I remember it clearly.
It was about 1:45pm Eastern Standard Time.
I was sitting in Miss Ross’ junior year history class. Someone came by from the office and called her out in the hall with the other teachers in that section of the school.
She came back in the class room and said we were to all gather in the gymnasium for an announcement. She was pale and crying, she said, “President Kennedy has been shot.”
The all the junior and senior high students went to the gym and gathered there while a television and a PA were set up.
Then the school principle, Mr Beebe made the announcement that President Kennedy was dead.
We were told to gather any younger brothers and sisters we had at the school and take them home with us.
We were told we should turn on the news once we got home.
By the time I got my brother who was in a different school and got home Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as President.
A police officer named James Tippit was dead and Lee Harvey Oswald was captured at the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff, a south Dallas neighborhood.
JFK’s assassination was the first of many during the turbulent years of the 1960s. Medgar Evers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy.
And finally even though his assassination was a decade after the 1960s ended John Lennon.
I can’t help but think the world would be a far better place if all those victims of assassin’s bullets had lived.
