re: #352 Shiplord Kirel, live from behind wingnut lines

I was a freshman in high school when JFK was shot. I was home from school for a doctor’s appointment and actually saw the first bulletin on CBS, followed by Walter Cronkite’s epic reporting as events unfolded. At first I thought, no, surely he’s just wouned, probably be up and around in a couple of days joking about it. You can’t really kill the President in this day and age, can you? Then the news came, and there was nothing else on TV for 3 days. Some asshole spray painted “Texan go home!” on our neighbor’s car. This was in Colorado Springs and the neighbor, like my father, was in the military. It seemed that the world had fallen apart. The next year, my father went to Vietnam. Eight years later, I went.

I was in second grade in a parochial school outside of Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, in New Bern, NC.

About six months before, Kennedy was at the air station and went to the crowd and shook hands, and he touched mine, and gave my dad a full handshake.

A lay teacher who had our second-grade class came in after lunch and, in tears, told us that Kennedy had been shot. Ten minutes later, the speaker came on and said that he was dead. The lay teacher started sobbing. He was our Catholic President.

I went home (I was the oldest of four at the time, later five), and my Da was sitting on the edge of his bed and weeping.

It isn’t my earliest memory, but it’s the first that made me realize that my parents, and all adults, weren’t gods.