Through a 5-year-old’s eyes
In the fall of 1963, I was a 5-year-old student in Miss Trogdon’s morning kindergarten class at Trailwood Elementary School in Overland Park, Kan. One Friday in November, I walked home from school as usual, arriving around lunchtime and entering my house to see Mom crying in front of the television. I had never seen her cry before.
She told me that President Kennedy had been shot. I could hardly understand what this word meant, but if it made my mother cry, it clearly was earth-shattering.
All four of Mom’s Catholic grandparents emigrated from Ireland in the mid-1800s. The election of a dashing young Irish Catholic president was a point of pride for them and their children, as it was for so many Americans like us. His assassination felt like a death in the family.
Two days later, my mother walked in to see me sitting before the television. On screen, the president was lying in state in the U.S. Capitol, his casket beneath the magnificent rotunda, surrounded by a steady stream of dignitaries and visitors. I was drawing a picture of what I saw—a casket covered by a flag, a building, a larger flagpole dominating the scene.
My mother asked me to write my name on the picture, then added her own handwritten label: “Timmy K—Nov. 24, 1963.” She put it in a folder—she kept one for each of her three sons with class pictures, report cards, school awards—and there it stayed for 50 years.
In the fall of 2013, my parents sold the family home so they could move to a smaller one-level apartment near our neighborhood. My wife Anne and I visited them that Thanksgiving to celebrate the holiday and help clean out the house. Mom had found the drawing during the cleanup and gave it back to me on the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. I had no memory of the picture. Nov. 24 is our wedding anniversary.
I do recall, as if it were yesterday, the shock of seeing my mother cry. And I remember how that shocking day was followed by so many others— the Vietnam War omnipresent, civil rights marchers violently attacked, the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the resignation of a disgraced U.S. president. The outside world during my childhood seemed marked with chaos and tragedy.
But through those years, I also found hope in seeing young people pushing back against chaos and despair. They were marching, campaigning, protesting, organizing and gaining the right to vote for 18-year-olds. They were reminding us of the things we had been promised about our country, just as young people do today. Time and again, their advocacy lifted the gloom. And I’ve never forgotten that.