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remembering JFK
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.
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.
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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.
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Anyway, have you seen any "50 years since CS Lewis died" retrospectives?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It was something like another ten years before I ever heard of either Huxley or Lewis.
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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!
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"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
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