— Underneath the chilly gray November sky
We can make believe that Kennedy is still alive and
Were shooting for the moon and smiling Jackie’s driving by 

– lyrics from Andy Prieboy’s “Tomorrow, Wendy”

I can only imagine that Andy Prieboy (who is the same age as I am) lived somewhere in the Midwest, somewhere in the regional vicinity of Milwaukee, because November 22, 1963 was indeed chilly and gray, and also, at least where we were, raining.

It was a day of tears, that’s for sure.

I was in third grade at St. Sebastian Catholic School on Milwaukee’s west side, on Washington Boulevard. We lived just a couple of blocks away from the church and its nearly overcrowded, baby-boom elementary school. Back then, of course, our moms — everybody’s mom, basically — was a homemaker so most (though not all) of the kids went home for lunch.

I remember coming back late that day — which was really odd, because I was the Best Little Boy in the World, and certainly, never late for school. We were due back at 12:45 p.m. and I so remember looking up at that tower and realizing I was late. It must’ve been because the bells were going off, as they did every quarter hour. For years I remembered looking up at a clock on that day, but as you can plainly see in the photo, there is no clock on that bell tower. So we realize memory is an unreliable narrator. It was, after all, 50 years ago.

How is it possible I can remember things that happened 50 years ago?

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I remember hearing later on that the president had been shot in Dallas, also in the Central Time Zone, about 12:30, and I figured I was just finishing my lunch or putting on my coat or something like that (like I said earlier, it was raining/drizzling there, and it was cold).

In the third grade class I was in, we had a nun teacher in the morning and a lay teacher in the afternoon (the morning nun was ancient; I don’t think she could have gotten through an entire day — and in fact, she died later that school year!)

What they did in those pre-internet/pre-ubiquitous TV days was to put the radio on the school PA system. But it was horrible quality – you couldn’t understand much of anything they said. Static and yelling. I do remember some of the kids crying – the girls of course, because the boys don’t cry. Soon the decision was made to herd the entire school into the church for a prayer for the President, and then they let us go home, early. (November 22 was a Friday that year, as it is again in 2013.)

My parents were both home, on the couch in front of our little black and white TV. It was really odd to see my father home in the middle of the afternoon. Both he and Mom were crying, which was much more disturbing to me. I believe that’s the only time I’d ever (to this day) seen them both in tears at once.

We spent the next few days watching all the horrible events of that weekend unfold in front of the TV. I had a new baby brother, David, born just a couple of weeks before, so I remember taking my turn holding him on my lap. Without reservation, the assassination of President Kennedy was the most profound event to ever happen in my young life.

If the “60s” really ended the day Saigon fell (which was actually in 1975), then perhaps the “60s” really began that day in Dallas. Nothing was ever quite the same after that.