A look back at that dreadful day

It’s true. People of a certain age remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.

Unlike other schoolchildren, I did not have to be sent home from school that afternoon. I was already home because of the way our seventh-grade classes were scheduled. My group of baby boomers was large, and we overwhelmed the system.

The East St. Louis school district lacked adequate space for us in the three junior high schools. The Board of Education instituted a platoon system for the entering class of 1963. Half of us went to class from 7 a.m. until noon each day. The other half had the afternoon shift.

I got home about 12:30 after a city bus ride and a half-mile hike from the bus stop. I cannot remember turning on the television. I have a vague recollection of playing around with a chord organ, a gift from the previous Christmas.

Someone must have told me. Maybe some adult checking in. It wasn’t my mom because employers of that era would not have been sensitive to the needs of working parents. My older sisters were at work too. The eldest had seen Kennedy at a campaign appearance. My soonto-be brother-in-law briefly met Kennedy during his Marine Corps years in “The President’s Own” when the president knocked his music off a stand at an appearance in California.

No one got off work early the day of the assassination, nor was the area public elementary school dismissed early, as I recall. If the nearby Roman Catholic school dismissed early, those students most surely went to Mass before coming home.

I turned on the television before Walter Cronkite delivered the fateful news. Then it stayed on pretty consistently until after the funeral.

I still can plainly see my mom walking down the street just about dusk that day, coming in from the factory job she rode two buses to get to in St. Louis. About the same time, the paperboy, an older kid who lived a couple of blocks away, was delivering the evening paper, tears streaming down his face.

I don’t remember conversations about the historical importance of that day. Adults in the neighborhood spoke in quiet, reverent tones. I remember sensing somehow this was a watershed moment. Before the end of the decade, we would see our worst and best selves played on an ever-growing and influential media stage.

This was the first media event I remember much about, although I have memories in bits and pieces of the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates.

Living in downstate Illinois, home to tens of thousands of Roman Catholics who outnumbered those of the Protestant traditions, I remember the excitement three years earlier of neighbors and their children at the election of the first Catholic president.

I also remember an electionyear incident in which a classmate parroted her evangelical parents’ concern the Pope would be running the White House if Kennedy got elected and others who worried about Kennedy’s civil rights commitments. Bigots find their homes everywhere; always have, always will.

My memory is hazy about the days following. While I have heard stories of Kennedy haters and Catholic bashers gloating over the assassination, I never encountered that personally.

Questions and theories about whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone were not uncommon early on, especially those laying a conspiracy at Lyndon Johnson’s feet. The president was killed in Texas and Johnson was from there. What Texans called their native pride was considered hubris where I come from.

The only other thing that sticks out in my mind about that time was digging out a language arts project from my sixth-grade class that was connected to President Kennedy.

American poet Robert Frost was part of Kennedy’s inauguration. He later would be named the nation’s poet laureate. I don’t remember us having a poet laureate before then.

The project was a booklet each of us made based on Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It included artwork, the poem, news articles about Frost, even some explication. A half-century later, I can recite it from memory. I still have the project somewhere in a box in the attic. That’s where Mom’s Kennedy campaign button is too, I think.

The poem resonated, partly because it spoke of a future we still faced, one that sometimes would be dark and dangerous but also held so much potential, even when our way was guided by a flickering flame or moonlight.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”