I knew something was up when the nun from the other classroom rushed into ours and whispered excitedly into our nun’s ear. They both became distraught and wheeled out the television set on a metal cart. Watching tv? That had never happened before at Assumption School. But John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, had just been shot in Dallas, Texas. It was November 22, 1963, just six days before Thanksgiving.
I learned a lot that day and weekend about presidents, motorcades, and death. Kennedy’s death was soon followed by that of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit and the alleged assassin of both men, Lee Harvey Oswald. My grandmother alerted us to Oswald’s death, since she had witnessed it on live tv that Sunday morning. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Oswald at point-blank range in the basement of Dallas police headquarters.
To my seven-year-old mind, these events seemed highly ritualized around death, blood, and sacrifice, but the most amazing thing to me was that the entire adult world came to a standstill, paralyzed. Death held that kind of power over everyday existence. On the 60th anniversary of the Dallas assassination, may we never experience anything like that again.
Image credit: feature by Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7464584. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”
