Remembering November 22, 1963

Do you remember where you were when you heard about that horrific event that took place on November 22, 1963?

It’s a rhetorical question.  If you were alive for it, and say, over the age of 4 or 5, you most certainly remember where you were when you heard that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.  You remember how you heard about it, and you probably remember pretty much that entire awful weekend that followed it.

It’s one of “those” moments, where something truly horrendous happens in the world and takes you out of whatever is going on in your own life and puts you together with everyone in the country—or the world.   The JFK assassination was that moment for my generation.  I’m not sure what that moment was for the next generation.  I know the most recent one of “those” events was 9-11.

My parents told me that for their generation, their moment was when they first heard about Pearl Harbor being bombed.   

I realize some of my readers may not have been alive on 11/22/63.  For you, what you know about that appalling day in Dallas was learned in history class, or in popular culture.  I just hope it wasn’t “learned” by watching that absurd Oliver Stone movie.

But yes, although I was just a kid, I was old enough to understand what had happened and it is still with me to this day.

It was about three weeks after our entire family had moved to Los Angeles.  We had picked up and moved 3,000 miles away from my birthplace, New York.  So I was in a brand new school, in the 4^th grade.  I don’t think I had made any friends yet—that was always a problem for me—and I don’t think I had made much of impression on any of my classmates.  I was still just “the new kid.”

Our class was in a bungalow, away from the main building.  It didn’t really matter, though, because the lower middle-class grammar school that was three blocks from our new apartment didn’t have a Public Address system anyway.

It was just before noon, and right before the teacher—a woman whose name I can’t remember and can’t even picture in my mind—was about to send us to lunch, when there was a knock on the door.  An older student handed her a note.

The teacher read it and looked shocked.  She looked up at us and asked, “Does anyone know who the Vice President of the United States is?”

We hadn’t covered that in the three weeks I’d been in this class.  I’m not sure if we had ever covered it in my old school back east.

But I knew the answer.  I don’t know how I knew, but I did.  I guess even back then, I was a bit of a political junkie.

I raised my hand.  No one else did.  Just me.

The teacher called on me and I said, “Lyndon Johnson.”

The teacher said, “Yes, that’s right, Lyndon Johnson.”  There was a long pause.  Finally she said, “Lyndon Johnson is now President of the United States.  President Kennedy is dead.”

And with that, she dismissed us to our lunch hour.

(An aside:  We moved during the summer and I went to a different school.  Years later, perhaps in High School, or maybe in college, I ran into a girl who was in that class.  I barely remembered her.  But she remembered me.  The first thing she said to me was, “I remember that you were the only person in the 4^th grade who knew that Johnson was Vice President.”)

That was a lot to absorb for a bunch of 4^th graders.  We headed out to lunch and wondered what happened.  Everyone sat together and speculated on the news.  She had not said he was shot, just that he had died. No one thought that he had been murdered.  Most of the kids assumed it was a sudden heart attack.  One kid thought it might have been a stroke.

A stroke?  I may have known who the Vice President of the United States was, but I didn’t know what a stroke was.

You have to remember that this was long before smart phones, the internet, or anything like that.  In school we really had no communication with the outside world.  Oh, we could have conceivable brought in a transistor radio, but kids only did that during the World Series (which was played during the day back then) and that had ended a month earlier.

So we didn’t know the details.  We went back to class long enough to be sent home early.  No one was going to learn anything on that day.  We were all shaken.

I probably didn’t learn that the President had been murdered until I got home.  My mom had Walter Cronkite on the TV (we were definitely a Cronkite family) and we sat transfixed in front of the black and white television as each new detail, each new speculation, each new rumor or theory was revealed.  I think my dad came home early that day.

I know I spent the entire weekend glued to the screen.  My young mind could not understand why anyone would want to kill the President.  Today, my old mind can’t, either.

I was watching live when, right on national TV, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed.  I had seen people on TV murdered before—on cop shows.  This was real.  Try to imagine a 4^th grader wrapping his mind around that.

After a weekend where pretty much everyone in the country sat in stunned, mournful silence, transfixed on the television set, somehow, everyone went back to work or school on Monday.

Eventually, we all stopped thinking non-stop about the events from fifty years ago.  But none of us will ever forget them.