I Remember the Day John F Kennedy Died

 

I remember the day that John F Kennedy died. I was in the seventh grade at Nolan Junior High in Killeen Texas. I’d had a fever blister on my lip, and I was trying to wrangle a way home from school. It hadn’t worked and I was walking back to class down the hall when the intercom came on right above my head. You always hear those who were alive on that day remembering exactly where they were at that moment. I do remember where I was. I remember the subject of the message from the speaker. But the only words I recall were, “John F

I can truly tell you that the world stopped turning that day. It didn’t hit me all at once. By the time I got back to my classroom the teacher was announcing that we all had to go home. That eclipsed the news in my twelve-year-old mind as we all charged out of the school glad for a three-day weekend.

It didn’t hit me all the way home. None of us kids spoke about it, or none that I remember. When I got home it wasn’t talked about. I fed the dogs. We ate. Then it began to dawn on me. I had this fantasy that The President would come and eat with us someday. I hadn’t realized that he was actually in Texas and in fact died just over a hundred miles away. Then it began to soak in. Now there was no chance that President Kennedy would ever eat with us.

A darkness began to settle over me. It was just like the day George Reeves died. He was Superman and I was eight years old then. How could Superman die? And yet, for me Superman died again on November 22, 1963.

As darkness settled over Killeen that day, I didn’t realize that it was a darkness that would never lift. From that darkness came Vietnam, the Watts Riots, and Kent State, and slowly, insidiously it became apparent that Mr Kennedy had indeed taken it all with him. It all crashed. Camelot fell. Our eyes were filled with false belief as the Warren Commission put its volume of lies out and from that point forward we saw time and time again that lies were the stock and trade of all that came out of Washington.

The weekend rolled on. Nobody would even notice Thanksgiving on the 28th, in fact I can’t remember if we even went back to school. There was nothing to be thankful for as we watched the horse drawn hearse as it slowly made its way to Arlington Cemetery just three days before. The man who supposedly fired the shots in Dallas was caught. My father didn’t have a single good thing to say about the President while he was alive and really didn’t speak of the assassination as he watched the continuous stream of news on our little black and white TV.

We were all watching the live feed of Lee Harvey Oswald being transported from the Dallas Jail to the County Jail. And I’ll never forget when the announcer yelled, “He’s been shot! Oswald has been shot!” My dad dropped his beer on the floor, jumped to his feet, and yelled, “Good!” President Kennedy was his president too! I remember the day John F Kennedy died.