38 thoughts on “The JFK Assassination”

  1. Yes. The Baby Boom generation – which is generally defined as anyone born between 1946 and 1964 – is almost the sole remaining repository of living memory of JFK’s assassination, supplemented only by the rapidly-dwindling so-called Silent Generation and the nearly extinct Greatest Generation. Gen X, the Millennials, the Zoomers and the Alphas – or whatever else we’re calling the currently in-progress generation – have no more personal connection to the Kennedy assassination than they do to those of McKinley, Garfield and Lincoln.

    Given the wretchedness of American education these last several decades, I doubt a normative member of any of these post-Boomer generations could name more than one or two assassinated Presidents and many probably can’t name any at all. Or would name Presidents who were not assassinated. Might make for an interesting episode for one of those man-in-the-street-interview YouTubers.

    1. I remember the funeral procession on all the color televisions in the big Sears department store. Mom made a trip every month or so to a shopping center in the bigger city and I was dragged along. The assassination day itself? Don’t remember that at all.

    1. I was in 7th grade, sitting in Mr. LaFave’s 7th-period Science class with just a minute or two to go before the final bell of the day when Principal Micenski made the announcement over the PA.

      1. Somewhat similar experience. I was in 8th grade music class when the PA announced that Kennedy had been shot. I rushed to the next class (Spanish) because the room had a TV. As I entered, Walter Cronkite announced that Kennedy was dead. I also remember the following Sunday when Oswald was murdered. What a way to end a year!

  3. 1st or 2nd grade in Lubbock Texas. We moved to Johnson City in 65. Heard stories about how Johnson was going to continue Kennedy programs. Far less impressed as an adult now.

    1. Yes. Kicking off the Apollo program was the best thing Kennedy ever did. The worst thing he ever did was allow government employee unions. There is an old saying to the effect that the good a man does dies with him but the evil he does goes on forever. In Kennedy’s case close enough for government work I guess.

      1. It’s not an old saying, it’s a line from Marc Anthony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “The evil that men do live after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.”

        1. Thank you for that. My Shakespeare is spotty at best. Seems as though roughly half of the notable sayings in the English language are attributable to The Bard.

          1. Old sayings can fade and mutate. Literature can be consulted. I started taking theater classes when young because there was an abundance of willing girls. I was in a production of Julius Caesar, in which I played Cassius, of the lean and hungry look. I actually reached the cusp of choosing an acting career, where I was auditioning for professional roles, when I sold my first book to a NY publisher. Sometimes I think I made the wrong choice. We’ll never know,

          2. Perhaps no choice was required. I believe Fritz Leiber did both with some success. Heck, even Harlan Ellison went in front of the cameras for Babylon 5.

  4. I was in the eighth grade, in study hall, when rumors started to spread as people came in until the announcement came. along with saying school was dismissed early. This was in Prince William County, VA. I saw Ruby shot on live TV at home with my parents, who separated 3 months later.

    1. Ruby was the shooter. Oswald was the shootee. Not one of the Dallas PD’s better days. They had a bunch of bad ones there starting on 11-22-63.

      And I also happened to be watching the live TV feed at the time.

      One of the reasons I’m less inclined than some to despair of recent times in the US is that I lived through the ’60s – from ages 8 to 18. Seemed like a perfectly fine decade starting out, but then things got seriously weird.

      1. A war raging that no-one understood didn’t help.
        I knew a victim from my small town. He had attended our church as a young man. I found his name on the wall decades later when I visited DC.

        1. Being from a small town in a very rural part of my state, there are likely a number of hometown names on The Wall. There were definitely a lot of people from there who served. My junior year American History teacher had a guy from two or three classes in front of us come in and talk to us about serving aboard the New Jersey and take questions.

          Not having been to DC since The Wall went up, I’ve never seen any names personally, but I’ve seen pictures of the section of The Wall that contains the name of one such hometown KIA I found out about pretty much by accident and long after the fact. He was in my high school graduating class and was likely the first – and perhaps only – KIA from that class, though I’ve never gone looking for others. Probably should.

          Apparently drafted almost immediately upon graduation and, based on his date of death being in autumn of that same year, got scragged very shortly after arrival in-country.

          I didn’t like him. He was, sad to say, not the sharpest pencil in the box and ran with a mean crowd. That seems to have been a far too typical description of Vietnam-era draftees.

          He never struck me as what you’d call cautious. He didn’t seem to own an “indoor voice,” for example. His normal speaking voice was loud with excursions into louder still. That may well be what got him killed so quickly.

          Vietnam was, thank goodness, the last war we fought with draftee cannon fodder.

          So it goes.

        2. So I went and found a site with Vietnam KIAs from Michigan listed by hometown. There were seven from my little burg, including the guy I mentioned. I didn’t know any of the others, though I knew siblings of two of them. Two degrees of Kevin Bacon x 2.

    1. Baby Boomer Brits mainly, I should think. According to my search engine Dr. Who wasn’t available in the US until 1972 unless one had access to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation feed. Dr. Who started in Canada in 1965.

  6. I was born 9 months before the moon landing. For my generation, the “I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard” events are the Challenger disaster and 9/11.

    1. Yeah, I’ve got those too. I keep them in a box along with Sputnik, the Cuban Missile Crisis and both of the Kennedy assassinations plus that of Dr. King. And, of course, Neil and Buzz. Columbia is in there too. Neil and Buzz provided the only happy item in that collection of indelibles.

    2. For me, it’s the day Reagan was shot, the day Pope John Paul II was shot (and I’m not Catholic, but I was already interested in Eastern Europe, so it hit me hard) and the day we lost Challenger (which was shortly after I’d acquired two posters of it that I kept hanging on my dormitory room wall).

      1. Maybe it’s just me, but unsuccessful assassination attempts don’t have quite the sticking power. I’ll be putting Charlie Kirk’s murder in my indelibles box too, at some point, but it’s too fresh at present.

  7. ” Seemed like a perfectly fine decade starting out, but then things got seriously weird.”
    Yep, 12 to 22 in my case. So much promise starting out, then it turned to shit.

  8. My memory of the assassination day itself is sketchy. It would have been when I was in 2nd Grade. I sort of remember all teachers being called to the office over the intercom. Then our parents were notified school was letting out early and we were sent home. I do remember watching the funeral procession, the horse with the backwards boots and JFK Jr’s saluting his father’s casket as it passed by. All on our B&W TV. But I was only 7 going on 8 at the time.

    I remember it preempting my Saturday AM shows. But the one Saturday AM preemption that was unforgivable to this child was Winston Churchill’s funeral. Not even an American…

  9. I remember tv (probably cartoons) being pre-empted and a bit of the funeral parade. I had no idea what was going on.

  10. I was in the first grade when it happened. I remember going to a Thanksgiving activity and heard about the assassination afterwards. I was 6 years old and to be honest, it really didn’t mean much to me. I’m almost certain we didn’t have a TV at home, so I didn’t see any of the funeral coverage or Ruby being shot.

      2. Hmmm, Gabapentin, yeah, that’s the ticket. I’ll tell my wife, Morgan Fairchild… Just upped my dose yesterday.

    2. 1963 and no TV? Wow! And I thought my folks were laggards. We got our first set about the time I turned 8 in 1959.

      1. I spent six months without a TV when I had my first apartment. I spent a lot of my non-working hours looking at a screen, but it was attached to a CPU and video card, not a tuner (my very first computer, which I thought incredible at the time, but was tiny compared to the machine I’m typing this on — even my phone has a more powerful CPU and more memory and storage).

        1. I actually spent an entire decade between 1973 and 1983 without a TV except when I was in Europe for two years as an expat. As I understood no foreign languages, the TVs in my accommodations during that stint stayed off for lack of any point in their being on. I have no recollection of feeling at all deprived during that time. Read lots of books and magazines and went to a lot of movies.

      2. My father was a carpenter and my mother a housewife who made extra money doing sewing. I was the youngest of 5 kids. I don’t know if we lower middle class or upper lower class, but money was tight.

        1. My father was managerial in heavy industry. Even so, we lived in a company-owned house we rented for my first eight+ years. Natural gas pipelines hadn’t reached the U.P of Michigan at that point and wouldn’t until the mid-’60s. Everyone heated with coal, fuel oil or propane.

          We had a coal bin in the basement of our original house along with a root cellar. The furnace was like the one Ralphie’s family had in A Christmas Story – an automatic stoker fed the coal into the firebox, but my dad had to fill the feed hopper from the coal bin by manual transfer with a shovel once or twice a week. He also had to clear clinkers out of the firebox with steel tongs and drop them into a metal bucket to be put outside for the trashmen.

          We bought our coal from the C. Reiss Coal Co. During “heating season” it would get delivered every month or so in a dump truck and fed into the coal bin by a little conveyor belt powered by a one-lunger pull-to-start gas engine like a power lawn mower would use. This contraption was carried on brackets on one side of the dump bed when not in active use.

          The brand name was Green Arrow Stoker Coal. The coal was crushed to a uniform average size and had some little round Green Arrow logos printed on heavy aluminum foil mixed in. These were about the size of a quarter. They would burn up in the furnace.

          I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, but my hometown still had a lot of the ’30s and ’40s about it well after most of the rest of the country had moved on.

          I guess we were middle class. Of course there were only four of us – the folks, me and my younger brother. Things would have been a lot more crowded and rations thinner if we’d been a family of seven.

          We moved to a newer, larger house in mid-1960 that my parents bought from our family physician as he had just built a new place in a far tonier neighborhood. It had a built-in dishwasher and a garbage disposal in the kitchen sink – items our previous dwelling had very much lacked.

          Heating was initially by fuel oil from a big tank in the basement that was filled by a tank truck from an access pipe that extended out to the alley alongside the garage. When natural gas came to town, we upgraded and got rid of the old tank and furnace.

          We stayed middle class, though Dad had to take disability retirement a couple of years after the move, Mom had to go back to teaching and things were a bit tighter than the folks had planned. But we got by and the mortgage was eventually paid off in the ’70s.

          Any early tycoons were long gone. The richest people in town were upper-middle-class. There wasn’t really much in the way of conspicuous consumption and there were no snotty rich kids. No private schools in town. A pretty egalitarian place, really.

  11. What I remember about JFK being killed is that the Democrat party being anti-Marxist died with him, that our media has always been trash except most people back then were not cognizant of it, and that assassinations are always terrible for the country. Of course, I wasn’t around back then, just my observations.

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