> My mom and I were living in Lawton OK.in 1963 while my dad was in Vietnam as an “adviser”.
I was only 3 and probably wondering where my Mom was since she had just abandoned me and Dad. Not likely I knew about, nor cared, the President and certainly didn't now who or what that was.
> I was in 1st grade at John Adams elementary school.
Funny you would mention John Adams elementary. That was my first school in 65 that I started at age 4. That was in Decatur, IL where we moved after Dad graduated from pharmacy school.
Took me a while to think about this.
E
I was working for the Bureau of Reclamation and at that time my crew and I were locating section corners and making intersection ties on a 230kv transmission line survey that started at the Dave Johnson Power Plant near Glenrock, Wyoming and ran to a substation near Stegall, Nebraska. We were in the vicinity of Douglas, Wyoming and had finished up for the day. We went to Douglas and parked the Dodge Power Wagon at the hotel. I had my car there and we were going the 50 miles back to Casper that night instead of staying at the hotel. Anyway, we headed to Casper, turned on the radio and heard the news saying that Kennedy had been shot earlier in the day and had died. It was shocking news after having had a successful day finding corners and making land ties.
On that day in 1963 I was assigned a flight. The aircraft was a B-47E, tail number was 53-2141, at Schilling AFB, Salina, Kansas. Our takeoff was 10 in the morning. The flight was eight hours duration, route was Schilling to Pawnee City and there refueling with a KC-135, after the refuel on to Des Moines and a celestial navigation leg to Casper. On to Pierre at low level for some low altitude bomb runs on a RBS site. Then back to Goodland, Kansas for some high altitude bomb runs on LaJunta, Colorado RBS site. Then on back to Schilling, landing a little after dark. An uneventful day, just like any day in SAC.
When we landed the navigator was first out of the plane and went to get his vehicle and would pick us up to get our vehicles. We waited and waited for him. The aircraft commander was getting a bit on the peeved side. Finally the navigator returned with his vehicle and the first words out of his mouth were, “The President has been shot and is dead.” We were silent and just stared at one another. Went to debriefing with the maintenance section and then debriefed the mission with operational folks. Of course we had a thousand questions about the death of the president.
All during our flight nobody said a word on the radio to us about the shooting of the president. Thinking back we all decided that it was an unusually quiet day for radio chatter back and forth between the tanker and the RBS sites as we progressed through the mission. On our initial contacts with FAA controllers we usually started with a good day greeting and of course the controllers would respond with a good day to us, that was not the case this day, everybody was curt and precise. As we though back we remarked to each other that we had noticed the radio chatter was extremely proper that day with no talking that was not necessary.
We had flown the whole flight without knowing what had happened in Texas. I would have thought at least one controller or one of the RBS scoring folks would have said something about the shooting. We, of course, were using our regular radio chatter but no one would respond. I suppose we left a trail of people thinking we were a mighty crass crew to be chattering away like nothing had happened with the president lying dead in Texas.
Jerry M. Davis
B-47 Combat Crew Member 1960 -- 1965
I was in 3rd grade at Central Elementary School in Boise, ID.
It was lunch time and the news came over the loud speaker.
I don't remember much more than that.
> All during our flight nobody said a word on the radio to us about the shooting of the president. Thinking back we all decided that it was an unusually quiet day for radio chatter back and forth between the tanker and the RBS sites as we progressed through the mission.
Jerry - that's interesting. Yesterday on the radio they were talking to a gal who was a telephone operator at the time and she said that all of a sudden, a little after 12:30 central time, all the phone activity went hauntingly quiet. Like completely dead, which she's never seen before or since.
Being SAC, were you ever at Carswell AFB? From 65 to 69 we lived in Ft. worth just off base in River Oaks. My dad was an army liaison officer at the time. I can sleep through anything after being just across the wire from a SAC base during the cold war. They did a lot of night time practice scrambles during those years.
Mike,
I was not at Carswell in 1965. I was there for three days in the late part of 1964 to get fitted for a pressure suit and an altitude chamber ride to check the fit of the pressure suit. That was done to enter the U-2 Program in early 1965 at Davis-Monthan AFB at Tucson. I went by Carswell for fuel a couple of times on cross county flights while I was in the U-2 Program. We were dual qualified in the U-2 and the T-33. The qualifications in the T-33 were for proficiency flying and check rides. We had no proficiency flights in the U-2. We had no two seat U-2 aircraft at that time. The current U-2 program has the T-38 as the companion plane. They have 2 seat U-2 aircraft now, so they can get check rides in the U bird.
Jerry M. Davis
Okay, I have an air-tight alibi. I was in Austin in an elementary school classroom, in the 6th grade. President Kennedy was scheduled to speak here at a fundraising dinner that was to be held at the Municipal Auditorium that evening. Steaks were on the menu. Obviously, that didn't happen.
I missed all the news coverage because my family had planned a trip to Mexico that Thanksgiving and the day after the assassination we were on the road in a 1962 Ford Station Wagon driving from Austin to Mexico City. What surprised me was how well liked President Kennedy was in Mexico. "Kennedy, Bang! Bang!", with a baleful shake of the head was what I recall from Saltillo. The Alliance for Progress was an initiative of the Kennedy administration, but I'm thinking the fact he was a Catholic was more in play.
Thanksgiving in Mexico City was unfortunately forgettable, even if the city wasn't. The market in Toluca with mostly Indian vendors was so far removed from events in the US that the assassination seemed to have occurred in another world, as in fact it had.
I might have been one of the last people in the USA to know what was going on.
Just turned 19, I was rear chainman on a county highway crew in northern Minnesota. I was dozing in the back seat of the truck (a brand-new '64 International Travelall) after lunch. There was no radio. One of the highway foremen drove up and talked to Ed, the party chief, but I didn't hear what he said. Ed was a tough character who had lost an eye in the D-Day landings. In his mind I was a raw recruit who didn't deserve to be told anything except what to do next. He said nothing to me. Stan, the head chainman, never spoke at all on the job unless Ed started the conversation.
Ed had climbed a steep hill above the Normandy beach under German fire, while prodding the man ahead of him with his bayonet to encourage him to keep moving. He was the kind of guy who would complete the mission no matter what. We went back to work. It was not as cold as it could get up there, but it was down around zero. We were chaining through brush, setting lath on the centerline of a new road alignment. There was about 4 inches of snow on the ground, and every time I took a step the wind blew fragments of snow crust forward along the line. Stan made a few quiet remarks about "..those little kids without their dad." I began to wonder what it was about, but we kept on chaining.
On the way back to the office, we passed some flags at half-staff. "He must have died," Ed said. "Who died?" I asked. "The President!" Ed said loudly. He seemed very angry. I wasn't sure I had heard him right, since it was so hard to believe. And you didn't ask Ed to repeat himself or explain things. We parked the truck at the office. I climbed out and headed home. On the way I stopped and bought a paper. Only then did I know.
