My mom and I were living in Lawton OK.in 1963 while my dad was in Vietnam as an “adviser”.
I was in 1st grade at John Adams elementary school. A big kid came in our classroom and said the president had been shot. Our teacher left, came back and said it wasn't true. Then the same kid came in and said president was dead. The teacher said it wasn’t true. Being clueless 6 year olds we went with her assessment, although it was unsettling to hear the teacher in the next room sobbing so loudly. Then they said we were all going home early. When my mom picked me up I asked her why the car radio was playing church music. She said the president was dead.
I was in the second grade at Forest Hill Elementary School in Ft. Worth, Texas. The teacher came in and said the president was dead. We all thought, "President? Is he like the principal?" I remember it as being a bright and crisp day and I remember the TV coverage the following days and the funeral.
Sitting in my 1956 Chev. eating a Dairy Queen burger and curly fries when waiting to go back to the field as chainman on a Texas Highway Department survey crew running centerline on an F.M. Road. I was listening to the radio when the radio station broke in with the news.
All I remember is the funeral on TV instead of The Lone Ranger cartoon.
about three months away from being conceived
No school buses for parochial schools back then, so I was walking from school to the nearest point the chartered bus was allowed to come, due to city franchise restrictions.
Minot Air Force Base, 1st grade. My dad was a B-52 Pilot.
I was working in a Owens-Corning factory, in Newark, Ohio. My first son had been born 9 days before.
They came over the PA system, an announced first that JFK had been shot, and later when he died. Both times the whole factory became silent, except for the hum of the machinery, all 'human noise' ceased, to a deadly quiet.
3 yrs old, in LaPorte, Indiana. No memories.
RWhere were you when JFK was assassinated?
We had just returned from lunch and were doing a practice traverse on the front lawn of the FDOT training center in Gainesville, Florida. Col. Epps came out and said he had heard the President had been shot so he was going home to check the news on TV with his wife. He left a student named Romano in charge (amazing what we can remember after 50 years). We drifted over to our cars and I turned on the radio in time to hear Walter Cronkite saying the President had been assassinated (but I was still thinking of an attempted assassination), and they would play Beethoven’s funeral oration. That’s when it hit me. All those years ago and it was like yesterday.
Pooping my diaper in a farmhouse in Lynn County, Texas.
I just turned 13 the month before and I was in the 8th grade at St.Nick’s R.C school in Passaic, NJ but..
I did not go to school that day. I awoke in the morning and something just did not feel right with me. I asked to stay home and I did. I was watching the b&w tv when the bulletins flashed. I was home alone. My mother was at work and called about an hour later after JFK was pronounced dead and asked if I knew and if I was doing OK.
Got a call from one of my school friends that night and he told me how fortunate I was that I missed school that day.
At school, they gathered the whole school in the church and the monsignor and a priest gave everyone absolution…in case the Ruskies were about to drop the ‘big one’ on them.
All the girls were sobbing throughout and the boys were speculating on what happened to JFK since no details were given to them.
I was 10 years old. I was home from school that day with strep throat.
Andy
8th grade Social Studies class, Crosby Junior High School, Pittsfield, MA.
Me, too. I am a 1956 model. I remember the nation in mourning and the horse-drawn carriage at the funeral procession.:-(
8th grade at St. Pauls parochial grade school/prison getting my daily beating from Sister Francis. :excruciating:
JFK assassination-did anybody else have a paper route?
Sixth grade music class. Hearing the news, our teacher came apart and a couple of us students had to take her to the nurse's office. The School Nurse wasn't in any better shape. The Principal let school out. We all walked home thinking that a nuclear war was fixing to happen (you had to had lived it to understand it).:pinch:
My brother and I were the local paperboys. Usually there were fifty daily newspapers in a bundle. I believe that was a Thursday, the papers were so thick there were twenty to a bundle. That Sunday there were only five papers to a bundle. I still have one of the Sunday papers. We worked our butts off and people were waiting outside for us to deliver the 'news'.
It was really an axis in American life. None of us realized it at the time, but America was forever changed; much like September 11.
Seems like it was yesterday.
In Quitman, Texas our 5th grade class was gathered in the social area outside the principal's office watching live TV coverage.
8th grade... woodshop class
But you probably deserved it. 🙂
