It was my 14th birthday and I was a freshman at Utica Catholic Academy. We were waiting for an assembly to begin in our auditorium; we were all sitting together with our little blue freshmen ties and navy uniforms and white shirts. The assemble was late in starting, which was very unusual as everything usually started right on time. It was a little after 1 p.m. Suddenly, Father Donavan, our principal, stepped onto the stage and up to the podium. He told us that we should all return to our homerooms and pray because the president (President Kennedy) had just been shot. We were in shock. How could this happen in America? Lincoln was murdered but that was over 100 years ago because a deranged man was upset because the South had lost the Civil War. Why would anyone kill our president?
We returned to our homerooms and each of us prayed silently and some of us cried. The radio played classical music over the louspeakers in each classroom, until around 2 p.m. the announcer broke in to announce that President Kennedy had died at a Dallas hospital. Vice-President Johnson was taking the oath of office as the President's body was being flown back to Washington, D.C. We were all devastated. All of us were crying and hugging each other. The principal came on the loudspeaker and asked us to pray for the repose of President Kennedy's soul and for his family. We struggled to pray through our tears until it was time to leave school.
I don't remember how I got home, if I rode with my father or if I rode the bus home. But I know I was still crying when I got home. My mother was not sympathetic to my crying. She told me to cheer up, because it was my birthday. How could I possibly cheer up when the president of our country had just been murdered!?
We had my favorite dinner of steak and french fries been I barely touched it. I felt sick to my stomach and had an empty feeling inside, I felt as if my world had been torn apart. I didn't realize it then, but I was experiencing what many people all across the country were experiencing at that time--disbelief that this could happen in our country, questions about why this man Lee Harvey Oswald would do such a thing, what would happen to us as a country now. Camelot had died. Poor Jackie. The poor children. How could they understand what had happened? He wasn't the president to them; he was their father.
A while later my grandparents and Uncle Donald came up for ice cream and cake, as they always did on our birthdays. I remember the gift my grandparents gave me. It was a Norwegian-style royal blue sweater with white and red embellishments at the top. I put it on; it was lovely. And I went to see alone in the cold on my back porch to cry. And I cried and cried. As I remember this, tears well up in my eyes because I remember this so vividly. My grandmother came out to sit with me and comfort me. I didn't care that it was my birthday. I didn't care that my mother had made my favorite dinner nor that she had baked my favorite cake--chocolate with chocolate icing. I only cared that this day had forever changed my life and the lives of everyone in our country. We were a country of violence. It had been easy to ignore the violence of the civil rights movement that had happened in the South. "They" were different, ignorant and stuck in the past history of slavery and injustice toward African-American people. This was different. How and why would this man shoot and kill our president?
I remember that a boy I had met and liked called me for my birthday. I took the call but didn't talk for long. We mostly talked about the events of the day. My aunt and uncle called to with me a happy birthday, and while I appreciated their call, I was more focused on what had happened.
The next few days brought even more shock, for as the country prepared for President Kennedy's funeral, Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. Oswald was being transferred to another jail in Dallas, and somehow Ruby got close enough to shoot Oswald and kill him. We would never know why Oswald had killed Kennedy or even if he had done so. Conspiracy theories began to abound, and later the Warren Commission was appointed to investigate the events and issue findings about the president's murder. They concluded that Oswald worked alone and had killed the president with the help of no other persons. Few people believed that and there was much conflicting information that supported other theories. The Warren Commission files were sealed for 75 years, so at some point people may know why they came to that conclusion and have access to the information they had, and maybe the truth will be known.
All I know is that my innocence of the world and the way it operates died that day, on my 14th birthday.
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