I was seven and in second grade when JFK was assassinated. It happened on a Friday afternoon. We were living in my hometown of California, Missouri at the time. My mother came to school to pick me up for a dentist appointment. She came into our classroom crying. Maybe she brought the news or we had just heard it announced on the PA system. Our teacher was crying. She and my mother embraced and sobbed in each other’s arms. My fellow classmates and I were quiet and looked at each other in alarm. What on earth did this mean?
My mother and I listened to the radio as we drove the 30 minutes to Columbia and the dentist’s office. The dentist was crying, and so was his hygienist. Everywhere I looked, I saw adults sobbing, the usual calm authority on their faces erased by tears and replaced with shock, horror, and grief. Is there anything more terrifying to a child than watching the adults she depends on falling to pieces in tears?
The reaction of the adults was the first sign that something terrible had happened. Truthfully, I was a little vague on how important our President was to the US and the world. I remember feeling in fact that it was unfair that a month earlier, when my beloved grandfather Paw Paw died suddenly of a heart attack, there hadn’t been a similar outpouring of grief. After his death, life went on as normal, as if nothing had happened.
When JFK was assassinated, the complete uproar caught me by surprise. Everything else faded into the background for four days. I’d never experienced anything happening on a national level that had any effect on me. Suddenly, it was all happening right on our TV in real time.
The next morning was a Saturday, and my sister and I had our Saturday routine. We woke at first light, dressed, ran down to the front door and found what the local dairy had left in a metal box on the front porch: ice cold whole milk in a glass bottle and a box of a dozen tiny cake donuts coated with white powdered sugar. Heaven!
We turned on the TV and stood at attention as the Star Spangled Banner played and a visual of the US flag whipped in the breeze. This was how TV programming started each day in 1963. But instead of our favorite cartoons, that Saturday the TV showed non-stop coverage of the assassination, the same images playing over and over. Slow-motion images of the convertible and JFK’s head jerking and Jackie climbing over the back seat were truly disturbing. Walter Cronkite with his steady deadpan delivery gave us comfort.
I’m sure our parents joined us at some point in the TV room, but it’s really just my sister and me that I remember, sitting on the floor with our legs crossed, chilly in the draft old Victorian, taking it all in but not quite understanding.
I did not see Jack Ruby shoot Oswald on live TV–at least I don’t remember it. It’s entirely possible that I did see it, but if so, the memory is lost in time.
My strongest memories are of the funeral: the riderless horse, the clop-clop of the horses as they drew the carriage carrying the coffin, and the silent crowds along the route. I remember Jackie with her flowing black veil, and 3-year-old John John saluting, wearing his short coat that exposed his poor little bare legs to the cold.
When I look back at that moment in time, it seems to me that Kennedy’s assassination was just the first in a chain of tragedies and shocks that ruled my universe for the next decade. It was as if his death unleashed turmoil of every kind in America.
There were protests and riots in the streets, images of the war in Vietnam on TV. Southern police sprayed civil rights protesters with hoses, and Chicago police beat protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention.
I was living in Memphis and in 6th grade when Martin Luther King was assassinated there in the spring of 1968. School was cancelled, and a dawn-to-dusk curfew was imposed. Tanks rolled through town and right into our neighborhood shopping center. We had uniformed National Guard soldiers with loaded rifles on guard as we shopped.
The assassination of Bobby Kennedy happened a mere two months later in June. The summer of love was anything but that from my perspective.
At Kent State unarmed students were murdered on a beautiful spring day when I was in 10th grade. That event affected my friends and me greatly since we too were students and could have easily found ourselves in that situation. In 11th grade, my high school boyfriend, a year ahead of me, got his draft number, which was something like 12.
And finally there was Watergate and the resignation of Nixon in August 1974, a month before I went off to college.
As Winston Churchill (or possibly Arnold Toynbee) once said, “History is just one damn thing after another.” And so it was from 1964 to 1974.
The chaotic decade that shaped me and my boomer peers mirrored the turmoil in my own family: My parents’ marriage fell apart not long after JFK’s assassination, and they divorced the next summer.
My mother moved my younger sister and me to Columbia, MO for two years. Then we were off to Memphis for two years at the beginning of 5th grade. Then we made another move to St. Louis as I started 7th grade. My restless mother timed these moves badly, forcing us to relocate and start as the new kid in class after school had already started.
We spent two years in St. Louis, where I was finally happy and fit in during junior high. But that calm period was short-lived. We moved back to Memphis when my mother remarried a former boyfriend whom my sister and I both detested. He turned out to be a violent alcoholic at his worst, indifferent or hostile at his best. I spent my four-high school years surviving that nightmare, and then I got out, fleeing to an Ivy League college and a different life.
In my memory, JFK’s death is tightly linked to the death of my grandfather. My grandfather’s death profoundly changed my feelings about everything from God (“Why did God have to take Paw Paw? I need him more than God does!”) to my sense of security and safety. My little universe was shaken by his death, and new earthquakes just kept happening as the years passed.
Just as the entire country suffered a loss of innocence with the assassination of JFK, I too look back and think about what I lost, and how the world was never the same. The first seven years of my little life were like a paradise, and then poof! It was one damn thing after another.
