I remember the day John F. Kennedy was killed.
The very first time I saw television was at my aunt’s house. Televisions then were not just entertainment appliances, they were furniture.
A man on the black-and-white television screen was standing behind a large podium. In front of him, a sea of people were seated in auditorium seating, much like a university classroom, where the seats in the front are lower, seats in the back are higher and you’d would walk up steps to get to the back.
The man in the suit and tie was answering questions. He’d point a finger from the podium and one of the well-dressed people in the audience would stand and ask him something.
At one point he pointed at a young woman. She stood up to ask her question and he interrupted, saying he was pointing to a man in front of her. She sat down, and even at the age of five or six, as I was at the time, I felt bad for her.
From that one gesture, I didn’t like the man behind the podium. There was everything to like about him. I didn’t have the vocabulary at that age, but in my five or six year old mind I knew the man was engaging, he knew lots of things, he seemed very smart, and all these people were asking him questions and he seemed to get all their questions right, as those listening to him seemed quite satisfied. But he embarrassed a lady so I didn’t like him.
Two or three years later I was in Grade 3 in a five classroom school house. Miss Neal, very pretty, was our teacher. She was in the middle of her lesson when the principal, Headly Graham, with his New Zealand accent, came in and whispered something to her.
She looked shocked and immediately left the room. We waited, politely.
She came in a few minutes later and gave an announcement before the class.
“President Kennedy has been shot,” she told us.
We Grade 3 students were all silent. This wasn’t making an impact on us.
I raised my hand.
“Who’s President Kennedy?”
“A great man,” Miss Neal answered, solemnly, and with such care we understood her in our young hearts.
We had no television. We had radio. When I got home from school the radio announcer was interrupting the broadcast by telling listeners President Kennedy had been shot.
“They’re saying that every five minutes,” I told my mother.
“Yes. It’s very big news,” Mom said.
Newspapers littered our living room in days following. We had a daily newspaper subscription, and when we were usually done with newspapers, they were used for something or thrown away. But not these newspapers. These newspapers were different. It was as if to throw them away was to throw away something as important as someone’s life. So newspapers accumulated, left open, on the couch, on stuffed chairs, even on the living room floor. Our house was in shock. Our living room could not comprehend what had happened.
Even in our part of the world, rural Canada, there was something profound about an American president being there and suddenly gone, killed. We children saw every adult, without exception, had been shocked to their core. We could read it on their faces. These things just did not happen.
The newspapers carried the story of Oswald being shot, of the president’s son saluting his casket, the grief of the president’s young widow. The newspapers that kept littering our living room displayed a photograph of the black-and-white parade of dignified horses pulling a cart with the casket with that man inside I’d seen the first time I’d seen television.
We children were unnerved. Grown-ups were not impervious. Grown-ups were made of glass. We could see what we didn’t want to see. Inexplicable grief was chilling the exposed heart of every grown-up. We could see right through them. It was as if incredulity and grief were all they were.
