Posted on 11/19/2013 7:43:13 AM PST by US Navy Vet
Post them here.
8th period, senior English class in N.Massapequa,NY. A kid came running into the room shouting that the president had been shot and we all assumed it was our class president.
My father had the same reaction, he couldn’t stand Kennedy.
I don’t remember where I was when I heard about it; I was 10. I suppose I was in school, and being a Catholic school, I suppose we said a prayer.
Living in DC, what I do remember is going to the funeral procession, seeing the riderless horse and the caisson, and someone lifting me to the base of a statute so I could see better.
Many years later, the internet had just started and I was in a chat room and ‘met’ one of the bagpipers from the UK who had been in the procession. It became a very small world.
Junior year in high school. Some of us cheered, for we were in Nixonland.
Nixonland stretched across the band of towns, south of the Puente Hills, among them Yorba Linda, La Habra, Whittier.
LOL
I was 5 and I only remember my mother sitting on the floor up close to the TV, watching intently and she kept turning around saying “shhh” to me and waving her hand for me to go away.
Well, I’ll play
I was in the Cameron Village Penny’s basement. I returned to the house where I lived with 20 other students.
I’ll never forget the President of the Young Republicans came in looking for one of my buddies. He was very unengineerlike. He was a little heavy and always carried one of those brief cases with the flap that locks. He was telling us all that “We just lost the Election”
I was at home with Mom (I was not yet 5) she was ironing and crying while watching TV. I had never seen her cry and I don’t think I have ever seen her cry since. It was a heart-breaking day.
What I do remember was the Huntley-Brinkley Report and Chet and David getting all dewy-eyed that the media's fairy-tale president was assuming room temperature.
I was sitting in a biology class at Newton High when the announcement came over the public address system. Our biology teacher, who never missed an opportunity to tell us how much he hated Kennedy, cheerily chirped up and said, “Wulp, that’s the way the cookie crumbles!” You knew that life in America had been changed forever.
I was sitting in class at school. They came over the loudspeaker and said in 5 minutes there would be an important announcement. Then 5 minutes later the principal came on and said that the President had been killed and they were sending everyone home early.
i was in 2d grade in Catholic school and we prayed the rosary on the bus ride home for him.
Fourth grade; I remember looking out the window to see the principal lower the flag to half mast. Kennedy buried on my birthday.
I was in second grade and Sister Mary had just tied a rambunctious child to his desk when another Nun came into the room and told her something. After that they turned out the lights and told us to sit at our desks with our heads down while they started crying. I didn’t find out what happened until I got home.
Well as I wrote to another poster, I was just a gleam in my future daddy’s eye.
I was a sophomore in high school in Arizona sitting in drafting class after lunch, when the announcement came over the PA system. The class was stunned and nothing got done the rest of the school day.
At the time, what upset me the most, was that myself and two other junior varsity football players were slated to move up to the varsity team to play with them in the final game of the football season on Friday night. Because of the assassination, the game was cancelled and we never got to play. I was bummed out at our misfortune.
I also remember vividly, coming home from Sunday School after church that weekend and turning the TV on to watch the news of the assassination events. Moments after I turned it on, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby right on live TV. I could not believe it. As a young kid, I didn’t fully realize the significance of these events at the time. It wasn’t until some years later that I finally realized that I had witnessed (albeit on a black & white TV) a historical event that would be talked and written about for decades to come.
And here we are 50 years later, still memorializing JFK’s tragic passing and discussing the events that transpired leading up to and afterwards. A sad day for our country.
I was thinking, oh the commies got him Joe McCarthy was right all along. Now the two main parties in this country will be the Republican and the Commie party and I was proven right, although I didn’t think they would take over the Republican party as well.
Eighth grade. Announcement over PA system. Girls crying.
My Irish Catholic mother was unable to produce even crocodile tears for “that inbred shanty-Irish trash,” with their little piggy eyes and...well, they were just crimey.
Third grade. The announcement that Kennedy had been killed came over the intercom. Our teacher broke down crying and then we did too because our teacher was crying. I don’t think I really “got it” until I got home and my Dad explained what had happened.
I was working part-time in ski shop in Detroit, having been discharged just two months prior from The Old Guard (TOG). I got an ‘early out’ to return to finish my BSBusAd at Wayne State University in Sep ‘63, otherwise, I’d have been in the iconic State Funeral of JFK viewed by scores of millions on TV worldwide.
I’ll be posting a thread on Nov 22 about a book compiled by former Captain Thomas F. Reid who was the Site Control Officer for the funeral ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery which compiles the personal accounts of 22 Old Guardsmen who were there.
The only flaw I detected in the four day event was the bugler who cracked the sixth note of “Taps”; it may have been a flaw but it only added an emotional highlight to the tragedy of the whole event.
I had graduated from the 7th Army NCO Academy that morning. I was on a bus that was traveling North thru Germany dropping off students at their posts when a gate guard stepped on the bus and informed us that the President had been shot. When I got to my unit the barracks and orderly room were empty, the whole unit had bugged out to the field. I had to find the post officer of the day to find a sign in sheet to get me on a morning report.
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