View Full Version : Sixty years ago today
Rainger99
11-22-2023, 04:31 AM
If you are 65 or older, you remember what you were doing when you heard the news.
What We Know and Still Don’t Know about JFK’s Assassination | TIME (https://time.com/6338396/jfk-assassination-conspiracy-culture/)
Two Bills
11-22-2023, 05:21 AM
I had just got home from three years overseas in military, was watching tv at home when news flash came up about assassination.
Went into kitchen and told my mother and brother, but they thought I was making it up. Had a job convincing them.
It was such a shock and BIG news.
If some leader got bumped off today, probably wouldn't bother to get out of my chair.
Different world today.
patfla06
11-22-2023, 10:26 AM
I was home from grade school sick and I remember my Mom was
shocked and crying.
charlieo1126@gmail.com
11-22-2023, 11:03 AM
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Arctic Fox
11-22-2023, 11:09 AM
If you are 65 or older, you remember what you were doing when you heard the news.
I do recall there being a grassy knoll in the equation.
Gpsma
11-22-2023, 11:32 AM
Was in Mrs Riley,s third grade class in a catholic grammar school. The principal came over tge loud speaker and told us tge president had been shot. She then had us all pray. Before we were dismissed, she came back on and informed us he had been killed.
The one thing that i will never forget was walking home after we were dismissed. Normally there would have been loads of people in the streets. It was totally empty. All inside glued to the tv. It was a very eerie feeling walking home
Ecuadog
11-22-2023, 02:48 PM
I was walking across campus by the dorms. People were hanging out the windows, shouting.
alwann
11-22-2023, 03:40 PM
I was working at the college radio station and did one of those "we interrupt this broadcast" announcements. Six months earlier JFK gave the commencement address at my school and I was close enough to see him perspire in the June heat. A few months after that, I was on the crew that covered Dr. King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I've seen some history. I'm not sure I want to see what comes next.
Topspinmo
11-22-2023, 03:43 PM
Was in 6th grade.
alwann
11-22-2023, 03:44 PM
I was working at the college radio station and did one of those "we interrupt this broadcast" announcements. Six months earlier JFK gave the commencement address at my school, and I was close enough to see him perspire in the June heat. A few months after that, I was on the crew that covered Dr. King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I've seen some history. I'm not sure I want to be around to see what might come next.
manaboutown
11-22-2023, 08:02 PM
I was walking from class at UNM to my fraternity house. Walking toward me on the same path were several coeds bawling their eyes out. I asked them what was wrong and they gave me the sad news. When I arrived at my frat house the TV room was full of good brothers watching the news. I spent the rest of the day there. A short time prior I had seen him in possibly the same limo in which he was shot, top down, driving up Central Ave (old Route 66) adjoining the campus waving at folks on the sidewalk. He was on a visit to Sandia Labs. JFK cruised Route 66 in Albuquerque - Route 66 News (https://www.route66news.com/2013/11/20/jfk-cruised-route-66-albuquerque/)
asianthree
11-22-2023, 08:36 PM
Elementary sent home, mom didn’t work, dad sent all his employees home, and didn’t return to work until after the funeral. TV was only allowed on Sunday for Disney, was on nonstop for the funeral.
Cupcake57
11-22-2023, 09:39 PM
I came home from Kindergarten and my mom was crying her eyes out and saying "He's the only Democrat I ever voted for and they shot him!"
toeser
11-23-2023, 06:34 AM
If you are 65 or older, you remember what you were doing when you heard the news.
What We Know and Still Don’t Know about JFK’s Assassination | TIME (https://time.com/6338396/jfk-assassination-conspiracy-culture/)
I don't know about you, but I remember practically nothing from when I was five.
But, I was in college when it happened and remember it well.
Marmaduke
11-23-2023, 07:01 AM
I was in 3rd Grade, Catholic school. The Principal, who was a nun, came to each homeroom and told us the President had been shot and we would be going home early. We prayed for President Kennedy before we were dismissed.
Prior, there was much excitement from the nuns because Kennedy was the only Catholic President elected in our nation's history.
My Dad worked at our City's Newspaper, a Scripp's Howard publisher. He had to stay until the afternoon edition was out, but he was always home by 3pm as we arrived home from school. What a great job he had, working from
7-3 and always being home for dinner. It was a simpler time, wasn't it?!
Our entire family sat glued to the TV watching Walter Cronkite that fall day.
Months before, my entire family was on the Ohio River Blvd. throwing confetti and holding signs which said, "We Love You", as Kennedy sat on the back of a convertable and waved to the crowd coming from the Pittsburgh Airport to an affair in Downtown. He pointed directly at me and acknowledged my sign, made by my mom.
5 Years later, we would be in front of the same TV watching Walter Cronkite show us footage from the jungles of Viet Nam.
From 8 years old to 13, I knew what it was like to strongly love, then vehemently dislike a President and his policies.
gmracket
11-23-2023, 07:14 AM
I was 18 and working at Dunn and Bradstreet. Our boss came out and told us all about the assassination. You couldn't hear a pin drop. Some of us were in shock, others crying and we went back to work but the typewriters sounded different like they were in a distance. Our boss let us out early that day and when the funeral was on tv we were glued to the set. Terrible day in US history.
Cliff Fr
11-23-2023, 08:26 AM
[QUOTE=gmracket;2276709]I was 18 and working at Dunn and Bradstreet. Our boss came out and told us all about the assassination. You couldn't hear a pin drop. Some of us were in shock, others crying and we went back to work but the typewriters sounded different like they were in a distance. Our boss let us out early that day and when the funeral was on tv we were glued to the set. Terrible day in US history.[/QUOTE
I had a good friend, Tony Zardecki that passed away a 4 years ago. He worked for Dunn & Bradstreet. Dud you know him?
sowilts
11-23-2023, 08:26 AM
Left School early and the next Day it Snowed and was very cold. Middletown New Jersey.
dewilson58
11-23-2023, 08:28 AM
WOW.....................there's a lot of old people in The Villages.
:throwtomatoes::throwtomatoes:
Marmaduke
11-23-2023, 08:29 AM
I thought of something else. I learned the definition of and how to spell assination in 3rd grade.
Marmaduke
11-23-2023, 08:31 AM
I don't know how to spell it now.
MandoMan
11-23-2023, 08:42 AM
If you are 65 or older, you remember what you were doing when you heard the news.
What We Know and Still Don’t Know about JFK’s Assassination | TIME (https://time.com/6338396/jfk-assassination-conspiracy-culture/)
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.
Catfishjeff
11-23-2023, 10:13 AM
I was stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base, a SAC base, in Wichita Falls TX about 90 miles from Dallas. On Nov. 22, 1963 we had a practice red alert where we all double timed to a pre-determined location. I had not been there long so I asked someone who had been there for a long time how often these practice red alerts happen. He said in his four years there they had never had one. The next day President Kennedy was shot and we were on a real red alert which we had just practiced the previous day. Every B52 took off nose to tail and it’s the loudest noise I had ever heard. So, of course, for the past 60 years I’ve always wondered if it was a coincidence that we had a practice red alert the day before Kennedy’s assassination.
Rosethorn
11-23-2023, 10:54 AM
I don't know about you, but I remember practically nothing from when I was five.
But, I was in college when it happened and remember it well.
I was barely four and I remember my mom watching the funeral on her itty bitty 13” Admiral television. I sat with her and looked at the funeral procession and thought that it all looked so sad.
Mom cried.
That’s about all I remember.
jimjamuser
11-23-2023, 12:51 PM
I was home from grade school sick and I remember my Mom was
shocked and crying.
I was non-political and at a College in Kansas playing on a basketball team. I vaguely knew that it was an important event at the time, but i was in my own world and did NOT realize until later how important it REALLY was.
jimjamuser
11-23-2023, 12:54 PM
I was working at the college radio station and did one of those "we interrupt this broadcast" announcements. Six months earlier JFK gave the commencement address at my school and I was close enough to see him perspire in the June heat. A few months after that, I was on the crew that covered Dr. King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I've seen some history. I'm not sure I want to see what comes next.
History and current events are moving MUCH faster today. Also inventions.
jimjamuser
11-23-2023, 12:56 PM
Elementary sent home, mom didn’t work, dad sent all his employees home, and didn’t return to work until after the funeral. TV was only allowed on Sunday for Disney, was on nonstop for the funeral.
Interesting about the use of the TV.
NavyVet
11-23-2023, 01:35 PM
The only memory I had of that day was that my parents were upset watching Walter Cronkite on TV. We only had CBS and NBC back then in the mountains. I was 7.
Bjeanj
11-23-2023, 04:08 PM
Grade school spelling bee.
I get a newsletter Letters from an American, written by Heather Cox Richardson (Heather Cox Richardson - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Cox_Richardson)). Yesterday’s was so sad:
From Letters from an American
“It all began so beautifully,” Lady Bird remembered. “After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas.”
It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.
That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.
When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights.
So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others.
The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business meant preventing a man from making all the money he could; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss.
That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”
But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”
The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird w
rote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”
As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”
After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her own husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.”
Officials wanted LBJ out of Dallas as quickly as possible and rushed the party to the airport. Looking out the car window, Lady Bird saw a flag already at half mast and later recalled, “[T]hat is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.”
In the confusion—in addition to the murder of the president, no one knew how extensive the plot against the government was—the attorney general wanted LBJ sworn into office as quickly as possible. Already on the plane to return to Washington, D.C., the party waited for Judge Sarah Hughes, a Dallas federal judge. By the time Hughes arrived, so had Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin bearing her husband’s body. “[A]nd there in the very narrow confines of the plane—with Jackie on his left with her hair falling in her face, but very composed, and me on his right, Judge Hughes, with the Bible, in front of him and a cluster of Secret Service people and Congressmen we had known for a long time around him—Lyndon took the oath of office,” Lady Bird recalled.
As the plane traveled to Washington, D.C., Lady Bird went into the private presidential cabin to see Mrs. Kennedy, passing President Kennedy’s casket in the hallway.
Lady Bird later recalled: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked…with blood—her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them. I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights—exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if I couldn’t get someone in to help her change and she said, ‘Oh, no. Perhaps later…but not right now.’”
“And then,” Lady Bird remembered, “with something—if, with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”
Cheapbas
11-23-2023, 04:28 PM
Was in Mrs Riley,s third grade class in a catholic grammar school. The principal came over tge loud speaker and told us tge president had been shot. She then had us all pray. Before we were dismissed, she came back on and informed us he had been killed.
The one thing that i will never forget was walking home after we were dismissed. Normally there would have been loads of people in the streets. It was totally empty. All inside glued to the tv. It was a very eerie feeling walking home
Exactly the same recollection. Dismissed early, I recall walking from the bus stop to my house with my head down.
thevillager1988
11-24-2023, 05:47 AM
I was born 9 months after the JFK assassination in what I label a mini baby boom caused by the president's death. I believe the boom to be the result of many husbands "comforting" their wives in the aftermath of the tragedy. (other mini booms have occurred ... after the NYC black out, after the Cub world series victory)
A visit to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas (highly recommended) and great read called I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt which turned into the movie The Irishman implicate the mafia in JFKs death.
DonnaNi4os
11-24-2023, 08:58 AM
I was sitting in my 7th grade class when my teacher came into the classroom, sat down and told us. He was crying and I will never forget it.
Nancy@Pinellas
11-24-2023, 10:02 AM
I was in 9th grade math class. It was my 14 th birthday. The intercom had the news report that our president had been shot.
Regorp
11-24-2023, 10:49 AM
If you are 65 or older, you remember what you were doing when you heard the news.
What We Know and Still Don’t Know about JFK’s Assassination | TIME (https://time.com/6338396/jfk-assassination-conspiracy-culture/)
Sitting in 5th grade history class in Southington, CT.
SIRE1
11-24-2023, 11:37 AM
When I was working on a project at our distribution center in Dallas, I got to know one of the guys who, when he was a teenager, was working at the Texas School Book Depository and he was there when Oswald shot Kennedy. He never spoke much about the incident unless you really asked. He even was called before the Warren Commission and his testimony is in the official record. So I then had to drive into downtown Dallas and I've stood at the spot. It is surprising how close the window and the car were. Not a long shot at all. And the grassy knoll and the railroad overpass where the suspected 2nd shooter might have been is really close as well.
chrisinva
11-24-2023, 04:48 PM
Freshman in high school. I recall the first announcement over that PA that Kennedy had been shot. Then, a short time later that he had died. How could this happen in America?? We were sent home from school. The following days were numbing. The funeral was numbing. My childhood ended.
sarp1967
11-24-2023, 05:54 PM
My dad marched in his funeral. Here's an article that came out in our local newspaper this week. Johnson City man recalls being in JFK's funeral procession | Local News | johnsoncitypress.com (https://www.johnsoncitypress.com/news/local-news/johnson-city-man-recalls-being-in-jfks-funeral-procession/article_e178913a-88bb-11ee-a2d4-8fd35cc09d36.html?fbclid=IwAR2hNVMgc6njYXGYmENkHo7 6_m1DlqszHWJQR3VQqpNtE0qn_9Nab_cztoQ)
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