Reply #28: I was 4, and I can close my eyes now and still see it... [View All]

[ms liberty]

My mom was washing windows, and I was coloring in my coloring book in front of the TV. Walter Cronkite broke into the soaps (I think it was As The World Turns). I stood up and started crying, and ran to the window mama was washing. "Mama, mama - they've killed the President" I didn't know who "they" were, but I knew who the President was and I loved him; he was handsome and smart, and honorable and everything that was good about us all.

I remember the funeral, so solemn and heartbreakingly sad. His beautiful widow, holding the hands of their children, all so grief-stricken and brave at the same time. The certainty that everything had changed, and not for the better. I cried and cried, and my mom held me in her lap, and cried with me. There was a feeling that nothing would ever be right again.

It's the earliest memories I have of a national or world event, and it was followed soon after in my mind by the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. Another first - but a good one.