I remember this day...

I was eight years old in 1963, living the high life in third grade at North Ward Elementary School, in the quiet little town of Tamaqua, PA. I was in Miss Edwards' class. She was a morbidly obese woman (back then we just said "real fat"), who would threaten her students with sitting on them if they misbehaved. And sometimes she would do just that, maybe lay a leg on a fragile little 8-year-old's lap, just to prove a point.

The woman would be in prison today. But I digress.

One gloomy November afternoon stuff started to happen outside the classroom. Adult stuff, stuff that was happening around us. When you're eight years old, everything happens around you; we're all just innocent bystanders at that age. The church bells at St. Jerome's Church across the street started to ring, which they normally did at noon anyway, but this was later in the day; it was early afternoon. The principal, Mrs. Wynn, came to the door and talked in hushed tones to Miss Edwards, who--after that conversation--seemed agitated. We could follow her eyes to the church across the street and see solemn looking men taking large wreaths of flowers up the long steps and in through the doors. Something had happened.

It wasn't too long until Miss Edwards had another conference at the door with Mrs. Wynn and told us something had happened and we were all to put on our coats and go home. Our parents would tell us what had happened when we got there. As a kid who had experienced the whole "duck and cover" drill repeatedly over the years, I ran home with a certain amount of trepidation. Were we at war? Did somebody bomb us? Was it the godless Russians? When I got home, the TV was on, something not unusual in my household for early afternoon. My mom would have been knee-deep in her soaps, but they weren't on. Instead Walter Cronkite was on. He wasn't wearing a jacket. He had thick, dark-framed glasses on. And then my mom said, "President Kennedy has been shot and he's dead."

I don't think I was old enough to fathom the whole concept of death yet. My grandfather had died a year or so earlier and I just knew he wasn't around anymore. I was told, of course, that he had gone to heaven, but that's still a pretty nebulous concept to me. But my grandfather was sick and he died. He wasn't shot, like on a TV cowboy or cop show. He had some kind of disease and it killed him. That was a little easier to grasp. Who would shoot the president and why?

I knew people hated President Kennedy. My Aunt Clara was one of them, a bitter old ex-schoolteacher, she once leaned across the table and slapped my face because I didn't chew my food 32 times before swallowing. I was five at the time. At any opportunity, she'd go off on the Kennedys, especially Jackie. But I didn't think she'd kill the president. Still, there was that slapping incident...

The next few days moved in slow motion. Television came to a standstill, schools were closed (it was the weekend) and even if we did go outside to play, we were told to keep it down, in respect for the president. I didn't quite get that either. He was dead, right? So we spent most of the time indoors watching TV.

And then it happened. I was alone in the living room, with the TV on and I saw Lee Harvey Oswald get shot. I started screaming for my mom to "Come here! Come here!" and when I told her what I saw she got angry with me, told me not to make up lies like that. But a moment spent listening to the TV confirmed what I saw. It was a surreal moment, one of the strangest in all of television history.

I still think the country died a little bit that day. The upheavals to come in the rest of the 1960s all go back to that one moment in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. As Stephen King has written in his new book, 11/22/63, about a time-traveling teacher who goes back to try and save JFK, if you save the president, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King probably don't get assassinated; Vietnam doesn't happen, at least not at the level it did under President Johnson. By extension, Nixon probably never gets elected and is forced to resign from office (the last dying gasp of the 1960s, taking place almost 13 years after Kennedy's assassination). The whole world changes.

I still can't fathom the Kennedy assassination (either one of them), or King, for that matter. Almost 50 years later, none of it makes sense. But I'll never forget it, either.

Comments

[Pamela]

Strange...just today in the morning I thought about you and all your childhood times and moments you spend with us in the comics and now in your blog..and now I read this one...heart touching...yes, I think that was a moment that changed the world towards dark times...again, thanks for sharing them with us, Gary!