Great site: Where Were You The Day President Kennedy Was Shot?

[Faygo Kid]

Great site: Where Were You The Day President Kennedy Was Shot?
http://jfkmemories.tumblr.com/

For all us older DUers. The 50th anniversary soon will be haunting. I hope you will visit the site and post your memories, if you have them (sponsored by AARP, and good on them).

I am haunted still, and remember every moment like it was yesterday. Here's my contribution. Please include yours, if you are old enough to do so.

SEVENTH GRADE, WITH A STRANGE EVENING TO FOLLOW

I was a seventh grader in East Detroit, Michigan. We were just leaving our next-to-last class of the day when a fellow student who was from the South and with a heavy accent turned to me and asked, “Isn’t it true McKinley was shot?” At least that’s they way I heard him. (He was also holding a transistor radio, which was absolutely not permitted.) I said yes; after all we were all headed to our next class, Mrs. Burgoyne’s American History, so I thought nothing of it. Until getting to class. And she was weeping. Then I knew. We were dismissed for the day.

I went home and like everyone was stunned, old enough to remember the Nixon-Kennedy election, definitely old enough to be scared witless during the Cuban Missile Crisis. JFK was my president, the first to be remembered with perfect clarity.

Mom worked for a large Detroit high school, which was playing that night (it was a Friday) for the Detroit Public School League football championship at Tiger Stadium. She got tickets for her, my little brother and me to attend, which she was very proud of as a single mom. Astoundingly, they played the game, and I went, although I said we should not go. It meant more to her to take her sons than it meant to her sons, so off we went. One of the most surreal evenings of my life to this day, it felt wrong and was wrong. Can’t remember who won and don’t care. (NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle did not cancel those weekend games, either, and later regretted it as the biggest mistake he ever made.)

On Saturday, we drove 50 miles north to spend the weekend with my grandmother and do nothing but watch the black and white TV. Got to see my first live murder when Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald.

The following Thursday was Thanksgiving - the quietest ever. Everything seemed trapped in eternal gloom until early 1964 when four Liverpool lads crossed the pond and things started to brighten again.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

1. First grade

I didn't know what the President of the United States was before this. I just remember JFK was a guy I saw on TV all the time.

[TexasTowelie]

2. About a year away from being conceived.

I was born in June 1965. I'll be in the Metroplex in November so I'll be marking the occasion.

[peacebird]

3. First grade, Catholic School. All the nuns were crying and we were sent home early.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. 2nd grade, with an evil penguin beating students for asking questions

She as horrifying and evil.

I do recall her saying that if we prayed hard enough, he would live. If not, he would die and it would be our fault.

What's a five letter word that rhymes with witch?

[Cirque du So-What]

5. Ask Poppy Bush

but I doubt his memory has sharpened since the time he was asked about his whereabouts on 11/22/63 and replied, 'I don't remember' - in spite of the fact that he was in Dallas on that fateful day. Memory's a funny thing, huh?

[DURHAM D]

6. I was putting on makeup getting ready to walk to class

when it came over the radio. I walked into the kitchen and asked my roommate if she heard it and I said "that is not funny". Right after that the announcer said "This is not a joke. The President has been shot in Dallas".

We ran to campus to watch the tv in the student union. I was a sophomore in college.

[Faygo Kid]

9. Tragically, I remember MLK and RFK, too, like yesterday.

What a better nation we would have been.

[Cirque du So-What]

7. 4th Grade

I don't remember how the teacher made the announcement, but I remember the reactions of my classmates, many of whom broke down in tears. I also remember encountering an adult handing out a special edition of the local newspaper while walking home from school - an unprecedented occurrence.

[Tidy Cat]

8. 9th Grade history class at Patrick Henry Jr. High school in Granada Hills, CA.

Principal announced it over the school's PA system.
School was dismissed for the rest of the day.

[Mass]

10. I was 4 and was living in rural France.

It must have been on TV and I may have seen the images as my parents just had their first TV, but I do not remember.

However, I remember RFK's death and Jackie Kennedy's marriage to Onassis as by then, I could read and the pictures where all over my grandmother's magazines.

[B Calm]

11. 7th grade study room. They announced it over the schools PA system. When

I got home from school, my dad was in tears.

[SamKnause]

12. Where was I ?

Pierce Elementary School, Ohio

4th grade

Mrs. Barger's class

[tularetom]

13. Leaving an engineering lab at Cal and going to the hospital to see my 1 day old daughter

It was a little after noon on a Friday and I was walking down Telegraph Avenue toward the hospital. At the corner of Dwight and Telegraph (where People's Park is now located) I saw a kid I knew from high school and he appeared to be almost in shock. When he finally was able to put the words together he told me what had happened. I don't remember the rest of my walk but I do remember that my wife knew nothing about the shooting.

I had to go to my job at 2 and accomplished absolutely nothing until I got off work at 6. Wasted the entire afternoon listening to radio accounts of the assassination. Went back to the hospital and then home where I spent the rest of the evening watching the news on TV and getting depressed and then drunk with my neighbor. Between work and hospital visits the weekend is still kind of a blur and by Monday things were more or less back to normal. My wife and daughter were home and I was back in class for an abbreviated week (Thanksgiving was the following Thursday).

[Bigmack]

14. Corporal of the guard at a small Marine Base in Japan....

In charge of raising the flag in the AM.

Japanese holiday of some kind. Had to raise our holiday flag to honor their holiday.

Wind blowing.

Raised giant flag, brought it to half mast.

Difficult to gauge size of flag/height of pole.

When the wind stopped, the flag was less than a foot from touching the ground.

The flag-is-sacred Corps would have had my stripes... and my ass.

More than Camelot died that day. Things turned to shit thereafter.

[pinto]

15. I was in 6th grade, Massachusetts grammar school.

Heavily Democratic area, overwhelmingly Catholic with a big Irish population. So many of our families shared those political, cultural and ethnic ties to some extent. We were simply told "The President has been shot. We're all going home." by an ashen faced principal. No one said a word and we went home.

In Mass, JFK was not only seen as President but as family, in a sense. It was a somber three days.

[SummerSnow]

16. I was not born yet. But my mom told me year ago that she was feeding my brother who was a year old..

and she was watching tv in the kitchen and it came on breaking news. My dad said he was outside working on his car and he heard it over the radio.

[kairos12]

17. In second grade in Houston Texas.

School was canceled and we were all sent home. I believe we the only people in our neighborhood whose parents voted for him. I don't recall our neighbors being exactly grief stricken at the news as was the case in our house.

I remember that day vividly.

[kentuck]

18. Interesting you should connect the Beatles in your account of JFK assassination.

I had not connected that before but I think you may be right.

[roamer65]

19. This country is in desperate need of resolution to JFK's murder.

It's time for the truth.

[kentuck]

21. Weren't the records supposed to be sealed for fifty years..?

Well?

[HipChick]

20. I was a glint in my father's eye..

He was engaged to be married..someone his parents had kinda picked out for him..

He saw my mum..and its was VA-ROOM!...Lots of people got upset, but he broke off the engagement, and married my mum...still married 30yrs later...

When I was 8yrs, I was tagging along with him, and he happened to bump into his ex...as kids do, apparently I took one look at her, not knowing who she was and blurted out " She sure is ugly"... thank goodness I went on to inherit my mother's good looks..

[tblue37]

22. Eighth grade--same as when we got more involved in Vietnam by way

of sponsoring a coup and the assassination of its president, or whatever his position was called.

I was so fascinated and disturbed by both events that without any prompting or input from teachers, I produced what was, for the time, massively "researched" (from various newspapers and news magazines and from taking notes from TV) illustrated reports with illustrated covers for both. Not knowing what else to do with them, I gave them to the teacher, who was astonished, because kids did not do such work without being required to, and back then such "researched" reports were not common at the eighth-grade level. It is one reason why as a college instructor I do not look down on my students' intelligence or effort as so many of my colleagues do. I know they are doing such reports early in their schooling, and doing research of a more serious sort than I did by collecting, summarizing, and quoting from newspapers, news magazines, and TV news shows.

My little 12-page reports were babyish and naive compared to what our kids are now doing in eighth grade, but at the time they were unheard of. I think being an Air Force brat whose father had been at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed and also had been rushed to Florida during the Cuban missile crisis had made me acutely sensitive to the potential such events might have for my own family and myself.

But we were still so young and naive as 13-year-olds back then. Now, with all their TV, internet, and movie exposure, our 13-year-olds manifest a sort of world-weary cynicism that fools us into thinking they are more grown-up, more mature than they really are. I REMEMBER how young, how naive, how much a CHILD I still was, even as an unusually bright and well-read 13-year-old. Biology hasn't changed. The veneer of sophistication that spoils our younger teens causes adults to handle their developmental, emotional,and educational needs in counterproducrive ways. As a teacher of young people only a few years older than that, being able to remember so clearly how I thought and felt at 13, or even as a college undergraduate, is a tremendous benefit. Even as an oldster, I find I can connect with my students in a way that even many of my much younger colleagues do not.

I suspect the assassinations of Kennedy and of the South Vietnamese president are among the reasons why I so vividly remember my frame of mind as a student back then. I knew presidents had been assassinated before, but that was history, like Henry VIII's beheading of inconvenient wives. The 1950s and 1960s were a kind of golden age for American families and their kids--at least if they were fortunate enough to be white. Thanks to FDR and thanks to the growth of decent unskilled jobs in the manufacturing industry and the benefits of the GI Bill, the middle class was expanding, and parents had the wherewithal to provide for their kids in some comfort and to protect them from some of the worst aspects of existence.

For those of us who grew up during that period, the sudden realization that our own president could be assassinated, even in our modern, "civilized" world, and that the assassination of other country's leaders was also a real possibility at any time was a major and distressing shock to our sense of how the world really worked.

[Comrade Grumpy]

23. 3rd grade, Canyon Rim Elementary School, Salt Lake City

The announcement came on the intercom just before lunch. They sent us home early that day. I walked home with my mother, who was a teacher there. She was crying. A few years later, she woke me up to tell me Bobby Kennedy had been shot.

After the killing, my father told me, "You say you like history. Well, you better be watching this, because this is history." So I got to see Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on TV.

[locks]

24. Sad memories

I was having lunch in the House dining room with a dear friend, Congresswoman Edith Green of Oregon. She was close to the President and had served as his campaign manager in Oregon. As we were eating a phone was brought to the table; after taking the call from her office she turned very pale and told us that Pres. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. We did not know until we got home that he had died.
On the next Sunday Pres. Kennedy's body was carried in a horse-drawn caisson to lie in state in the Capitol. When we went to view the casket people were lined 40 blocks around the Capitol; all night and all day they came. Along with the world we mourned the loss of a great man and a great President.

[Faygo Kid]

33. Unbelievable memories. We will all gather here in November.

What might have been.

[cbayer]

49. I read this before I saw who wrote it. Hello, Mom!

I thought you had left the house to go see Edith Green and did not know that you were already there.

But, other than that, our memories are remarkably similar.

[MineralMan]

25. In my dorm in my Freshman year of college.

I was leaving to go to my first class of the day, when I noticed a bunch of people standing in the TV lounge in the dorm. I went in, and saw the news. I was unsure what to do. I went to my first class, which was a Biology 101 survey class in a large auditorium. By the time I got there, the class had already begun.

I walked down to the front of the class, and spoke to the professor. I told him what had happened and that I had seen it on the TV in the dorm. He got pale and announced the information to the class and dismissed it. Classes were being dismissed all over the campus and the streets and pathways of the campus were clogged with students, all trying to figure out where to go and what to do.

This was before students had television sets in their dorm rooms. In fact, they were forbidden. So, the television lounges in the dorms were packed with people, standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the story develop. I went to the school's snack bar and found a seat where I could watch one of the TVs mounted on the wall.

It was a long, difficult day. Everyone was in shock, and people just weren't sure what would happen next or what they should do.

[dgibby]

26. I was a senior in high school.

We'd just gotten to English class (the teacher,Miss Van Horn, was a fixture there-had taught our parents and older brothers and sisters). One of my cousins came into class and said that JFK had been shot. We all thought he was kidding, as there were many jokes about the Kennedy's circulating back then. Not funny we told him. Not kidding he told us. He'd been in gym class, heard it on the radio in the boys' locker room. We still didn't believe him-kept waiting for the punch line. Finally, someone from the office came by to tell us it was true, he had been shot, but we still didn't know he was dead. When we turned back around, Miss Van Horn had her head on her desk, sobbing. At that point, our world stopped spinning. She was a rock, unflappable, immovable, inscrutable, and She. Had. Lost. It. We were shaken to our very core. We sat there in stunned silence, the only sound her (and our) sobs.

The school admin. decided to finish out the school day (we only had one class left to go), and the girls basketball coach decided to hold practice, thinking it might be therapeutic (it wasn't). After that, some of us went to the local hang out- a pharmacy that had a lunch counter. Don't think I'd ever heard it that quiet before or after.

The thing I remember the most vividly was wondering who was behind the assassination. Were we being attacked by another country (USSR), a group, a loner? Nobody knew, but we were all frightened.

Thanksgiving was surreal, can't remember much of it at all, but I do remember standing in my friend's living room on that Sunday(we were on our way to church) and watching Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald. We were stunned. I think we went on to church, but honestly can't remember.

That entire era was marked by chaos and assignations of public figures. I sincerely hope we never see anything like it again, but I fear the growing right-left chasm in this country makes it more than highly likely.

[jwirr]

27. For some reason I did not turn on the tv that day. Laid in bed with my two small children reading to

them. Went to the bank to deposit some money. They stamped my deposit book upside down and I wondered why. Then when I got home the phone rang - my parents were coming over so we could all watch it on tv. The rest of the week was with family watching tv and crying. Even those little children were crying. 5 days later my last child was born. I remember hoping she would hold off so I could watch it all.

[shenmue]

28. My mother was a teacher

She said it was the biggest shock she ever heard.

[appleannie1]

29. Getting ready to go to the doctor's office for my 6 week checkup after the birth of my first child.

My upstairs neighbor pounded on my door yelling to turn my TV on. I was wearing a black skirt and light green blouse. He was wearing dark brown pants, a white shirt and black suspenders. Mr. Humphrey and I stood holding hands and crying while we watched the coverage. He was 83 years old, had lived through a depression and a huge war and was bawling like his world was ending.

[warrant46]

30. Senior in High school

At lunch time on a Friday, sitting outside the school smoking cigarettes. Waiting to get drafted to go to Viet-Nam

[Graybeard]

31. U.S. Army Hospital, Ft. Gordon, GA

I had been injured during Basic Training and was in a large ward with other GIs. I was in a wheelchair and passing around a big box of cookies that I got from home for my birthday. Suddenly on the TV came:

******BULLETIN******

******BULLETIN******

******BULLETIN******

Walter Chronkite announced the news and we all got back to our beds and watched the most amazing week-end of history in the making on that Tv. We were riveted to that TV set as Oswald was caught, and then killed. LBJ sworn in. And the funeral march in Washington, DC.
.

[northoftheborder]

32. At home...

...the TV was on, I was glued to my "As the World Turns" which I never missed, and Walter Kronkite came on with the awful news.....

My television was on the rest of the day, and for weeks, all day...and I think that's where my compulsion to know who, what, when in the local, national, world events started.

[Skidmore]

34. Fourth grade and it was

my birthday. I can't tell you how much I dread my birthday every year.

[Faygo Kid]

35. Celebrate it - and have a happy one

I can understand why Nov. 22 is a tough one, but have a piece of cake and enjoy. You deserve it.

[Hoyt]

36. 9th Grade Georgraphy Class, Atlanta, Ga. Had us go outside, and sent us home.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=R2_V4XxvI2E


Byrds -- He Was A Friend of Mine

He was a friend of mine, he was a friend of mine
His killing had no purpose, no reason or rhyme
He was a friend of mine

He was in Dallas town, he was in Dallas town
From a sixth floor window a gunner shot him down
He was in Dallas town

He never knew my name, he never knew my name
Though I never met him I knew him just the same

Oh he was a friend of mine
Leader of a nation for such a precious time
He was a friend of mine

[elleng]

37. college, political science class,

professor had just mentioned 'Kill a JapaNazi' meme when someone walked in and told him; he told us.
Walked across grassy quad to dorm, where we were all glued to tv for the duration.


Went home with friend for 'Thanksgiving' weekend, and went to synagogue with her family, so a very 'community' period of time for me.

[MiniMe]

38. First grade, in California

[richmwill]

39. I was 11 years away from being born, but my Mom told me the story...

She was in Catholic school, and a Nun ran into her class and said that they all needed to pray for the President.

[Ron Green]

40. In high school in East Texas. Within a couple of days, a joke was going around:

Shots had rung out around the motorcade in Dealy Plaza. Lyndon Johnson turned to the agent and asked what had happened.
"There's been gunfire, Mr. Vice President. Someone is attacking."
"Did they hit the President?"
"Yes, sir, they did."
"Did they get Governor Connolly?"
"Yes, sir."
"How about Ralph Yarborough?"
"No, sir, they didn't get Sen. Yarborough."
"Make the block."


It was an amazingly callous joke to come so quickly on the heels of the assassination, but this was not a place where there was much grieving. Our football team played its regular Friday game that night.

[LongTomH]

42. I was at a small junior college in Northeast Oklahoma when Kennedy was shot.

There were tears from some; but, too many sick jokes.

[RebelOne]

41. I was home with my 1-year-old son.

News didn't travel fast on TV those days. My uncle stopped by while on his truck route and told me.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

43. Home on leave from the marines.

Sat in front of the TV for the next several days. I was 19 at the time.

[Andy823]

44. I was in Tucson Arizona

8th grade mechanical drawing class. The announced it on the intercom. The whole class was in shock, and I remember how silent it was after the announcement.

[1-Old-Man]

45. Senior in High School, sitting in a History class when the first announcement came.

The first announcement came, telling us that the President had been shot and that others had been injured as well. About 15 minutes later a second announcement came telling us that the President had died. Shortly thereafter a third announcement came dismissing us all from school.

[CANDO]

46. I was a fertilized egg in my mother's womb.

I kid not. Born July 3rd, 1964. Must've been conceived early in Oct. of '63.

[tortie]

47. Sixth Grade

School was dismissed early, and we didn't know why. We all got on the bus to go home, and the principal Mr Stein got on the bus and told us what had happened. The bus ride home was silent. I remembered being glued to the TV and my Mom yelling, "they shot him" when Ruby shot Oswald. I too, remember the cuban missile crisis, the duck and cover drills we had to do. and the tension in the country. I guess that is why I was more aware of the President than I would have been otherwise at 11 years old. Thanksgiving was sad and subdued. I remember my Mom and Aunt Donna in the kitchen working to prepare dinner and crying. It's hard to believe it's been 50 years, it seems like yesterday.

[cbayer]

48. Fourth grade in the Washington DC area.

They sent us home, but didn't say why.

When I got home the TV was on and both parents had gone downtown to be with some friends who were in Congress.

I was later able to join the line for the viewing of the casket.

JFK was an enormous hero in my home and my community. The loss affected us very deeply.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

50. I was a sophomore in College, and I was heading back to my dorm at nearly noon when I heard.

I lived in a private Catholic dorm, and we had a chapel. Every day at noon, Father Healy would say Mass...

That day, it was a Requiem Mass, and it was standing room only...

I picked up a newspaper on the way to all that; I still have it.

[abelenkpe]

51. Unborn nt

[Island Blue]

52. I was 3 months old

and my mom was feeding me - or so I've been told.

[Chisox08]

53. I wasn't even born yet and my mother was 2 at the time.

[Warpy]

54. Double whammy for me that year

Three weeks later, I was dealing with a murder in my own family.

[steve2470]

55. I was 5, somehow I remember the funeral procession nt

[Zen Democrat]

56. George HW Bush didn't know he was in Dallas. Nor did E. Howard Hunt. Nixon told conflicting stories.

I was 14 and at my locker on the way to English class. A guy came by & told me Kennedy and Johnson had been shot in Dallas. I went to the Library because there were TVs. Turned on the tube just as As the World Turns came on, so I thought that David was being tacky about that shooting stuff in Dallas. Then Walter Cronkite interrupted. We were sent to our last period classes, while the radio on the PA kept us up to date. There were tears and silence.

What was so strange to me is that the day after the funeral, with Oswald dead, there were no further investigation. It was dropped. It seemed that the media was working overtime to get the public past the tragedy by putting it in the rear-view mirror. I was shocked that it was so neatly packed away.

As a 14-year old I knew the whole thing stunk badly. I remember my mom asked my dad if this was a conspiracy. My dad responded that if it was a conspiracy, someone would kill Oswald. That was Friday night. I also remember the attorney general of Texas telling a reporter that he had info that Oswald worked undercover for the FBI and received a stipend of $200 a month. He changed his tune quickly, but a Houston Post reporter wrote the story anyway. My grandmother in Dallas told me that a lot of people in town were talking about Oswald having links to intelligence but that it wasn't true because Hoover and McCone denied knowing of Oswald. They were believed on the strength of their word by the American people. We later discovered Hoover memos from 1960 and 1961 inquiring about an Oswald double, so Hoover was lying his ass off. Then when the Church Committee was going over the CIA activities from the early 60's, with a fine tooth comb, Jerry Ford put George Bush in as CIA director and he put up a wall to the Church Committee. Now we find NSA was spying on Senator Church!

The assassination of our wonderful president was a snakepit of lies, murder and a shut-up-or-die-coverup.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

57. I was home, being a pre-schooler,

and our neighbor, lady by the name of Gloria, crashed through the door to say the President had been shot. My only real memory besides that is watching Ruby shoot Oswald on TV. It was a strange and scary sight.

[Link Speed]

58. I was saddling my horse when my mother came outside

She had heard it on The X, which was our sole link to the outside world besides our mailbox.

We hopped in the truck and drove to my uncle's bank, the only place we could see a television. We walked in to see Cronkite in tears.