22 November

 22 November 2022

 

It wasn’t long after lunch when the teacher from across the hall burst into our classroom.  She was sobbing uncontrollably.   She rushed to her colleague, my own 1^st Grade teacher, Mrs Dawson who immediately came to her side.  I watched her face turn ashen, aghast. Their horror faces was unmistakable, something a six-year old never forgets.

 

Mrs Dawson turned to the class and said, “President Kennedy has been shot.”  I knew who the President was.  I knew what shot meant from watching westerns and war movies on TV.  But I did not understand what this meant.  She instructed us to sit quietly and within a few minutes we were gathering our things, dismissed early from school.

 

I remember the walk home---we nearly all walked to school and it was at least 15 minutes door to door.  The weather was warm for November and most of my friends took our “long route.” But I said that I was going straight home.  We often dawdled and my pals were less concerned.  Some how I felt it important to get home. I know I didn’t really grasp the situation, only that something terrible had happened.  I was worried about my mom, my siblings, my father.  I wanted to get home.

 

When I reached the house, I came in by the garage, my usual route, stumbling onto the kitchen floor only to find that my mom on the phone with her sister, my Aunt Dolly.  I knew it was Dolly because she was speaking so loudly in Italian that I could hear her voice in the receiver and I understood how upset both she and my mom really were.  I was terribly scared, worried, and hunkered down on the step waiting for mom to get off the phone.  She hung up.  But before I could say anything, she was dialing the phone again.

 

I could tell she had dialed my father’s office in New York City.  In those days that was a long-distance call from across the Bridge in Jersey and you had to dial ‘9’ on the rotary phone to place the call.  I remember how anxious she seemed waiting for the phone to make its own journey around the long dial.  The sound it made is still something I can hear.  And then the pause before the connection.  “Dave,” she said, “please come home now.”  I never heard my Mom say anything like that before.  My father never left work early but he was home in no time.  The neighbors next door had already come over, the grown-ups gathered around the huge black & white TV, and they sent us kids “upstairs to play.”  So we did.  

What I remember next is that school didn’t resume that next Monday. It was right before Thanksgiving and then the Macy’s Day parade went off as usual.  I was a big fan of the Bullwinkle balloon, as were all the other kids.  He was still kinda’ new to the parade and every one waited for him.  But then there was this black cloth that looked like bunting on the buildings, sort of what you see but in a very different way on the 4^th of July.  This was something very, very sad and so too the somber crowd and even the marching bands.  The parade in ’63 was another part of these unforgettable times.

I have now no recollection of events some thirteen months earlier when the President had ordered the debacle known as The Bay of Pigs invasion but even at this tender age I knew the world was flush with dangers.  We were routinely huddled in the basement of our elementary school with the Fallout Shelter signs.  We might suddenly be commanded to crawl beneath our desks in the middle of a lesson.  The Cold War was no laughing matter for us because the grown-ups made it clear that staying safe in an unsafe world was something you needed to think about, prepare for.  (I try to imagine now what it is like for school children in gun-infested society and how much worse the threat that comes from within our society.)  Was the President’s soon to be confirmed death a part of that Cold War?  I remember putting that into my private equation of scared.  Was this the beginning of something even worse?  I was the kind of kid who thought about these things, worried about stuff like that, believed bad things could happen even if I lived in a “safe” neighborhood and was lucky enough to have caring parents.

What followed of course is well-chronicled in pictures and film footage.  I vividly recall sitting with my Mom watching the President’s funeral.  The riderless horse, the cassion, and little John Jr. and Caroline walking with their mother.  I still have copies of the Look magazine, which much like Life, recorded these events in photos and narrative---and also then the assassination of Oswald, which I saw on live TV as did millions of others.

 

This morning some 59 years later I recalled these events to my college students who have no recollection even of the events of 9/11---they weren’t yet born.  And 1963 seems no less graphic to me.  I spent a few minutes telling them what I remember from not so long ago, sitting in my first-grade class at Whittier School when we received the news that the President was shot.

So long as there are people who remember what it was like to witness, experience, and feel such events, I think there is no better time spent than sharing a living memoyr.  What will become of us if we all just forget?