I was a small-town second-grader on November 22, 1963. My teacher, Jackie Grant, told the class that the president had been shot and killed, and then we all went home. For me, home was a block away from the classroom door, but my mother still drove to the school to pick me up, and my family spent much of the rest of the long weekend watching television. That much I remember, but I have no direct recollections of any of the TV images, except for this: I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk just before Oswald was shot, and returned to the living room to find chaos on the screen.I am three years older than Terry, but I identify more with him than the boomer stereotype he describes. Perhaps that is because I am female and didn't have the Vietnam draft hanging over me. Perhaps it's because I grew up reading Robert Heinlein novels. Who knows.
Anyway - where was I on November 22, 1963? I was in 4th grade at Walnut Hill Elementary School in Dallas, TX. It's still there - a pretty mission-style building with a red tile roof. I stopped by when I visited Dallas for my 30th high school reunion a few years ago. It was hot, and the end of the school day. Doors were open and adults and children going in and out. I walked right into the auditorium - dusky red upholstered pop-up seats and heavily varnished wood floors - and immediately flashed back 40 years. Here was where I lost the school spelling bee on "awry." Here was where we were all assembled on November 22nd, 1963, and the principal explained to us that the President had been shot (he hadn't been confirmed dead at that point) and we were all sent home. Those were the days when a kid could walk home from school alone, which I did.
I don't remember much about the next few days, except that the TV was on continuously with news coverage and all the grownups were preoccupied. I do not remember seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. I do remember the endless funeral procession, and finding the whole thing very tedious.
For me, the Kennedy assassination was significant because I grew up in Dallas, the scene of the crime. This was the first assassination of any American politician in decades, much less a sitting president. The condemnations and analyses of Dallas were viscious. For the next five years at least it was shameful to be from Dallas. Just living there at the time of the assassination you shared the taint.
Days after President John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were gunned down here in November 1963, Brigadier General Herbert Hall, retired in Tucson, folded a large certificate into an envelope and mailed it to the mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell. Over the words "Honorary Citizen of Dallas," a title given to him by city fathers during the Korean War days of 1951, Hall had scrawled: "Returned with shame and sorrow."I remember every time our family took a vacation, and my brother and I got to playing with some kids we met wherever we were, as kids do, someone would ask where we were from. "Um, America." "Yeah, I know. Where in America?" "Um, Texas." "Where in Texas?" (Muttered) "Um, Dallas." "Eeuuw. You people shot the President!"
The Kennedy assassination shocked the world, but it shamed Dallas. The city immediately felt the sting of the nation's revulsion. It was scorned as a nest of rightist bigots and Kennedy haters, and even branded as somehow complicit in the president's death. For years afterward, Dallas, a brash, proud place that has always strained to hold its head a little higher than its Texas neighbors, treated its darkest days with a stunned denial and shrank from honoring the slain president.
(Maybe that's why I didn't buy into the boomer malaise. Not only was I a child of Holocaust refugees, I was also a native Dallasite. By the time I hit the politically and socially turbulent late 60s, I knew all about scapegoating and I had a mean bullshit detector. If anyone would like to get a statistical sample of Dallas kids and check out this hypothesis, let me know what you find out.)
I have heard vague references to the feelings of vulnerability of the Dallas Jewish community, especially after Ruby's murder of Oswald, but I don't remember my parents saying anything specific about it. They and their tight-knit group of Mittle European immigrants in the wholesale apparel business must have all been terrified, wondering if pogroms were about to erupt. After all, the assassination of a Nazi official by a Jew was the pretext for Kristallnacht. But I went back to school, everything settled down, and aside from the lingering despising of Dallas - which evaporated after the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations showed that such a thing could happen anywhere - everything went back to normal.
UPDATE: Gary - a mere five year old at the time - also got impatient with the endless TV coverage.
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