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In reply to the discussion: John Fitzgerald Kennedy 11-22-1963 Where Were You? [View all]raging moderate
(4,469 posts)I went into my high school library, and everyone was hushed, and the radio was on. I didn't even know they had a radio in there. And Walter Cronkite was talking, and he suddenly said, "President Kennedy is dead." And there was this strange sound like all the air was being sucked out of the room. It was the sound of about two hundred people suddenly gasping, all at once. And everybody started crying or staring ahead in shock. And after that was art class, but there was no class. Again, everybody was crying or staring ahead in shock, and the teacher was weeping silently but smiling bravely and telling us not to be scared, we would be all right. And then some of the kids made those ghoulish jokes some people make at these times. My friend Ronald was mad at them, and he asked me rhetorically, "Why are they joking about it?" And then, a half-hour ahead of schedule, the bell suddenly rang, and she said, "Well, there, I guess school is dismissed, kids. Don't forget to take all your things with you." And we all walked out as we always did and went home. And for two or three solid days, there was nothing on TV except news reports about the assassination, the Kennedy family, the investigation, the arrest, the assassination of Oswald which happened right on live TV, funeral preparations, and then the endless funeral, with those heavy drums going boom-boom-boom-boom. The next week, we learned that the school office had not meant to dismiss school. Someone had noticed kids still standing about in the hallway crying and had had the irrational thought that maybe they had not heard the bell in their grief and so had brilliantly decided that ringing it again would bring the school back to normal order. But nothing was every really normal again.