aggressively.
Home to the TV, small, black and white, snowy, old men with suits and heavy glasses talking seriously. No cartoons allowed. No Soupy Sales. No Sandy Becker today.
Dad comes home from work and just looks at mom. Tells the kids to go wash up for dinner.
In study hall. I remember the announcement over the PA system saying that these had been a tragedy — that JFK had been shot. I remember one of the guys saying, “The only tragedy is that he isn’t dead”. (Of course, he was dead; we just didn’t know it.)
In our neck of the woods, JFK wasn’t popular so nobody had a huge reaction and nobody cried. (As opposed to my mother who bawled like a baby the night he was elected.)
I was too young to notice the event, but my parents talked about that day for years. It was their wedding anniversary.
They got married 11/22/58.
I was in fourth grade. I remember the moment the assassination was announced over the intercom, but I think what is embedded in my memory even more was watching Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on TV.
I was in 3rd grade standing at my school locker when I heard.
The Principal came over the loudspeaker and said the President had been shot. I remember thinking, "He's someone important."
I also remember watching Oswald get shot on live TV...
Do I remember? Yes, I was in the assembly room of our high school and the superintendent gave the news. A few years after that I was learning to like jungles.
I recall my father never liked JFK because he was the spoiled womanizing son of a bootlegger and a democrat. This is true, but hindsight tells me he was probably the best democrat prez we’ve had in my lifetime.
Each democrat president after JFK got progressively worse. I guess that’s why they call themselves progressives.
3rd grade - remember janitor coming into the classroom with hat in hand. Told Sister that the president had been shot and died.
The whole school went to the church to pray the rosary for him.
Years later heard of a Dallas cop coming down from the ROOF of the building with a rifle. The family of the witness was harassed for years about keeping quiet.
Second grade in St. Paul MN at St. Mark’s Elementary School on Prior. Sister Caroline came on over the intercom and announced. Then let the radio play. It was horrible. Kids crying.
“We hardly knew where a country called Vietnam was located, but we all were about to figure that out.”
LOL! I can top that one. I recall getting my first overseas assignment. I was sent to the personnel office to get my orders. I asked the clerk where I was going. She told me USASAFS Asmara. I asked where’s that? She said it was classified and pointed to a classified document. I was clueless, and had no idea where I was going. I had a port call at JFK airport with no destination on it. It was a very fast operation where I was informed of orders in the morning and fully processed out with a physical and on a plane in the afternoon.
While home on leave I went to the school library and discovered Asmara was in Ethiopia. I was told not to bring civilian clothes but did anyway. At JFK I was approached by a female army major that said I had to shed my uniform.
When I got to Asmara I discovered I was assigned to a US Army outpost called Kagnew Station that was an NSA listening post.
America would have survive if Eisenhower’s vice president had won the 1960 election.
The destructive 60s and most everything that people have been trained to put onto LBJ, actually came from JFK, including the immigration law that ended us, Vietnam, Affirmative Action, unionized Federals, even the “Great Society” is from JFK’s “New Frontier”.
I laid out of school that day...I saw the news on TV and called my mother, who was a telephone operator...I started telling her about what happened and ended up on the phone with her for about 2 hours as she relayed what I was telling her to the other operators she worked with...
Today if the president got shoot, a significant portion of the company wouldn’t care.