What I Remember
I remember being sent home from school. Walking home down 34th street from Forest Park Elementary. Something terrible had happened. The teachers said we needed to be with our parents.
I was 9.
I remember watching our black and white TV into the night. The news that Kennedy had died just too awful to believe. My father was a funeral director. I was accustomed to hearing about death.
I didn’t quite understand an assassination.
I remember my mother talking about how terrible it must be for Jackie. And for those children.
We had been shown how to hide under our house many times. Pine Bluff, my home town, was supposedly a target during the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the Pine Bluff Arsenal, where highly dangerous weapons were secreted.
The day Kennedy died, I remember fearing that we would have to go under the house. Maybe live there for a while. I think I felt that Kennedy had saved us from that crisis. I don’t know if that was politically correct or not. I just remember feeling that as a child. We were in danger again.
Other than those distinct things, I and I am sure you, have watched countless documentaries of this tragedy. It is hard to know what are my true memories and what are artifacts from those accounts.
The iconic pictures – Jackie, standing by Lyndon Johnson as he was sworn in; young John, standing and saluting. They feel a part of my personal memory. One a photo, the other what we watched on TV. People grieving. Saying good-bye. Going on.
I think perhaps that’s what I remember the most. Watching that tremendous sorrow. Raw. Evident. So intimately personal.
We felt it as a nation.
We could not possibly feel it like his family did.
My dad’s father had died when he was 15. He rarely talked about it. Maybe, when President Kennedy was killed, I began to see grief for the first time in my young, fairly naive life.
I so wish that I had begun to learn some other way.
My thoughts and prayers today to all who knew and loved him. And to our continued healing as a nation for the many that we have lost.
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I’ve been so moved by reading the emotions of the midlife women who are a few years older than I. How sad that children have to be afraid of attacks and worried about hiding.
It was sad for the nation but even sadder, as you note, for his family and especially Caroline and John-John who grew up without a father.
That is at least what I took away from the experience Kay Lynn. Thank you so much for reading and commenting. I had forgotten in some ways about the worry I felt back then. The need for protection. We may seem to take a lot for granted now. Maybe we need to ask our children how they feel. We certainly need to protect them.
I was in 5th grade in San Diego….we were at recess when the bell rang early and we got in line to go back into the school. The teachers were all crying. We knew something was terribly wrong and in our young minds the worst thing we could imagine was that our principal had died (we all loved him!). Our teacher was crying so hard she couldn’t talk, so the teacher next door came in to tell us what had happened. I honestly think that was the day innocence and the belief in goodness was lost and the United States changed forever.
It saddens me to believe that Lori but I know that many people do. I guess I hate to give the actions of one man that much power. (I don’t want to go into the whole “it’s wasnt just one man” right now..) I want to maintain my belief in goodness. I know that it was shocking to understand that it could be accomplished. Maybe that is where we could find a way of understanding – that what changed was an innocence about being protected from harm. I so appreciate your comment and feel that your sentiment is shared by many.