50 Years Ago

Very good article about what happened after Kennedy was shot.
The Flight From Dallas from Esquire Magazine

I was nine years old and remember vividly the announcement our principal Mr. Will gave over the PA system.  "Boys and girls, the President, President Kennedy has been shot."  Some girl in my class burst into tears, sobbing loudly.  I think her name was Melody. I remember wondering why she was so emotional about the whole thing.  I guess my mind couldn't fathom it and I recall thinking, "Well, they didn't say 'dead' did they?"  I remember looking out the window of our eerily silent, second floor schoolroom (at Lincoln Elementary) and seeing just a few leaves stuck on tree branches waving in the wind and the sky was gray.  A few minutes, or so it seemed, Mr. Will came back on the PA and said that President Kennedy had died.

In retrospect, they didn't shield us kids from this hard, brutal fact.  And it was just the facts. There was no school counselor waiting outside the room to talk to you about your feelings.  Maybe it's because even the youngest teacher was probably born in the beginning of World War Two. We were sent home and I'm sure the school (rightly) felt that our parents would talk to us about this event.

I remember we were sent home from school And there was a bit of giddy joy that we got out for the rest of the day. Little did we know or thing about it; every channel on TV (we only had 3) had around the clock coverage.  So, in a kid's way, I remember feeling sorry for the kids of the president but I was bored beyond belief that there was nothing to watch on TV, stores were closed, etc.  If you ask anyone my age, that is something we all vividly recollect.  There was basically nothing to do.  You couldn't go play with your friends; that would have been disrespectful.  Joy wasn't an option.  A President had been killed.  Lakewood, Ohio, where I lived at the time, had pretty much shut down.

I remember watching the funeral on TV and seeing John-John saluting the coffin. I remember the riderless horse, Black Jack, with the boots turn backwards in the stirrups and thinking that was pretty cool.  I remember Walter Cronkite's voice.

I knew the whole thing was very big. Days later I figured out that this was an earmark for my generation: where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?
It was our generation's Pearl Harbor.

Now we have: where were you when 9/11 happened?

So think about this: if you or your living relatives are in their 80s, they've witnessed Pearl Harbor, a Word War, the assassination of a President, the moon landings, Challenger blowing up and 9/11.  Not to mention the technological advances, the good things and the bad things.

Those are some pretty intense memories and they should be recorded in some way for posterity. Interview your older relatives, from the 100 year old ones on down to us Baby Boomers. We have some stories to tell.

We are living history.