“Before the announcement over the school’s PA system, a kid shouted, ‘Kennedy’s been shot’ and there were some cheers over it.”
I guess I was in 10th grade, and the cheers erupted when the news came over the PA system that he’d been shot. The announcement referenced a “tragedy”. Some guy said, “The only tragedy is that he isn’t dead.” Well, he was dead but we didn’t know it yet.
“It’s funny how it’s a moment frozen in time for those of us old enough to remember. I was just settling down in a physiology class. Some girls who had a radio in their gym locker room (remember dressing for gym?) were saying that Kennedy had been shot. After class had begun, and I still can remember we were looking microscope slides of the three types of muscle, when the announcement was made Kennedy had died and we were to have a moment of silence and prayer for ‘President Johnson’ which at the time sounded so strange.
A girl next to me started crying and then the teacher said, OK, let’s get back to work. The question we all were asking was “Will they let us out of school?” They didn’t.
I was in high school in Georgetown, Washington DC. (At the beginning of Georgetown’s gentrification because of the Kennedy home). Back then we only got Thanksgiving Thursday off. It was a chilly gray overcast day the Friday we returned to classes. Principal let us out at 10 or so. A group of guys, about a dozen went down to the field by the reservoir to play touch football. A car full of classmates drove up honking their horn to tell us the radio news of the JFK shooting in Dallas. We all gathered around the car to hear more. I recall the two Hungarian refugees of their revolution silently turned to look at one another without a word. In that instant I knew were all thinking the same thing, Russians did it.
I was in US Air Force Survival school at Stead AFB, Nevada.
They locked the base down, increased the “DEFCON” and then cancelled all parties or celebrations post graduation...it was cold enough for three of us to get frostbite. Spent 7 days on snowshoes, escaping and evading. 18 inches of snow one night just about buried us in our 2 man “tent,” made with a parachute canopy. Those were the days!