Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

ER, gosh, you're a young 'un. I was a little girl (just shy of five), but remember it very clearly. I was in kinnygarten at a public school in Brooklyn, where my paternal unit was stationed at the time. It was during quiet time (lights off, kids with heads down on our desks) that our teacher came in and said the president had been shot, and that we should pray for him. (Geez, those were less contentious times; she probably would be sued by AUSCS over that today.)

At any rate, I distinctly remember my parents (most especially my mother) crying for the next three days. Just crying as she stood in front of the ironing board, ironing sheets.
 

tkux
I keep forgeting how young the rest of the world is. ER,you weren't born?

Now this is a Black Subject Indeed:

I was a freshman in a Baptist college on that day 42 years ago. I was walking up the stair well in my dorm going to my room after lunch when I first heard. At first we congregated around a radio in a dorm room and then went down to the lounge where the only TV in the dorm was located. We stood there in standing room only and watched Walter Cronkite as a black and white talking head be handed paper after paper as he tried to connect the facts and tell the story.

Occasionally Cronkite's voice quavered slightly. That is how we knew we were in real deep stuff.

In reference, you have to remember that this happened right after, the secrete invasion of Laos by Kennedy, carpet bombing of the plain of Jars, the Bay of Pigs, The Cuban missle crisis, the revelations that the CIA was behind the Cuban invasion and the public trials of the captured American-Cuban invaders in Cuba.We had seen the ICBM missle site photos of the Russians in Cuba. We had watched the Soviet ships be turned back on TV. Hawk missle anti-aircraft batteries were strung along the Gulf coast. The National Guard had been mobilized.
A year earlier I had watched an ICBM Atlas missle be raised out of its silo at Frederick Oklahoma, and sit there ready to go, in its mist of water and oxygen vapors.
Now the President has been shot, and now the President is dead, and now Johnson is President. What in the hell was going on? The President is dead. Who did it, was it the Russians, why was it done, was it Castro, what will happen next? We all asked ourselves and each other, could this be the beginning of the end of it all. Would they and we drop the bombs today? Life in America was frozen; no traffic, no classes, no business, no going, no coming, and nothing anywhere but news about what was happening. It was a long black day. Then the day extended for day after day.
 

I was in third grade, in Mrs. Davis' class. I remember every little detail about the day, about the room. We had just started class after recess when our principal, Mr. Smith, came to our classroom door and asked Mrs. Davis to come out to the hall. His face was ashen, his eyes filled with tears. They closed the door as they spoke.
When Mrs. Davis opened the door, she was hysterical. I thought she was laughing, at first. It was that maniacal kind of crying -- the high-pitched wail that comes with the kind of sorrow I had never seen at age 8.
Somehow, between the two of them, they managed to tell us the President had been shot, and school was cancelled and we should all go home. (In those days, it was understood that all of our mothers would be at home waiting for us, so it was absolutely natural that it would be safe for us to be sent home on our own.)

I walked the block and a half to my house, shaking more than the November cold would account for. My mom wrapped me up in a big hug and just held me tight. She was anxiously waiting for my brother's school bus to bring him home. He attended special school across town so it took longer for him to come home.

When he arrived, we sat on the floor in our living room, alternating between playing with a large cardboard box and listening to the bad, bad news on our 12-inch black-and-white television. Walter Cronkite was the main source of our information for days and days.

My childish mind tried to put all of this together, and I did have a pretty good understanding of what was happening. I didn't have enough context, though, at the time to understand just how rare and significant an assassination of a President was. At 8, you don't know if this is something that happens when someone gets mad at the President, or if this is how leadership changes hands, or if it is indeed the historically significant disaster it was.

I came to understand it better during the days that blurred together -- seeing Lee Harvey Oswald killed right in front of me; seeing John-John salute his father's casket as the horses carried it. Seeing Jacqueline Kennedy veiled, holding on to her children, trying to maintain her dignity as she, too, tried to absorb what had happened to her husband, the father of her children, the President.

I remember hearing the sound clips of Johnson taking the oath of office on the plane.

I remember crying for days.
 

I was eight years old and in the third grade the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Returning to school from lunch, I was told by my best friend that the president had been shot. The reality of such news can be lost on a child of that age and that was certainly true in my case. Later the principal made the announcement confirming that President Kennedy had died and instructing all of us to go home.

It was back in the dark ages before schools dispatched crisis counselors to assist grieving students. Looking into the eyes of the teachers, they would have been the ones in most need of consoling. They were all stricken. It was the kind of unspeakable pain and the type of sadness that a child fears seeing in adults.

I was deeply saddened as well, but what sticks with me to this day, is how it affected all the adults that I loved and looked up to. It was a period of national grieving matched only in my memory by the attacks of 9/11.
 

I, too was born after this event. I've often heard people say, much as the posters here, that they always remembered where they were. Often folks tell of grieving. My Dad was at the Naval Academy when this happened. He's told me how he was on his way to class when an upper-classman passed the word on to him. He told me how it numbed him. Likewise, Mama tells of hearing it on her car radio on her way to/from the job she was working.

What was so different about that time in our history? Why was there so much support for that president? If Bush were picked off today, or had it been Clinton picked off in 1998, would many people care? I'm sure there'd be lip-service paid, even from his political enemies. But would the general public care? Surely the public wouldn't grieve (for Bush or any successive president). When did the change occur where the President of the United States became just another man? With Nixon? Before? After?

These are questions that I ponder every year around the anniversary of JFK's death. Can any of you older folks shed some light on this for a youngster?
 

I think if Bush were assasinated it would have a massive emotional effect on America. Much like 9-11.

But it is hard to impart the absolute fear we felt then, that total distruction may be happening TODAY.
That was a large part of why America simply stopped for a while. Not just Grief but uspoken undefined Fear.
That would not be the case today.

The mythology of JFK has obscured the fact that he was not the "universally beloved president" the day he died. I had a friend who attended school in Ft. Worth, Texas tell me that her Sophmore math class cheered when the news that JFK was shot came to them.
I have a newspaper EXTRA from Dallas from that afternoon. Of course all they did was replace the front and back pages with assasination news. The interior of the paper still has articles that damn JFK for his policies and critize him.
One of the reasons it took so long to get the JFK/6th Floor museum done in Dallas was that many of the people in Dallas in that age group didn't think it was a worth while thing to have a Kennedy museum.
JFK was young, he had a perfect wife, he had cute little children, it was made to order mythology.
Within months the movie "Years of Lightning, Day of Drums" was playing everywhere. Much of what people think they remember from the day or the days following the assasination is actually from the movie as it began to mythologize JFK. It wasn't till after his death that his administration was dubed "Camelot"
 

Life was very, very different in 1963. I don't know if those of you born later could possibly understand since you were truly born into a different era. The world changed profoundly from 1963 to 1969. Those are years unlike any other in American or world history.

Socially, in 1963 we were still living in a time I refer to as the Eisenhower era -- we were the Leave It to Beaver generation. Life was a little more formal. People treated one another with respect. Titles were used -- Mr. and Mrs., not first names. Clothing was a means of expressing that respect, too, not just a fashion statement or a matter of being covered. Men wore suits; women wore dresses; girls wore dresses or skirts and blouses; boys wore slacks and button-down shirts. Grooming mattered. Hair was combed and neatly cut.

It is my opinion that these social conventions were continued during that time because of the traditional nuclear family -- Mom, Dad and two kids. Moms stayed home and were the rock-hard center of the culture, teaching children the social skills and conventions. Economically it was a time when one breadwinner was sufficient to support a family -- partly because we were not such a consumer culture then. We were content with the 12-inch B&W television. We were happy to have one car. No stereos, no microwaves, no computers.

As a society, our sources of information were radio, Walter Cronkite, Huntly and Brinkley, Howard K. Smith... and the hometown newspaper.

Community meant something. Schools didn't have the problems with out-of-control students. Drugs were not an issue. ADD didn't exist because we didn't live off of junk food and sugar. We had real meals, with real food, made by real moms and served at real dinner tables.

And then, the 1960s happened. JFK's death was the turning point. Society was shaken to its core. We entered the Vietnam War. Women started entering the work force, and not like the past. They were there to stay this time.

Civil rights issues came to the forefront. Equality became a definining issue for the country. That's where the biggest cultural war was fought.

Families changed. Fewer dads were part of the picture. Moms were away from home, too, working. Latchkey kids increased, becoming the new norm. And with that came all kinds of problems mixed in with all kinds of opportunities. A consumer economy developed to compensate -- can't be with the kids? Buy more toys.

With the intense social issues bringing pressure to bear on the country, we reached a turning point. There were more assassinations -- Robert Kennedy; Martin Luther King Jr.

Life is just different now.
 

Trixie is right on the money.
But you forgot Malcom X.

There are those who say that the world changed on 9-11. I can gaurantee you that the World really did change with JFK's assasination. In many ways it is the pre-JFK years that our social conservatives want to return to.
Not only is there no way back, there is nothing back there to go to.
 

Historically, U.S. presidents had been shot before. Assassinations had been attempted -- by people who walked right up and fired.

Perhaps, as with 9/11, the shock of the JFK incident (meshed of course with the political sendup to it) was the sneak-attack aspect of it. The shot ringing out from who knew where.

While I don't remember this from the actual day (I do recall being sent home from school and the eery silence that enveloped EVERYTHING for several days), I do recall being mesmerized by photos in a 1,000 Days book my mother ordered. Women standing along the parade route lying on top of their children. I asked, what on Earth is THAT?

Think about that for a second. A shot rings out. Everyone dives for cover. There the entourage was in an open car riding through Dallas.

Was it naivete to have the Secret Service running alongside the car, protecting from the close range?

For all our sophistication, we didn't seem to think about anyone using an airplane as a flying bomb all those many years later, either.
 

I was in 7th grade math class when I heard the news. I was teacher's pet of Mr. Emerson, my math teacher, something I never understood since I was a horrible student. I hated math and I was a disipline problem. Our principle was a distant relative of President Kennedy. His name was T. R. Kennedy.

I remember the grief people all around me were experiencing, but at 11 years old, I didn't fully appreciate the gravity of the situation. At least not until a few days later when i saw the powerful image of John John saluting his dad's casket as it went by.

On a lighter note, Emo Phillips said people always ask, "Where were you when President Kennedy was assisnated? Well, I don't have an alibi!"
 

I wasn't not yet born then by much: May 2, 1964, 6 weeks or so early -- hours after Mama ER drove a big flatbed hay truck in the field, so I'm told. But that's another story.

I think Rem underestimates what would happen if we lose another president in a similar manner.

Suddenly, the president would be subsumed by the presidency, and with his personal perceived failings then as dead as the man, most of us -- minus the few true radicals -- woul grieve for the national loss, if not the actual man. But most people would grive for the man, too.
 

This happened seven years before I was born, so nothing to say there. But think of all the other life-definers that have happened since.
For those of us in the Northwest, it's more like "Where were you when Mt. St. Helens erupted?" I've seen it erupt four times in my life, actually, but wasn't there when the really big one (that killed people) went.
Then Reagan getting shot. This wasn't a life-defining moment as such, but represented a turning point in me, and maybe in American culture. My fourth grade class actually cheered, despite my teacher who was yelling, "YOU'RE ALL HORRIBLE PEOPLE!" But Reagan had not been kind to the farmers, remember.
The space shuttle Challenger explosion. Another changing point In which we had to admit that we couldn't do everything right all the time, and that accidents happen, and above all else-buy your o rings from a decent contractor.
All the other ones tend to be personal...We've already talked about 9/11...I don't know what my Dad was doing 42 years ago on this day (working for Associated Press in L.A., I believe), but my Mom was working in a bank in Salem, Oregon.
As she put it,"I got on my Vespa scooter, went home and cried all weekend."
 

Challenger explosion was a big one for me: Heard the news walking through the TV lounge in Bennett Hall at Oklahoma State.

I started paying close attention to those around me and how they were dealing with it. Took some notes.

Went on in to the college paper, where I was headed anyway, and wrote a local reax story.

It was the first of more localizations on national and international news than I can now remember. Newswise, that was the first time I got a piece of a national story.

I also remember feeling reminded that we, as a species, were not, in fact, as smart as we thought we were.
 

A snot-nosed kid's recollection of Challenger:

In north Forida where I grew up, we obviously didn't have 'snow days'. We did have 'cold days' though. Cold days were days when we were well below freezing, such that the pipes froze. I probably had a half dozen 'cold days' through 12 years of school. Anyway, the day the Challenger blew up, we had a cold day (I was in seventh grade). Being as it was too cold to go outside and do anything, we were inside. As kids, we just wanted to watch TV. All we kept seeing were images of the Challenger. My sisters and I went from shocked and a little sad to bored stiff in relatively short order. I remember my youngest sister asking Mama "why the space shuttle had to blow up today". So, yeah, I remember that day pretty well, but if we weren't having a 'cold day', it probably would have been a day indistiguishable from any other.
 

Yep, can't outsmart the weather.

NASA again wasn't smart enough to realize it wasn't so much Morton-Thiokol as it was JANUARY in Florida.

Ergo, Columbia disaster.
 

My entire fifth grade class was squeezed into one room to watch the Columbia liftoff. Although none of our teachers had even applied for the program, they were all very excited that "one of them" was going to be in space.
We were all quite stunned when the explosion happened--the cloud of smoke and debris didn't look real.

I'd never seen a teacher cry, much less had three of them standing there with tears running down their faces, but no one went home from school because of it. We just had an unsceduled recess while the teachers pulled themselves together.
 

Challenger.
 

Columbia was the shuttle that broke up over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003.

I still remember Apollo 1 burning on the launch pad in January 1967, killing Grissom, White and Chaffee. Ah, but I also remember how proud we were as Americans of the space program.
 

Urgh. Brain fried by work. Sorry.