Fifty Years Ago Today–Where I Was & What I Remember

Fifty years ago today–also a Friday–the principal at Mercer School in Shaker Hts. Ohio, Mrs Van Dusen, came in to my third grade classroom in the early afternoon and had a whispered and worried-looking conversation with my teacher, Mrs. Vaughan. A few minutes later Mrs Vaughan told us we were being excused early. Parents who normally picked us up at 3:15 would be coming for us soon. Elation I might’ve felt at getting out early was tempered by uncertainty at the earlier whispering and an unspoken urgency. I went out to the school oval and saw my mom in our car waiting to pick me up. I got in and before I could ask what was going on, she said, “The president’s been shot.” I think she didn’t want to tell me just yet that he was dead.

Thus beginning at age 9 was triggered in me a tragic period of my childhood, with violence and political killings that followed in the wake of JFK’s assassination, including events two days later, when, taking a break from a dolorous family meal, I got up from the table and walked in to the TV room. Within seconds I found myself watching a black&white TV picture as CBS broadcast the moment Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. What a weird sad time.

In the years that followed I observed the urban riots that afflicted many cities, including my hometown of Cleveland; deaths in Vietnam that numbered in the tens of thousands; the political murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; and the shootings at Kent State. In some ways, I feel like I’ve never really gotten over the shock of the weekend JFK was killed.