There seems to be an event in everyone
’s memory that you remember precisely where you were and what
your doing at that exact moment in time. For folks of my
generation, that event is the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy.
Editor:
There seems to be an event in everyone’s memory that you remember precisely where you were and what your doing at that exact moment in time. For folks of my generation, that event is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Nov. 22, 1963, was a cold and gray Friday in Brookline, Mass. JFK was born in Brookline, and it is where I attended school. I was 11 years old, in the sixth grade and our school day was near an end. The principal, Mrs. Thompson came into the classroom, interrupted the teacher and told us that President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.
We watched as the school custodian lowered the flag outside the school to half-staff. It was the first time we had ever seen that. We were scared kids walking home from school. A Brookline boy, just like us, had been elected president, and now had been struck down. We didn’t know who did it or why it happened, and we didn’t know what would happen next.
In those days of the Cold War, just one year after the Cuban missile crisis, we worried that our country was under attack. My two older brothers were already home from high school. One stayed home ill that day. The other came home as classes were dismissed early. They were watching television, as Frank McGee, Elie Abel and Edwin Newman rounded out the NBC News anchor desk with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.
We watched TV for the next four days, through the transition of power, through the thousands of people lined up to pay their respects at the U.S. Capitol, through the murder on live television of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, through the arrivals of a hundred heads of state, to JFK’s funeral the following Monday. It was a weekend of change, and a weekend of growing up.
David Cohen, Morgan Hill
