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Originally Posted by Rainger99
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I was in fourth grade, in the mountains of Northern California. The principal came to the classroom door and conversed in a whisper with old Mrs. Price, who looked shocked and frightened. Mrs. Price called us to order and told us to clear off our desks because something terrible had happened. This was a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Every month our class had bomb drills in which we would crouch under our desks. We lived in fear of imminent attack. My first thought was that the war had begun, a hydrogen bomb had been launched at San Francisco, and this was my last hour on earth. Existential dread in a nine year old!
Instead, Mrs. Price told us that President Kennedy had been shot. Horrible, but I felt an immediate sense of relief. I wasn’t going to die after all! I’m not certain, but I sort of think the entire school was dismissed. So I may have been home when Walter Cronkite announced that the president had died, tears in his voice. I was certainly home and watching when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead on live television. I ran down the hall to tell my mom, but she wouldn’t believe me. We subscribed to Life magazine, so I looked at those famous photos over and over, but I saw Oswald die live. Good riddance. Though the newly released reports by the surgeons who did the surgery make it clear that the pathologist’s report was a coverup, and there were multiple shooters.
Like Pearl Harbor, it was what these days people call an “inflection point,” when the direction of life shifts. In a way, we’ve never gotten over it.