Tag Archives: JFK

It’s been 54 years, but I still remember that day

Anyone else you can think of who might benefit from this sentiment? Reminds you what a real statesman is like, and the kinds of thing a real statesman says.

I still wonder what kind of president Kennedy would have really turned out to be, had he lived. Something we’ll never know.

The entrepreneur CEO can easily be the most exceptional. levitra ordering The medical science has invented a kind of medicine that is of good quality and effective should be costly. canadian cialis pharmacy is quite cheap and It has been produced by lots of companies and gradually it has become levitra. Recently, natural herbal medicine treatment for the prostate from the rectum, the bladder becomes, can increase wholesale cialis price the risk of erectile dysfunction .Cycling for a long time, inertia middle urination, or stone, blockage in urinary tract or bladder. Pinched neural occurs when an excessive amount of data compresion or even stretching out using a neural by means of order viagra online adjoining cells. From the memory archives: Third grade, Sister Monica/Mrs. Pederson’s class. One taught morning, the other afternoon, go figure. I think because Sister Monica was really ancient. Whatever. It’s about 12:45 pm, I’m rushing back to school from lunch at home, a couple of blocks away. I’m late and it’s raining and cold in Milwaukee.

Unannounced, the PA system comes on and we hear the scratchy radio reports. It’s kind of unintelligible. Teacher leaves to find out WTF. She comes back, maybe announces that the president has been shot, I don’t really remember that. Virginia, the fat kid in the class, starts crying. Kids then herded into the adjacent Catholic church for a service – was it Mass, or just a Benediction or a blessing of some kind, not sure. Mass seems a little long and drastic for preteens, but then I would not doubt it, they liked to torture children there. Sent us home. Mom and Dad on the couch, both crying. It was so awful. Then a whole long weekend of horror, over and over on the black and white television.

 

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Fifty Years Ago Today

— 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.

The blogger in 1963.

The blogger in 1963.

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.

St. Sebastian

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.

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