General Discussion

I was home from school that day because I was not feeling well. Around 11:30 am, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen for lunch, feeling a little better. Then I laid down on the couch with the TV tuned to Grouch Marx on NBC.

So I saw the first bulletin of unconfirmed shots fired at the president's motorcade. The regular programming was interrupted again a few times for updates until it was confirmed that the president had been shot. Then it was continuous news coverage for the rest of the weekend.

I had some idea of what we lost, but learned much more as I got older. I was 10 during most of the campaign in 1960 and 11 in January when he was inaugurated. I was in 6th grade. My school brought a TV into the auditorium so we could watch the inauguration during lunch. We usually went home for lunch at 11:30 am but were allowed to bring food to eat in our classrooms before going to watch the ceremony. Afterward, our teacher held a discussion about the ceremony and speech.

I remember seeing JFK's televised press conferences and the Cuban Missile Crisis. My oldest brother was in the Navy and at the blockade, so my family followed it closely. I took a forbidden transistor radio to school to listen to the UN discussions with the radio hidden under my blouse and a wire running up under my hair to listen through an ear bud. My civics teacher caught me when I did not answer when called on. I said I was listening to US Ambassador Stevenson at the UN so he had me turn up the sound so the class could listen, too.

You might not remember this, but a comedian named Vaughn Meeder made an LP record on the Kennedy family that was hilarious. He imitated Jack's voice and Boston accent perfectly. Our civics teacher played it for us in class. The next month, the president was dead.

My city and neighborhood were predominantly Roman Catholic. The two largest ethnic groups in the city were Italian and Polish. My family was German Lutheran. I did not know until years later that Protestants were the majority in the country. Students and teachers came to school on Ash Wednesday with ashes. Protestants did not do ashes then. In junior and senior high, the cafeteria offered fish for lunch on Fridays and a smaller, separate line for non Catholics students who wanted meat.

There were other cultural and ethnic groups -- Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, a Conservative Jewish temple, Irish, Asian Indians who were Muslim, several African Americans who were mostly Baptist, Pentacostal, or Evangelical.

The city was large enough to have a variety of people, often grouped in neighborhoods, but small enough that we intermixed in junior and senior high schools.