dammit.


.

I am pretty sure it was the first time we binge-watched TV for 3 days.

We were sent home from school early. I still have a vivid memory of the funeral and seeing Jack Ruby shoot Oswald on television. My parents cried and were inconsolable, my Dad had driven 60 miles to his home precinct to vote for JFK in 1960.

Sister Adrien Marie came into class, told us to lay our heads on our desk and say a prayer for the president. I was 9. I remember it like it was yesterday. Big Catholic Parish North Philly.

I was in shock and scared and kept wondering if the world was gonna come to an end. Little did I know it was far from over. I will never forget

School let out early and everyone was glued to the TV for days. When John-John saluted the casket as it passed by, we all lost it. Thinking about it still makes me cry.

I was 15. The rumor swept the hallway on the way to class. Someone behind us saw d she was glad if he got shot. The friend I was walking with whipped around and slapped her. I got to class and teacher said this is geometry, not current events and we had to work on math. Halfway through the class, the school flag was lowered to half staff. Then I knew.

I was devastated. I had worked on his campaign in 1960. I was the only one in my school with a Kennedy bumper sticker on my notebook.

I watched everything on tv. Ruby getting shot, the funeral. Everything. My patents were very distressed but didn’t say too much.

That was my first political trauma. Then came MLK and RFK. That’s when I lost all hope.

Started around 10 o'clock in the morning. Our teacher who was a Catholic made us put our head down and pray we weren't Catholic. And then he told us that our dear President had died and we need to pray for his soul. We all did then they dismissed school early and I walked home and my mom had the television on. She never had the TV on during the day.and then I watched TV for three days and my brain popped out of my head when the man that killed him was shot by Jack Ruby. I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was a freshman in high school in Algebra class. The principal came over the loudspeaker and broke the news. My teacher was writing on the board and he froze and dropped the chalk which shattered on the floor. They set up the tv in the cafeteria and the whole school watched until we were dismissed shortly after. Everyone was either crying or in a state of shock. When we were getting ready for church Sunday morning we had the tv on and saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. I remember bursting into tears watching Jackie standing next to Johnson on the plane when he was sworn in and during the funeral when they had the riderless horse and Jackie leaned down and had John John salute when the coffin passed by.

I don't remember knowing why we were being sent home until on the school bus someone said that Kennedy had been shot.

When I arrived home, went right in to turn on the TV (which stayed on for days, it seemed),and then saw the events as they unfolded in real time. The things I remember that stood out are Walter Cronkite announcing that Kennedy had died, Jackie at the airport with her blood stained skirt, Oswald being led down a hall and claiming he was a "patsy," Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby.

In later days, I watched the funeral march, remember Jackie in her black coat and veil, John-John's salute when the flag-draped coffin passed by, the eternal flame being lit at Arlington....

Sad times....

I knew it wasn't some family tragedy, I'd seen that, so I, ever the pessimist, instantly jumped to the conclusion that nuclear missiles had been launched.

Beyond that JFK existed outside my autistic spectrum universe. I only hated seeing my parents upset.

I don't think we had a working television then.

I worked near the TV department. I stood in front of the TV there to see Cronkite make the announcement. We were shocked. People shopping left . After an hour or so the store was empty. Workers had to stay until 5, but there were no customers. The store was closed until Monday. Then Sunday morning we saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. Altogether a shocking time.

I was in the sixth grade and a classmate I was sitting close to burst into tears

It was a strange time after that.

We didn’t have the TV on for lunch, and only turned the radio on if there were sirens, so I was unaware of what happened. I briefly watched a kickball game which was incongruously going on in Iowa in late November.

My classmate, David Grundemeir, told me the President had been shot. This was probably within 15 minutes of the shooting. It was the age of TV westerns, so i asked, “Where did he get it, the arm?” Realty was about to obliterate fantasy when it came to gunshot wounds.

The bell rang soon after, and we trooped into the classroom. Mrs. Sogard had been teaching for nearly 40 years. She was too experienced, and too empathetic, to try to return to her lesson plan. There was one TV in the school. The 6th graders used it to watch a weekly show on Iowa history. It was kept in the principal’s office, and he was using it to monitor the situation.

I don’t know, for sure, but I think when he got the news from Walter Cronkite at 1:38 PM, he informed the 6th grade classroom, walked through it to the 5th grade room, and then around the corner and down the hall to tell my class, at 1:41 PM, that the President was dead.

Most of the next few minutes are lost to my memory, but school was dismissed at about 2 PM. I walked home with Pat Barrett and Joan Nelson. I recall that there was a dusting of snow on the ground, which hadn’t been there when we came in from lunch.

The next three days were a TV marathon culminating in the funeral. My little sister was not yet three, but she says she remembers that weekend clearly.

She mostly remembers everyone being very sad and the TV being on.

I can still hear Walter Cronkite's voice announcing the death of the president.

We were glued to the TV for the entire weekend. It was a terrible sad time.

Suddenly there was a scratchy, staticy sound coming from the loudspeaker on the wall, the one they used for announcements. After a moment the static resolved itself into a radio news report. Somebody in the principal's office had put a table radio next to the loudspeaker microphone. There were a few kids jumping around in the school halls, whooping it up and celebrating. I was not one of them.

They sent us home early that day. It was a Friday and for the whole weekend, there was nothing on TV except assassination and funeral coverage. LBJ being sworn in. Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby and the Texas School Book Depository building. A teary Jackie Kennedy still in her pink outfit. A 61-year-old memory of a blur of those kinds of images during those several days.

That's what I remember, y'all.

— Ron

It’s all still vivid

remember walking into the house and seeing my father watching the black and white TV with tears running down his cheeks.

I hope I get this right. My father worked as a reporter at the Modesto Bee. He recalled that they had a news wire of some kind that would ring once if there was a major breaking story. He said that around midday the wire began to ring and it just kept ringing, over and over again, and that's how he found out. My parents watched TV but I can't remember if they had their own TV or watched with neighbors.

I have more questions than answers.

Did most businesses shut down for a day or two? Did they give their employees time off to watch and grieve?

Did most Americans have television by that point?

Was Cronkite the only newsman live on air that day, or did other networks cover it too?

Was the coverage 24 hours a day, live day and night?

Did anyone listen to the radio? Did they have "all news radio" in 1963? Did some people glue themselves to radio the way they glued themselves to tv?

I LOVE reading all your recollections! It is so interesting.

Mr. Huntley commented on the field reports as they came in. About ten years ago, I accessed web archived videos of the NBC telecast.

Shortly after 1:30 PM EST, a radio feed was relayed to our second grade class via the public address speaker. We heard that the President had been shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, and that he was rushed to a hospital where was reported to be in critical condition. About a half hour later, the radio news feed stated that the president had died.

After that he kept a photo of JFK on his desk until the day he died (I have it now, it's very aged, it was clipped out of a magazine). My dad had heard JFK speak in Ann Arbor when he announced the idea of the Peace Corps, and since my father was Irish Catholic, that added to the devastation.

After that, JFK was essentially worshipped in our house for years. We all have pictures of him still up, and my sister has a whole Kennedy section on her bookshelf. When I went to college orientation many years later in the 1970s, I took along a JFK bio for the three days.

All that is to say that it had a profound effect on our family. I don't know that our young family was ever the same; some bitterness had set in. It took me until the 1990s not to tear up on the anniversary.

Because the parents hid newspapers from me.

When I got taken to Runnymede almost a couple of years later, it was "tribute to a past president".

(I was overseas. The first big tv event I recall was Churchill's funeral.)

At first, I thought it was a joke. Soon Found out it was a tragic and frightening situation. I remember the whole thing four days nonstop coverage on TV Oswald being shot. Everything burned deep in my 12 year old brain.

I went to a one-room school from K-6th grade. I was in the library painting a table green and listening to the transistor radio when the announcement came. I told my teacher and we spent the rest of the day listening to the radio. Everybody was crying. A high school play we were supposed to attend that evening was canceled and we spent the next three days glued to the TV and I saw my first murder on live TV a couple of days later. End of innocence.

... walking home with some friends across the golf course and discussing the tortures we'd like to submit the assassin to.

Watching TV for three days. Seeing Oswald murdered on TV live - the first time I ever saw death happen. "Ruby, you son of a bitch!", first swear I ever heard on TV. It was cloudy in Akron for those three days.

Very clear memories. I remember the seat I sat in during that study hall, A seat I never sat at before in my three years at Simon Perkins Jr High.

I was in the shower because I was getting ready to go spend the weekend with my friend's family on their farm. My mom came into the bathroom, yanked the shower curtain back, and said, "The President's been shot!" I couldn't believe it. I was in a state of total shock and just stood there in the shower until it started to run out of hot water. Then I got out, started to dry my hair, and went downstairs. The TV was on and my mother had maid coffee. We just sat there in silence watching Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. Then my friend showed up and she was crying her eyes out. Mom gave her a hug and a cup of coffee and sat her down and told her she couldn't drive until she stopped crying. Finally we got underway and drove the 45 miles to her home. Her family, normally so loud and boisterous, was somber, and just like at my house, the TV was on, even during dinner. Everywhere we went, that was the case---people were quiet, talked in hushed tones, and TVs were on. When we went back to Madison, I remember going to a service at the University on Bascom Hill. It was unbelievably quiet. Later I read that there were 10,000 people there. On Monday TVs were on everywhere as everyone watched the funeral. After that, life resumed but I don't think anyone or anything was quite ever the same.

Heard it on the intercom in our class room in my tiny Kansas hometown.
Still makes me kind of sick, all these years later..

My grandfather had died a few months prior and when I got home from school that day, my tough, strong little grandmother was curled up in a chair in front of the TV, sobbing.

Natural born duer even back then.

Another teacher came to our class and whispered the news to our teacher. We could tell by their faces that something was very wrong. Our teacher told us the news with tears streaming down her face, stammering to get out the words. I don’t remember if school was let out for the day but when I got home my mom was very upset and her face and eyes were red and swollen from crying. She had the TV on and we watched the news in silence.

My dad was a Marine and he worked with a couple guys who had been in the same outfit as Oswald. They told my dad that Oswald was too stupid to pull it off by himself. My dad maintained that Oswald was a patsy the rest of his life.

I often think of how much better our country would be if JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr. had lived to fulfill their legacies. Those assassinations set us back decades and changed the trajectory of our nation. Now we’re overrun by MAGAts. Makes me weep like I did in 1963.

Midafternoon we were told we were being dismissed to go home. No reason given. So we go through the dismissal routine and the buses are outside waiting just like usual. It was a big mystery, because back in the day we NEVER had early dismissal or days off in the middle of the school year, and it wasn't a holiday. Outside I saw the flag at half staff and asked a teacher why the flag was only half up. She told me that it meant someone important had died and to ask my parents. I immediately assumed it was my Grandparents who died, because they were important. And old (probably in their late 50's at the time). Got on the bus upset that my Grandparents died and heard from another kid that President Kennedy had died. My parents were Republicans, so I was afraid they would be glad he died. I didn't say anything when I got home because I didn't want to hear that they were glad. They weren't. They never really talked about around us (I was 5 and my sister was 3). Later that year I learned to read and I was obsessed with everything Kennedy. They could tear Life Magazine out of my cold, dead hands. Especially Caroline and John-John, who were my age and my sister's age. I couldn't imagine what it was like to have your father die at the age I was then.

your Republican parents were not glad!

As for

I remember my teacher crying as she told us the president was dead. Then the school sent us home early. The assassination was the only thing on TV, of course.

You have to open the web addy to see the image. II do not yet know how to bring an image from Bluesky to here on my cheap little.phone



https://bsky.app/profile/beschlossdc1776.bsky.social/post/3lbkkxzy6ak2l

I remember going to tell my mother, but not much after that.

I remember being sent home early from school. I remember breaking an Allen Sherman album in half because it had (I guess) a parody song about JFK.

But my most vivid memory came years later when I saw a replay of the funeral and the sound of the horses hoofs clopping on the ground stopped me in my tracks.

I remember one of my 9th-grade friends coming up to me in the lunch room and giving me the news of what had just happened in Dallas. Like it was yesterday...

I was in second grade.
My mom was on the phone with her best friend, and asked me to turn on channel 2 because her show was starting. (As The World Turns).
Just after I switched it, they broke in with the bulletin.
My mom, still on the phone, asks "What did they so?" I repeated what I heard and she told her friend "I have to go." hung up and ran into the TV room.
We watched it until my dad got home from work. Then we watched some more.
I remember it in detail, but I honestly can't remember if we ate that day.