remembering JFK

[calimac]

All over the web and even newspapers that I read, people have been posting their memories of learning of the assassination of JFK. Except in LJ. Well, I'd been thinking of writing on this anyway, and I'd better do it now, because by Friday the topic will feel stale already. (Besides, I have something else appropriate for then.)

I recall as a child feeling annoyed at the media assumption that everybody remembered where they were at Pearl Harbor, because some of us were not around then. The open invitations to post memories of JFK's assassination must be equally annoying to anyone younger than I am, and I'm not young. I was six at the time, and that's about as young as it's possible to remember such things. It's not my earliest memory, but it's my earliest precisely dateable one.

Kennedy was shot at 10:30 AM our time, and his death was announced an hour later, but nobody had a radio in our school, so the news didn't arrive instantly. I must have gone off for lunch, either home or with a bag lunch to a far corner of the schoolyard to be by myself (as socializing with my peers was my lowest priority throughout my school years), because what I remember is coming back to the playground area and finding everyone standing around in clumps, rather than off playing. I asked what had happened.

I knew this was big news - I couldn't remember the last time there was a change in President - but what I could not grasp at all was the enormity* of it. I knew who the President was, but I didn't know enough to have any particular feelings about him, nor did I have the emotional experience to be shocked by assassination. What did draw my attention was a self-irritation at the fact that, although I knew that, if the President dies, the Vice President succeeds him, I could not remember or did not know the current Vice President's name. I felt I ought to have known that, and, ever since, I have kept up to date on such things. It is still typical of me to be drawn to such fine points.

Naturally, I spent the weekend in minor annoyance at the pre-emption of my favorite TV shows. All right, this was a big deal, but did it have to be on all the channels?

But one grows up quickly. It was not much more than a year later that Churchill died, and, while I'm not sure I had ever heard of him before, and he was, in any case, full of years, I was by that time equipped to appreciate what a momentous passage this was. (And I remember avidly reading about it in the newspapers: this tells me that I was already reading newspapers at seven, which I was apparently not - though I could and did read - at six.) If you wanted me to actually feel stunned by a tragic event, the assassinations five years after JFK's did that.

*And yes, I'm using that word correctly. Look it up.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Your reaction to JFK's death is almost exactly mine to Churchill's: I was extremely peeved when the funeral preempted "Hoppity Hooper."

As for JFK, I remember my mother's reaction, but not the event itself; and I remember being put out to play so that my mother could watch the funeral.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As you are almost exactly that much younger than I, that strikes me as entirely age-appropriate.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

My children had the same reaction to 9/11, which happened just as the post-school kids programming should have been on TV.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Mine were old enough (19 and 14) to be pretty well traumatized by it :) :(

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I was three years old when JFK died, so I wasn't even old enough to be annoyed about TV being interrupted, because I don't think I was watching TV yet. Well, what do I know? I don't think I have any clear memories at all from when I was three.

Anyway, have you seen any "50 years since CS Lewis died" retrospectives?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Only a few blips on the Lewis front. But then I haven't been specifically looking.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

The "eldil" mailing list (not surprisingly) has posted a few articles from the m/s media about the 50th year of CSL's death. Most of them also mention Aldous Huxley; one suggests that in another fifty years Huxley will be all but forgotten while Lewis will still be a cultural fact.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It does seem as though Huxley has faded somewhat in reputation already, but I've been reading about how the painter Caspar David Friedrich has gone through a couple of cycles of fading and being rediscovered since he died in 1840. In fact, like Herman Melville he had gone from being incredibly popular to completely forgotten within his own lifetime. Hard to predict what later generations will find important or interesting.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I was in first grade, in a Catholic school, when Kennedy died. I don't remember a lot about it, but they did make an announcement in the classroom. I think it took a while before I understood what it really meant.

It also took a long time, like sometime in my thirties, before I consciously realized that assassinations weren't common. Tragic, yes, I certainly got the tragic part even as a child. But having so many happen while I was growing up, I was surprised when I suddenly realized at some point that no world leaders had been assassinated for several years. Definitely had given me a skewed worldview.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The feeling I had on RFK's assassination is one that, on more recent occasions, I'd sum up by quoting the bowl of petunias from HHGG: "Oh, no, not again."

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

P.S. Is there contention about the word 'enormity'?

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Ah, never mind.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1965 (on JFK's successor's birthday, as it happens; it was considered unusual enough for my parents to write it in my "baby book") and therefore couldn't have a memory of that. I have seared-memory moments of Reagan being shot (high school) and of the space shuttle explosion (I was just leaving my grandparents' house to drive to school in Chico).

My grandmother's big presidential memory was the death of FDR. She was working as a telephone operator in Idaho on one of those systems where all calls had to go through the operator who run a punch board. The way you knew someone wanted to make a call was that the metal tab covering the punch hole fell down. On that morning, every tab fell at once. My grandmother says that they thought lightning had struck the building. They were so busy completing calls that it took a while before they found out why the phone lines had gone crazy.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I was in grad school when Reagan was shot, and associate that memory with being on the sidewalk in front of a particular pharmacy on the Ave. But I can't recall exactly how I heard about it.

Some asked at the time - this came up in apas I was in, for instance - why there wasn't as much grieving over Reagan's being shot than JFK's. Unspoken implication, all you libbruls hate him. Hmph. How about "He didn't die" as a reason?

My mother's memory of the death of FDR is very strong. He was the only President she could remember, so that would strike very hard at a more advanced stage of childhood.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I was at school, in second grade, and they sent us home with no real explanation that I can recall. I was met at the door by my mother, who was in tears, and told me that the President had been killed. I can recall the whole shock of that moment. Not that I was political, per se, but Kennedy had an aura about him of magic, of charisma, that I distinctly recall. And I know that I was home watching TV when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, because I watched that happen live. Shock upon shock.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You're a little older than I am, so you'd have been better at picking up on these feelings.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course you're using the word enormity correctly. I find it kind of appalling that you would feel the need to point that out, actually.

Kennedy's death overshadowed two others that took place the same day: Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis. On any more normal day both would have drawn considerable attention.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Enormity" is such a great word, and it's so rarely used when it would be appropriate.

It was something like another ten years before I ever heard of either Huxley or Lewis.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think i wrote that footnote as a pre-emptive strike against a sometime reader of this journal who's been known to claim that I don't know what a word means when I do. One could read my use of it either way.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I was a seventh grader newly in junior high, and they announced it over the loudspeaker, and our teacher started crying. I was sick with terror, because of the way the adult acted, and some of the older clowns started predicting that the Russians would be dropping A-bombs any time, because of course they'd killed JFK. What with all those constant bomb drills in those days, I absolutely believed it, and I can still remember that gut-sick helpless feeling that there was nothing I could do, nowhere I could be safe, if the world went mad.

When I got home my dad was going on about how that jerk Kennedy was a commie anyway, and I found his rant comforting, because it meant Business As Usual, which would not have been the case if he was, say, packing us up to escape A bombs.

Probably one of the things that drove me to read history!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

My memory is that I was in eighth grade, and doing the arithmetic from my date of birth seems to confirm that. I don't remember hearing any of that kind of speculation, but then, hardly anyone talked to me. I suppose the other students must have reacted emotionally, but I was even less emotionally perceptive then than I am now; it didn't have much impact on me, but then, elected officials were remote figures to me—I think I knew the president's name then, but I'm not positive.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

We had the "curl up underneath your desk" drills in school, up until the time I was about 10 or 11, but I had no idea of what it was supposed to protect us from. Probably it's good that I didn't, because the whole idea was ludicrous.

"I thought that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put paper bags over our heads or something."
"If you like, yes."
"Will that help?"
"No."
- The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Our babysitters took great glee in telling us nothing would help. Oh, the nightmares I had!