O. T. Where were you when you heard?

[Steven]

I'll never forget, but that's mostly because, for me, there's nothing TO forget. I wasn't even a glimmer of an idea yet. I was born 5 years later.

Steven

[WhistlingGypsy]

Could I forget?

I wear short trousers, those long gray flannel English style which sting my thighs and I hate them. But I'm ok, with my 9th birthday in a couple days.

It's the evening in Paris, and my Mom brought me to a concert at the Palais des Sports. Ironically, it's the Choirs and Dances of the Red Army--they were a big hit in that time, and did an impressive show.

It is already past the intermission.

A man walks on the scene in the mid of a song, hands a paper to the conductor. The music stops, and a man turns to us for an announcement. I don't remember for sure whether he's French or has a Russian accent. He slowly tells in a few words that, in Dallas, Texas, at such and such time, the President of the United States of America, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was mortally shot.
The theatre is packed. It was deadly silent from the start of this interruption and I don't know what word triggers a single, long, moaning sigh. Then we immediately stand up, while the Soviets start playing the American Hymn.

The evening mood is ruined. I don't really understand what it's all about, but sense most grown-ups are gloomy.

After that I don't remember exactly. The next images I conjure are from a black and white TV. There's that kid doing a military salute before a coffin. Also, a confused, dark, indoors scene where Jack Ruby kills Lee Oswald.

I've seen some find it good fashion to diss "Camelot" in the US, but here JFK was the best ambassador America ever had.

No I'm gone all goosebumpy!!! Great description Zub.

I was 6 years old in the kitchen of my old home in Roscommon, Ireland when it was announced on the wireless.

[jbarter]

I was 8 years old and in the cinema with my mother. The screen went blank and then a hastily written sign was projected upside down. Everybody twisted round to try to read it. Then it came back the right way up and nobody really beleived it. We all thought it was a Candid Camera gag or something. When nothing like that happened everyone started leaving to try to find out if it was true. It took an awful long time to realise it had really happened.

[bozemanhc]

I was at work. (As a young man, of course)

[Nanohedron]

At school; 4th grade, I think it was. I don't recall details other than the palpable general shock, and a freeze-frame of viewing the school building and playground from outside a cyclone fence surrounding it. Even my parents had nothing to say (very hardline Republicans --Dad was even flirting with the John Birch Society at the time...but he got better, thanks). It was like a bad dream.

[DCrom]

At home, watching TV. I was four at the time, and it's my first memory of something outside my immediate surroundings.

I remember watching, over, and over again, footage of the parade and its end; newsmen on TV looking grave; Ruby's attack on Oswald; and Kennedy's funeral.

Of them all, the funeral made the deepest impression at the time. The flag covered casket, the riderless horse, the family standing at graveside. I knew something Very Bad had happened, and I wasn't quite sure what would happen next; up until then Bad Things were something that happened in stories, not real life. But seeing his children - kids like me! - standing at his graveside showed that these things really *could* happen.

[fancypiper]

Meridian Mississippi in basic jet training. I had just dropped jet training after realizing that after advanced and fighter training came Vietnam and actually getting shot at) and awaiting orders to airborne early warning and electronics countermeasure school.

I think that was when I actually became an adult and thought about the future.

[janice]

Sitting in the reading circle in Miss Nicolas's first grade class....the principal announced it over the loudspeaker. It still seems surreal.

[lddulcimer]

I was in 2nd grde... I rememember a teacher coming in, looking shaken, whispering to our teacher, then leaving. Our teacher instructed us to put our heads down on our desks and have a quiet time. She then left the room. We heard her and the other teachers whispering in the hallway...lots of sobbing. We were peeking out from under our folded arms, looking at each other and wondering what the heck was going on.

A few minutes later, the teacher came back into the room and said the principal was going to make an announcement. It seemed like almost immediately after that, he came on the loudspeaker, and choked with emotion, told us that the president had been shot and killed. It was like a sledgehammer to the stomach.

From that point on I remember deafening silence throughout the school - a heaviness, punctuated only by the sounds of various teachers crying ... some openly sobbing and trying (not too successfully) to hide it from the children. Not long after that the busses showed up, and we were all unexpectedly sent home early. I remember coming home and finding my mom sitting in a chair in the living room crying. My Dad came home that night and was unusually somber. I seem to remember watching Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on TV, but I am not sure. I have seen the footage so many times over the years I can't be sure when I first saw it. I do remember for days it seemed like the only face on TV was Walter Chronkite.

[LeeMarsh]

I was 10 and had just returned from living a couple of years in Australia. I'd started to follow J.F.K while in school at Geelong Prep, in Australia. I'd heard, read, or watched a number of speeches. I'd read, with difficulty, PT109. President Kennedy was the first political leader I had come to admire. A dreamer, an idealist, that challenged us to became the greater nation we could be.

When I heard he was killed in Dallas, I first thought it must be a mistake, later in the day, I can remember feeling disoriented because assasination just wasn't what America was about. I was also a little ashamed, being born in Texas, that my fellow Texans had failed to protect our President, the leader of the free world. Finally, I felt robbed, the man I thought would be the greatest President all time, was taken away.

In later years, many an hour was spent with friends, exploring the what-ifs that a decade of assassination had expunged. We not only lost what those leaders: John, Bobby, and Martin, could have accomplished. We lost hundreds of dreamers and idealists. John F. Kennedy had challenged the youth of the 60's to "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." A decade later, disheartened many cautioned that the youth of the 70's should ask not what your country can for you; but, what your country will do to you.

And some of us retreated from politics, into other forms of service, opting to keep simple and local the vision and message ...

[Tom Dowling]

As I recall, it was a Friday. I was a high school senior, attending school in Kingston, New York. Because I worked weekends and because my last period was a study hall, I had permission to leave school at about 2:15 p.m. on Fridays. I generally hitch-hiked the roughly 30 miles of Route 209 from Kingston to Ellenville, where I worked weekends at a resort hotel. (It was still safe to hitch-hike then and I always managed to get there in time to set up for and serve dinner.) I believe we got the first reports just before I left school and heard the rest on the radio with whomever I got a lift that day. The hotel was not festive that weekend. There is an interesting irony in that I had the honor of shaking hands with President Kennedy's brother, Robert, at the same hotel a few years later. He was then in the early stages of what most likely would have been a succesful bid for the office previously held by his brother. Shortly thereafter, he too would die at the hands of an unbalanced man.

In my lifetime the assassin's bullet has twice robbed this country of potentially great--though no doubt flawed--leaders. It could be argued that we have also been robbed of potential leaders by other means as well. There is little doubt, for example, that Nixon's 'Dirty Tricks' boys issued the infamous 'Canuck Letter,' which effectively ended the very credible candidacy of Edmund Muskie and left the Democrats with an un-electable slate. I think there may be an even more recent example of thwarting the popular will, but it slips my mind just now.........

Tom D.