`No, it can't be true': Where I was on Nov. 22, 1963

It was a normal Friday afternoon Nov. 22, 1963, at Rancier Junior High in Killeen, Texas. I had settled into my front row seat in Mr. Swindell's eighthgrade science class, expecting to learn more about the life cycle of plants and photosynthesis.

Whatever I had for lunch was beginning to settle. Swindell was about to begin the day's lesson when the classroom intercom crackled with the announcement that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas, about a three-hour's drive north of Killeen, a small town just outside Fort Hood, where my Army officer father worked and our family lived.

Shocked but still a cocksure boy about to turn 13 in three days, I blurted out in disbelief, probably an effort at protective selfcomfort, “No, it can't be true.”

But it was.

Some of us kids — in thrall, like so many Americans, of the handsome president, 46, and his beautiful, young wife, Jacqueline — were aware that Kennedy and the first lady were to visit Dallas as part of a campaign trip for the upcoming 1964 election. On TV and in newspapers, it was big news in Texas, the home state of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

We didn't know it in that moment, about 1:15 p.m. CST 60 years ago Wednesday, but the fabled Kennedy days of Camelot, some 1,000 of them, had suddenly ended as we left Swindell's classroom for our homerooms.

Mine was in Mrs. Dickinson's. A sweet, tall, darkhaired woman, she burst into tears at one point, repeating, “Why? Why? Why?” just before the school buses arrived to take us students home to our neatly tended streets on the massive central Texas Army base.

By nightfall and into the weekend, it was endless hour-to-hour TV coverage of the assassination on the then-three major networks and countless radio stations. There were, of course, the black newspaper headlines in what seemed like 4-inch type, blaring “JFK Killed in Dallas,” “Nation Mourns,” “VP

Johnson Sworn In” and the like.

The nation more or less shut down. Street traffic dwindled. The horrific news had knocked the collective wind out of Americans.

A suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine and sharpshooter with pro-Soviet sympathies, was arrested later Friday at the Texas Theatre in Dallas. A relief to know.

In the hours afterward on Saturday and into Sunday morning, I vaguely recall sort of wondering what was going to happen to the United States in the wake of the JFK's murder.

At one point, I knew that Oswald was going to be transferred to another location from wherever he was being questioned by law enforcement officials. The transfer was televised live from the first floor of a massive building in downtown Dallas. I remember seeing Oswald — a slightly built man who had worked at the Texas School Book Depository, where, from a sixth-floor window, he allegedly shot and killed Kennedy as the president's motorcade headed down an adjacent roadway — being escorted down through the concrete building's lowest floor.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a man later identified as Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner and apparently a familiar figure to Dallas police, shot and killed Oswald on Nov. 24, a Sunday.

My birthday, my first teenage birthday, one I had planned for weeks, arrived the next morning. I had invited friends Edwin Hall Marks III, aka Trey, and Bill Luckenbach to help me celebrate my big day.

Of course, I had no real birthday that day, Nov. 25, when world leaders arrived to honor the slain president, with images of the horse-drawn casket, the riderless horse with leather boots reversed in the stirrups, the symbol of a fallen leader, as the procession made its way on a crisp, fall day through downtown Washington, D.C., and toward Arlington National Cemetery. I thanked Trey and Bill for coming to my home for a brief visit and they left.

Shortly afterward — and I clearly remember this — John F. Kennedy Jr., prompted by his mother, stepped out in front of her to salute his father as the casket passed by. My mother began to sob loudly as the 3-year-old boy, like a soldier, placed his right hand to his forehead.

By then, it was noticeable that nearly everything in the United States had come to an utter standstill: No traffic, no activities, no stores or movie theaters were open, my

Boy Scout troop meeting was canceled.

The entire nation was shut down for three days.

Six weeks later, my mother, twin sister Dede and I boarded a Greyhound bus to Omaha, Nebraska, to visit my father, who was attending the University of Nebraska and earning a bachelor's degree in history.

We traveled north to Dallas during that time, and, sure enough, the bus motored up a roadway to its downtown station. Dealey Plaza came into view as dusk settled over the city, which in the wake of the killing was being called “The City That Hates,” one filled with political cells of right-wing crackpots, fertile ground for people who wanted to dismantle democracy as the nation began to change amid the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. I felt somewhat lightheaded being so close to where the youngest president ever elected was gunned down, devastating the nation and world, an ending my relative innocence.

In 2013, I and close friend Gil Torres visited the Sixth Floor Museum (the old Texas School Book Depository building) in

Dallas and saw the window where Oswald fired his high-powered, scopemounted rifle. It was clear that it would have been easy to assassinate JFK. The rifle's in the museum.

At that time, just 10 years ago, I was reminded that JFK's death marked the end of his famed “New Frontier,” but in name only. For Johnson took it upon himself to shepherd into law the Kennedy policies that focused on domestic programs to expand education, widen the social safety net, and encourage Americans to serve those in need, symbolized by The Peace Corps.

Sixty years on, I cannot help but think the Kennedy legacy, what he called “a New Frontier,” is still worth pursuing, to advance peace, health and hope not only for Americans but for all who live on our small blue planet.