It was sixty years ago today that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. I still remember what I was doing that day.
It's not so rare to recall clearly any event of such magnitude, but it's becoming rarer. After all, it was sixty years ago. At seventy-five perhaps I'm positioned to remember that day better than many. I was fifteen when Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas. That's young enough to have an impressionable mind that easily formed memories. At seventy-five I'm just at the cusp of things disappearing into the endless forgetfulness of old age.
I better write this down before it disappears into that infinite nothingness of the past.
I was in teacher Jim Craig's English class at about 1 p.m. that Friday afternoon when principal Jim Exum made an announcement over the loud speaker system. In those days there were round loud speakers built into the concrete block walls of each classroom. Whenever the principal wanted to convey messages of some import or interest you'd hear the cackling of the speaker and then Exum's marbled southern drawl asking for everyone's attention.
"There has been an event of great importance take place concerning the President of the United States," Exum said. "When there is more information, I will let you know. That is all for now."
Then the loud speaker went dead.
Exum was a Texan with a heavy accent that the students in Pennsylvania made fun of. You could see he was sensitive about being made fun of behind his back. You could see it bothered him and he wanted to be liked, not derided, but he was pacific. Still, he was six-foot-three-inched tall and nobody wanted to mess with him beyond making fun, and we'd scurry away before he could take us by the upper arm and drag us into this office, perhaps never to return.
"That's a relief," said Mr. Craig. "I thought he was going to say he got shot or something."
Yes, it was a relief. Even as kids we knew people got shot regularly in America and all around the world. It was a terrible violent world of wars and holocausts and radioactivity. We must have been thinking the same thing. Mr. Craig was a former professional baseball player who was going to make the St. Louis Cardinals one spring training and become a Major Leaguer as a pitcher, but he spun around on a pick-off move to second base in practice and tore up his shoulder so badly that he never played baseball again. I idolized him, since I wanted to become a professional baseball player. He was everything I wanted to be, except injured. It hurt me later that year when he was arrested for exposing himself to an unknown woman after coming home from his honeymoon. He had just been married, which should have been sexually blissful, I thought, and there he was exposing himself to a woman he didn't know for some dubious reason. I thought he must have gone nuts from losing his baseball career and then having some weird things happen on his honeymoon. My idol had clay feet.
About twenty minutes later, the loud speaker cackled to life again and that familiar Texas drawl made the awful announcement.
"The President of the United States has died in Dallas," Mr. Exum said. "All after-school events today are cancelled. We will finish out the rest of the day of classes and then we can all go home. Right now, we will come back to school on Monday. I repeat, the President of the United States has died in Dallas."
For me, that meant JV basketball practice was called off that afternoon.
That was a Friday. We didn't get much done in Mr. Craig's classroom, or in my next class, which I can't remember. I can recall Mr. Craig trying to talk to us about the assassination. We didn't know much about it other than it happened, but everybody was speculating about it. We were shocked. The Russians did it. We knew they were going to start World War III. We should blow them up with atomic bombs first before they blew us up. Ever since elementary school we had practiced duck-and-cover in the case of nuclear attack. We were taught to hide under our desks on our knees and bend over and cover our heads with our hands and stay as far away from the windows as we could, since they would shatter and spray broken glass all over the classroom and cut us to pieces. We knew about radiation. We knew that was worse and would probably kill us all.
Now the Russians were coming for us.
When we were getting on the school buses to go home on the chilly, bright afternoon the rumor passed through the squirming crowds of kids climbing onto the big yellow buses that a Russian fleet was spotted off the East Coast. We had to get ready to fight. They would invade the next day.
For some reason, that didn't happen.
Saturday morning was a normal Saturday morning, except it wasn't, since we were all still shocked and confused and suffering from fear. If the Russians didn't do it, who did? It felt good to be alive, but it felt bad, too. It felt bad to be confused.
Our JV basketball coach, John Rittenhaurer, told us before we left school on the day of the assassination that our Saturday morning practice would go on as usual. He was a tough Army veteran who wasn't going to be deterred by anything as normal as the death of a president. We had to be stronger basketball players than that.
My father drove me to the school that Saturday morning, my gym bag in the back seat, and dropped me off. A few of the other boys were waiting outside the locked doors of the school, and it was cold. We were shivering and stomping our feet waiting for Mr. Rittenhaurer to come along and unlock the school so that we could play.
About half the team did not show up.
When Mr. Rittenhaurer finally did show up, he told us to go home, practice was cancelled. Evidently, Mr. Exum had heard our JV practice was to go on and he blew up at Mr. Rittenhaurer and his lack of sensitivity. An admonished Mr. Rittenhaurer had to open the school so that we could call our parents on the pay phone to come pick us up. He seemed nervous and impatient, looking around and blinking and telling us to hurry. Like us, he didn't like being yelled at by the principal. Many years later he got a doctorate and became principal and years after that died in a terrible car accident that perhaps involved alcohol while he was still fairly young.
If the Russians didn't kill Kennedy, who did? We wondered that. Soon we had the answer. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former soldier who had defected to Russia at one point and worked for the communist Cubans, was caught the afternoon of the assassination after killing a police officer outside a movie theater. He was the one who did it, we were told on the evening news. He was a nut. A crazy lone gunman. But we got him that day and soon would have our answers why he did it.
A few days later, we had only more questions
I was watching the coverage of the ongoing events and investigations in Dallas on an old black-and-white television in my sister's room. I had to go to the bathroom and could not wait. I got up and when I was in the bathroom I heard my sister scream.
"They shot him!"
I had no clue what she meant, but rushed out to find the Texas police wrestling a heavy-set man in a felt hat and suit to the ground. Jack Ruby, a Dallas night club owner, had shot Oswald in the side as the police were transferring him to another station. An ambulance came to take Oswald away and the police, who all wore white cowboy hats and looked confused and angry, took Ruby into custody.
"You shot the president!" Ruby supposedly said as he killed the assassin.
It all seemed fishy, even then. Oswald died, silencing him forever. He had claimed he was a patsy, which suggested a larger conspiracy. Rudy never talked, or at least we never heard what he said. He died of cancer years later while in jail. He never opened his mouth about why he killed Oswald.
How many theories have there been about who killed Kennedy in the sixty years since then? The Mafia. The Cubans. The Cubans with the Russians. A nut. A lone gunman. Two gunmen. Former CIA chief and former president George Bush.
I don't know anything more about it than I did then.
How was a fifteen-year-old boy to understand any of it, especially while surrounded by so many unstable characters - a shy resentful confused principal, a perverted former baseball player, a tougher-than-nails ex-Army coach who no longer felt anything for anybody and didn't even realize he should? How could any of them understand what had happened? Especially since the people who should have known what was going on weren't saying.
The Warren Commission said Oswald was a lone crazy gunman and stuck to it. Since I could see no one was saying anything you could rely on, I never believed it.
Books were written disputing the commission, movies were made and TV shows went on an on in speculation for these sixty years. Nobody had come to a believable conclusion.
It was part of the paranoia and craziness of the Sixties those of us who were alive at the time experienced. I'm a little paranoid and crazy because of it, even now.
As I was writing this I realized that November 22, 1963 was a Friday. Today I got confused and thought November 22, 2023 is also Friday. It's not, but excuse me for the confusion. You can't blame me.
I'm far beyond that cancelled Saturday JV basketball practice, but I'm still the same boy standing out in the cold in front of my high school, waiting for someone to come along to unlock the door so that I can understand what happened that day in Dallas.
I guess I'll stand outside in the cold waiting forever.
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