that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.
I remember that day, as if it were yesterday. The assassination was the 9/11 of my youth. As a sixth-grader, I didn’t understand its significance at first, but by evening time, I knew that the world was different. With subsequent assassinations and turmoil throughout the 1960s, I became somewhat anti-American in my teens and early 20s. I wanted to be British.
I had done a math problem on the blackboard and was walking back to my desk, when Mrs. Chattin, our teacher, ran into the room and screamed, “turn on the TV.” I was unaware that she had left the room. I saw newsmen talking into telephones and thought that the Russians were attacking us. I expected any minute to see the nuclear cloud outside. My body would be cooked. Vaporized.
Oh, the President has been shot I learned, and I thought that my world was safe.
Then, we left school without being assigned any homework, and the President was dead. My parents were upset. My father said that he kept waiting for the punchline that never came. It wasn’t a joke. The entire family was glued to the black and white television for four days. Commercial free TV for the first time in my life. Round the clock news. My mother cried when Oswald, the alleged assassin, was shot. My male Sunday School teacher cried when he prayed for our country. It was the end of my innocence. I was confused.
I watched a Catholic mass for the first time in my life.
Like 9/11, every detail of those four days in November have stayed with me. I didn’t cry then, but I cry today for the loss.
