<p>I lived within 40 miles of NYC, so we “knew” that if nuclear war happened we would all be killed almost immediately. Nevertheless, we were periodically taken down into the corridors in the gym/cafeteria area that were the only place in the school without floor to ceiling glass windows to duck and cover. For years, even as an adult, I thought that I might see a mushroom cloud on the horizon some day.</p>
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<p>Absolutely. I was in the eleventh grade, and the assassination made me feel that way, but it did not make me fear a nuclear attack as bclintock mentioned above. Neither any of the news announcers nor my parents talked about that, as I recall, so it didn’t occur to me. Many teenagers back in the early 60s were much more clueless and innocent than teens are now.</p>
<p>You have to remember that there had been no assassinations in the US in the memory of most people at that time. The Kennedy assassination altered our world view in much the same way that the terrorist attacks altered our world view on 9/11.</p>
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<p>Absolutely.</p>
<p>After 9/11, S2 – who was in 7th grade, if I recall correctly – had an assignment to interview the “old” people he knew. The question he had to ask all of us was whether JFK’s assassination of 9/11 was a more significant event to us. For me, it was the assassination, since that was the first time in my life anything really tragic had occurred.</p>
<p>I was in kindergarten at the time and have no memory of the day. I got an email from an old friend yesterday; prompted by the anniversary she’d asked her mom what she remembers. Apparently, I was at their house after morning kindergarten and we were watching “Bozo the Clown” so we saw the coverage from the beginning. It is interesting to have this gap in my memory filled in.</p>
<p>Our parents had planned to go out to dinner that night as my friend’s family was moving out of state. They went ahead to dinner and were the only customers in the restaurant. I don’t know why I’ve never asked my mom about that day, but I will now. After I toured the Kennedy Library I did ask about her memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis.</p>
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Not just in the early 60s. I graduated from high school in 1980 and and never gave nuclear war a second thought. The threatening things back then were mostly closer to home: inflation, the oil embargo, rising gas prices, “malaise.” The only really big thing I remember happening is the Iran Hostage Crisis.</p>
<p>It had to be really crazy Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot by Jack Ruby and all Americans watching all the events on TV and wondering what the heck is going on. Fifty years later most folks are still not certain exactly what happened other than JFK died. Oswald acting on his own is still suspect.</p>
<h1>25 Vietnam War?</h1>
<p>even though I wasn’t watching tv news, the draft was important enough it was definitely on my radar</p>
<p>I graduated from high school in 1974. I have just about stopped worrying about nuclear attacks, but only because my children are better able to survive a catastrophe without me than with me. I’ve pretty much been waiting for the apocalypse since age six. It didn’t help to spend the early years in a fire and brimstone sort of church. My parents left the church by the time I was 10 or so. Damage already done. imho</p>
<p>School kids who grew up in the 1960s grew up fast. Drills crawling under school desks for nuclear missile attacks, turbulent civil rights era, assassinations, ramp up in Viet Nam, draft. Lots of goings on!</p>
<p>We had a police presence in front of the house every night for a really long time because our DA neighbor was trying an extremely volatile civil rights case. Interestingly, I watched no tv news coverage of that either.</p>
<p>ETA: googling the events leading up to the trial, I learn there were hundreds of National Guardsmen in town to “keep order” - I had no idea. So pretty clueless seems an apt description.</p>
<p>Well, footballmom104, the 80s were the era of “glasnost” and people were – rightly or wrongly – much less worried about nuclear war than they had been in the fifties through the seventies.</p>
<p>I was in 9th grade. My 2nd to last period of the day was Phy Ed. We were in the school basement wrestling, isolated from the rest of the school. At some point word started to circulate that the President had been shot. The Phy Ed teacher never said anything and we kept wrestling. I remember having this picture in my head of JFK sitting in his rocking chair and someone shooting him. I didn’t know he was traveling. At some point during or after showering(which we did in those days) and waiting for the bell to ring word spread that JFK was dead.</p>
<p>The bell rang and we went to our final class of the day. Mine was Civics. As we filed in the room, the teacher was sitting at his desk staring out the window. The bell rang to start class and the teacher kept sitting there staring. My recollection is that nothing was ever said and 25 or so 9th graders sat there quietly for 50 minutes. The final bell rang and I went home and followed the TV reporting.</p>
<p>I don’t have any recollection of any PA announcements or any other word from teachers or anyone. I was watching live when Ruby shot Oswald.</p>
<p>It was a Friday and I was in 7th grade Algebra class in the period just before lunch. The principal came on the school PA system and said something important was happening that we should know about. He then fed the live radio news broadcast directly into all the classrooms via the PA system. At this point Pres. Kennedy had been rushed to the hospital but his death had not yet been confirmed.</p>
<p>When the period was over they dismissed us to go to lunch and all the kids and teachers sat in stunned silence in the cafeteria listening to the broadcast. Soon they officially announced the death, and some kids broke down crying. After lunch school was dismissed. I trudged home full of shock and disbelief, mentally trying to somehow make this terrible thing unhappen. </p>
<p>At age 12 I wasn’t a weepy sort of kid, but the one especially poignant moment for me of whole sad weekend that followed came after he had laid in state for a day under the Capitol dome. The military pallbearers carried the casket down the long steps of the Capitol and they paused at the bottom. The military band then played “Hail to the Chief” for him for the last time. All the dignitaries including Pres. Johnson were there, but everyone knew they weren’t playing it for LBJ. That moment still chokes me up - 50 years later.</p>
<p>Off topic, but is anyone else struck by all the schools that sent kids home early and apparently just assumed that the mother would be there? Wouldn’t happen now. Didn’t happen on 9/11.</p>
<p>My mother worked on JFK’s campaign in 1959 and I was lucky enough to shake his hand when he stopped his motorcade as we stood by the side of the road, got out of the car, hugged my mother, got back in his car and left. There may have been other campaign workers there, I don’t remember; I was four. (My mother worked at the Ladies Home Journal and was part of the first articles about him in the early fifties as he rose in politics.) </p>
<p>When JFK was shot, I was in 3rd grade at our Friends School; they took us all to the Meetinghouse to pray for him and to wait quietly for our parents to pick us up. My mother never came and eventually (three hours later) the principal made arrangements for me to go to a friend’s house, where I stayed until my parents came and got me four days later. I was there, watching TV when Jack Ruby shot Oswald. (My parents were both journalists; my mother regularly sent me to friends when there was a big story. This time, I think she flat-out forgot me. My older sister stayed with a different friend.)</p>
<p>In the seventies, I was visiting my uncle at Fort Myer in Virginia and was able to meet Black Jack Pershing ([Black</a> Jack (horse) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Jack_(horse)]Black”>Black Jack (horse) - Wikipedia)), the riderless horse in JFK’s funeral procession.</p>
<p>I was in 5th grade in my neighborhood Catholic school, Mrs. Scully’s class. JFK was OUR President, in that he was Catholic. All I really remember is going home and watching TV for about 4 days straight, except going to church on Sunday and praying for JFK. Even the Canadian station in Windsor, Ontario was covering the events nonstop.</p>
<p>I was in 9th grade in my all-girls Catholic high school. I can still hear the principal’s voice over the intercom, saying that President Kennedy had been shot in Texas. The televisions were turned on in all the classrooms, but I have no memory of hearing that he had died. When we went home, there wasn’t a sound on the bus. My family and I watched TV that entire weekend, and I remember seeing Oswald killed on live TV.</p>
<p>There is a facebook page for my high school, and most of the women on it are around my age, because the HS closed a few years after I graduated. We are talking about the Kennedy assassination on that page, and quite a few women have made the same comment: I didn’t know until that day that nuns cried.</p>
<p>Good point about the assumption that mothers were at home, Consolation. Another parallel with 9/11 for me - I remember coming home from dropping my kids at school and listening to a voicemail about a plane hitting the WTC. Of course, I pictured a small plane and a relatively minor event. I spent the entire day watching TV, but I have no memory of the towers falling. The most horrible events seem to leave blank spaces in my mind.</p>
<p>At the joint birthday in class for my friend Candy Wilde (real name, not sure if I spelled it right) and Greg White. We were sent into the ballroom (our lunchroom) and then sent home. Even Canadian TV only interrupted the next 3 days for the Grey Cup, which is their football championship. </p>
<p>Like others, I saw Ruby shoot Oswald live.</p>
<p>I have met the original 6th Floor museum director and highly recommend going. There was (is?) an “alternative” museum in the West End. Had some interesting relics but the ideas are essentially wrong. Like “did you know Oswald only had gun residue on his hands?” Well, duh, he went home and changed clothes and could easily have washed his hands and face - imagine that, you’ve just shot the President and your adrenalin is pumping and you go into the bathroom and splash water on your face and look up into the mirror. He then picked up his pistol and went out and in one of those moments of insanity that catch bad guys - like Terry McVeigh driving away from the OK City bombing in a car with no license plate and getting pulled over - Oswald shoots a police officer for really no reason. So there’s now gun residue on his hands.</p>
<p>And the absurd analysis of shots by people in a crowd with echoes off buildings and open police radios rebroadcasting what they picked up … if you’ve ever been around a shooting, you know how hard it can be to identify where it’s coming from. Basically what happens is a bullet comes by - and you can sometimes “see” it in the trails it leaves in the air - and then noise and the noise isn’t that focused and that becomes more true the farther away the gun is.</p>
<p>Other stuff is more absurd: you can’t fire 3 shots in x seconds with that rifle. Sure you can because you start counting when you fire the first. You don’t start counting and try to get off 3 shots. You fire and then you get off 2 shots in that time, which is not that hard. </p>
<p>And the one thing that so many either get wrong or ignore: it wasn’t an ordinary car. The back seat was higher so the bullet that went through JFK’s throat - where you see him reaching up - hit Connolly in a straight line. It didn’t change direction in flight.</p>
<p>I was in seventh grade and I remember an announcement on the PA system, and then the school dismissed students to go home.</p>
<p>I remember getting off the school bus at the end of my street and seeing lots of people walking towards the bus stop crying. There was a collective sense of shock and loss.</p>
<p>That weekend I was glued to the TV.</p>
<p>I wasn’t born yet, but I find the conspiracy theories intriguing. The newest one I just heard last week was shown on “JFK: The Smoking Gun”. Wow! DVR it, if you are interested in that kind of stuff. It has moved to the top of my list of what I think really happened.</p>
<p>I was in elementary school.
I dont remember exactly how I heard about the assassination while in school but I do remember, while lining up to get on the bus to go home, asking the teacher aide and she confirmed it.</p>
<p>When I arrived home several women (including my mother) were leaning out of their apartment windows and crying.</p>
<p>When I entered my apartment, my mother told me to immediately go to the corner store and buy a copy of the New York Post:</p>
<p><a href=“http://i.ebayimg.com/t/New-York-Post-Extra-Blue-Final-November-22-1963-JFK-SHOT-TO-DEATH-No-Reserve-/00/s/MTYwMFgxMjgx/z/37QAAMXQKPRSL~IW/$T2eC16V,!w8FIc6uCrE(BSL+IVOSUg%7E%7E60_35.JPG”>http://i.ebayimg.com/t/New-York-Post-Extra-Blue-Final-November-22-1963-JFK-SHOT-TO-DEATH-No-Reserve-/00/s/MTYwMFgxMjgx/z/37QAAMXQKPRSL~IW/$T2eC16V,!w8FIc6uCrE(BSL+IVOSUg~~60_35.JPG</a></p>