#OnThisDay: 1963, President John F. Kennedy is Murdered in Dallas

November 22, 1963– President John F. Kennedy is Murdered in Dallas

The school principal made an announcement over the intercom. With the news, the elementary school secretary had been calling parents for permission to send students home if possible. I decided I wanted to walk the 10 blocks home. My mother, who worked full-time, did leave her job and met me there. We decided to go to a little cafe in our South Hill neighborhood of Spokane. We ordered grilled cheese and tomato soup, but then we didn’t feel hungry enough to eat.

My father traveled for his job, but he came home early from Walla Walla a few hours away. The three of us watched the news broadcasts on our black and white television.

I told the parental units that I suspected LBJ was behind the assassination. They were horrified by my theory.

By the late afternoon, Lee Harvey Oswald had been identified as the killer. We finally felt like we could eat, and we had our dinner, plates on our laps, in front of the television for the first time ever. During dinner, there was a brief mention on the news that Aldous Huxley had also died that day, and I thought that, whoever he was, he must be feeling a little slighted in the attention department.

When I got into bed that night, I could still hear the television through the wall.

On Sunday morning, my parents and I watched in horror along with the rest of America as Oswald was shot down by Jack Ruby. I turned to my mother and asked: “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

Photographer unknown, International Center Of Photography

I was not quite 10-years-old, but I was a Kennedy fanatic since the election in 1960, already planning on my someday marrying John-John. I took the loss hard, just as I would with the murders of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lennon.

It was my first profound loss of innocence.

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