<p>The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination is this Friday, and the airwaves are beginning to be inundated with related documentaries. I am too young to have been around in '63, but I thought I would make a thread for people to share their memories of what they were doing at the time. Also, if you have any pet theories on any potential assassination conspiracy, feel free to share them here too.</p>
<p>I was just a baby then, so of course no memory. But I do now live in Dallas, and I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never been to the Sixth Floor Museum. A few years ago, D1 had a British friend she met in her semester abroad in London here to visit. One of the first places he wanted to go was the Museum and Dealey Plaza. He couldn’t believe it when I said I had never been. The kids both went there on school field trips, but I’ve never been. I still want to go…</p>
<p>Nrdsb4, go! It was a great experience. I enjoyed it. In fact, I think I still have the newspaper somewhere under my bed.</p>
<p>I was in sixth grade. I remember another teacher coming to our classroom door in tears and whispering something to our teacher. He got a radio out of a closet in the classroom and plugged it in and put it on his desk. He told us that something terrible had happened to President Kennedy and he turned on the radio. I actually don’t remember what it was we heard on the radio. Shortly after that, we were all dismissed early. My mom was very upset, and watching tv, when I got home. The following days were very sad and solemn.</p>
<p>I watched a segment on CBS Sunday yesterday about it. One thing that really struck me was that Jackie Kennedy was only 34 years old, only 31 when she became First Lady. A short three months before that awful day in Dallas, she had given birth prematurely and her baby had died two days later. They also had lost another baby who was stillborn before Caroline was born. So much sadness in her life.</p>
<p>I was in seventh grade…in study hall in the library. I can picture exactly where I was sitting. I’m sure that anyone over the age of 10 remembers exactly where they were when they heard the news. </p>
<p>We went to the Texas Repository about 10 years ago. It is a must see, in my opinion.</p>
<p>JFK was in Tampa 50 years ago today; he visited Tampa, November 18th, 1963.</p>
<p>[JFK</a> in Tampa: The 50th Anniversary | Home | Coming to WUSF-TV this November](<a href=“http://jfkintampa.org/]JFK”>http://jfkintampa.org/)</p>
<p>Yes, I remember my professor telling me that, lizard. Right after he left Tampa, he headed back and…</p>
<p>I was in 11th grade in San Antonio, Texas. We were just starting lunch in the school cafeteria. A friend came up to me and said, “President Kennedy was shot.” She had a peculiar look on her face, and at first I thought it was a joke or something.</p>
<p>Moments later, the noisy cafeteria fell silent. A news report came over the P.A. system. We now knew there had been a shooting, but no details. I could not eat my lunch (fishsticks, corn) and threw it away.</p>
<p>During the remainder of the afternoon, news reports came into the classrooms over the P.A. system. Not much got done in class; in chemistry class we were supposed to do a lab experiment, but Mr Mickey said we could skip it if we wanted to.</p>
<p>The previous day, Kennedy had ridden by in his motorcade in front of our school, in his open limo, and everyone had gone out to see him. A German exchange student who was in one of my classes had been so excited to see him. The next thing we knew, she was weeping because he was dead.</p>
<p>Everybody went home and spent the next three days watching the coverage on TV. There was no school Monday. This was the first time the networks (there were only three or so back then) had ever preempted regular programming for continuous coverage of a major event, over a span of days. It was the first time I ever heard a TV announcer use the word “recap.”</p>
<p>We had finally turned off the TV at home when I (a new driver) volunteered to go to the store for milk. On my way back, news of Ruby shooting Oswald came on the radio.</p>
<p>I went home and said to my family, “Turn the TV back on.”</p>
<p>I was in 3rd grade. My most distinct memory of that weekend is the funeral procession, which I watched sitting with my dad in his big chair, something I hadn’t done for several years at least. </p>
<p>The moments which I now find most arresting – John John’s salute, Jackie and Caroline kissing the coffin, Jackie with that iconic tragic face walking behind the gun carriage flanked by Bobby and Teddy – I have no memory of seeing those at the time. What struck me then was the riderless horse with the boots turned backward.</p>
<p>I was in first grade.
Very vivid memories.</p>
<p>Aldous Huxley & CS Lewis also died that day.
[Cal</a> Thomas on JFK, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis - Columnists - WS Journal](<a href=“http://www.journalnow.com/opinion/columnists/article_d102201e-4d70-11e3-be76-001a4bcf6878.html?mode=jqm]Cal”>http://www.journalnow.com/opinion/columnists/article_d102201e-4d70-11e3-be76-001a4bcf6878.html?mode=jqm)</p>
<p>This is a fun read by Stephen King about a time traveler who tries to stop the assassination. [Stephen</a> King Plots To Save JFK In ‘11/22/63’ : NPR](<a href=“Stephen King Plots To Save JFK In '11/22/63' : NPR”>Stephen King Plots To Save JFK In '11/22/63' : NPR).</p>
<p>It was a Friday afternoon. I was in 6th grade, and we were in music class. The Superintendent of Schools in our small school district, who had his office in the same building, made an unexpected appearance in the class, looking ashen, and somberly announced that the President had been shot in Dallas, and that there was no further word on the President’s condition. He instructed us to go back to our homeroom, gather our belongings, and wait for a bell that would signal school was dismissed for the day. The school buses came early. On the bus there was dead silence. Kids were scared and confused; no one quite knew what it meant, but it seemed as if a defining anchor point of the stability of the world we knew had been ripped away. When I got home, my mother was watching television. Within a few minutes, Walter Cronkite gravely announced that President Kennedy was dead. If I recall, he choked up a bit, and wiped a tear from his eye. That made it official; Walter was the ultimate authority on “the way it is.”</p>
<p>I was numb. It was impossible to enjoy the early dismissal and the weekend. I was also scared. This was still the height of the Cold War, and just a year earlier I had watched my parents sweat through the Cuban Missile Crisis. I feared that the Soviet Union would exploit this moment of chaos to attack. I remember on both occasions, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, going to bed wondering if I would ever wake up again, or if the world I knew would be obliterated overnight by nuclear warfare. We lived in a pretty remote small town, but very near a Strategic Air Command (SAC) base for heavy B-52 bombers that carried nuclear weapons, so I figured we’d be a prime target for a preemptive Soviet nuclear strike. Pretty heavy thoughts for a 10- and 11-year-old kid. But those were the times.</p>
<p>I was almost 4 years old, and living less than 200 miles from Dallas. Our small town cable carried Dallas stations, so we had a birds-eye view of the happenings. I was confused, because at that time I thought all TV was live and they kept showing the president.</p>
<p>My mom and I were visiting my grandmother that morning when the plane landed in Dallas. My grandmother made the remark that the president shouldn’t go to the crowds like that because someone might shoot him. </p>
<p>My sister lives near Dallas now, and before the big event was scheduled for this Friday we’d planned on visiting Dealey Plaza. Instead, we did our own tour on November 1, visiting Oswald’s grave, the Sixth Floor Museum (my second trip there, very interesting), Dealey Plaza, Oswald’s rooming house in Oak Cliff, the site of the murder of J.D. Tippett in Oak Cliff, the Texas Theatre where Oswald was arrested, and finally the home where Marina Oswald was living in Irving. It was an interesting step back in time, and still so very sad.</p>
<p>I was in 5th grade. We were returning from a field trip and I was in the second row on the right of the bus. I could hear the teachers whispering something but they didnt tell us until we were about to return to school. The next day a theacher was writing assassination on the blackboard when we had a fire drill. When the drill was over, the returning students were greeted to the word on the blackboard, but only the first 3 letters had been written!</p>
<p>I was in 10th grade. (I’m older than almost all of you.) I find it interesting that this year the anniversary of his assassination is also on a Friday.</p>
<p>I was in first grade. I remember our teacher crying as she told us the news and being scared and upset because of that. We were also dismissed early. I lived close enough to the school that I walked home with my sister and the neighborhood kids. It really was a turning point for our country. After that, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King seemed foreshadowed.</p>
<p>
I was struck by this too while I was watching The History Channel the other night. From what I’ve read over the years, losing little Patrick drew JFK and Jackie closer and he cut way back on his extracurricular activities after this. So on top of everything else, she lost him at a time when their relationship was in a good place. Tragic!
ETA: As a “Kennedy Kid” - a Baby Boomer born during the Kennedy administration - I have no memories of the assassination. My mom tells me I was taking a nap while she cleaned the bathroom with the TV on in the background so she could listen to the soaps as she worked.</p>
<p>I was in fourth grade. The teacher went out into the hall and talked with someone from the office for a long time, and when she came back, it was clear that she had been crying.</p>
<p>But she didn’t tell us what had happened. We just went on with our work (and speculated about what might be going on). I think our teacher reasoned that it would be more appropriate for us to hear the news from our parents. Instead, of course, we heard it on the bus, from kids whose teachers had chosen to tell them. I don’t think this was what my teacher had in mind.</p>
<p>I remember being amazed at how dignified Caroline was at the funeral. She was exactly the same age as my younger sister, who couldn’t even sit still in church. Caroline must have been an unusual child.</p>
<p>I was talking about JFK’s death at the office yesterday with a colleague who’s the same age I am, and we realized that almost nobody else whom we work with would remember. They’re too young.</p>
<p>I have always found it incredible that Jackie was so so young when she became the first lady. It takes such amazing poise. It demonstrates to me how “correct” her upbringing must have been that she was able to do all that at such a young age.</p>
<p>I was in fifth grade. Our teacher took us into the classroom next door, where there was one of those TVs built into a pillar like thing that had just started appearing at the school. (We (very) occasionally were shown educational programming on it. The only other thing I recall seeing was about conflict in Southeast Asia, showing a map with Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos.) We stood up along the side of the classroom and watched. I know that at that point he had not been declared dead. We may have seen Walter Cronkite’s famous moment. I can no longer pick out what I actually saw at that time from the many iconic images that I have seen in the intervening years. I do recall one of my classmates nervously joking that Nixon must have done it, because he lost the election. Later, I think I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. The one thing that I remember most distinctly was Black Jack, the riderless horse with boots reversed in the saddle, in the funeral procession.</p>
<p>I was in second grade and there was a brief announcement from the teacher. There was minimal discussion when I got home. Probably there was deliberate distraction and a change of subject. We did not watch any news reports or funeral coverage. For me, like bclintonk, the Cuban Missile Crisis had been frightening. Years later my father told me my take-away had been that the US would be successfully invaded. I remember being concerned we didn’t have a fall-out shelter, wanting to start building one immediately and discuss plans for stocking it. He and my mother decided no more tv news with children in the room. We didn’t realize they had made that decision. I am not sure it was the right decision but it was an interesting one. The one exception was watching every space program event on tv. Usually there was a sort of party with friends over.</p>