Not many are around who remember an historic event 6o years after it happened. But I'm one of them. And I'm the only one from my immediate family still here to remember it.
Sixty years ago tomorrow I got my driver's license.
I would have gotten it a lot sooner had I passed the driving test the first time. But I was jittery and the guy who tested me did little to set me at ease, so I failed. I wasn't really terribly upset. I knew I'd give it another go, and I did.
The second time was the charm. Plus, I was excused from school that morning to take the test so the day was doubly rewarding. I returned to school a very proud and newly mobile senior. I couldn't wait to show off my license to all my friends.
I imagined driving around in my dad's car listening to songs on the radio like "One Fine Day" or "Heatwave" or going to see a movie like "The Great Escape." It was a frivolous, happy time.
When I got home from school my dad was waiting for me. "Well, Dan" he said "I guess you'll always remember the day you got your driver's license." And indeed I did. But not for the reason you might suppose. Because not long after I got back to the classroom that day we learned that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
I was sitting in journalism class on the third floor of Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, New Jersey when the speaker mounted above the classroom door started broadcasting what sounded like a radio news report. I thought I heard something about the president. But then the broadcast abruptly ended. Understand, I was a Kennedy fanatic. I loved the guy! I campaigned for him; stayed up nearly all night election night during one of the closest contests in history; had an autographed photo of him and even got to personally meet him during the campaign.
Why would a news report come over the classroom loudspeaker in the first place? And why was it cut short? was already a news junkie so I was suspicious. I had a bad feeling.
I was president of the school's student council so I quietly asked the teacher if I could go down to the main office and find out what was going on. He said yes and I raced down three flights of stairs to the office which sat near the school's front entrance. There, I saw the principal, a couple of teachers and a secretary huddled around a radio. But before I could get close enough to hear what was going on they told me to go back to my classroom.
As I walked back to the third floor, this only deepened my feeling of dread. Sure enough, when I got back to my desk the principal came over the loudspeaker to announce that President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. This was how we found out. There were no computers; no internet, no social media, no cell phones.
And just like that, a miasma of gloom descended and enveloped everything. It felt like a silent, invisible swarm of locusts -- dark, pervasive and menacing. This lasted, uninterrupted, for four days. To the extent people went about their business at all (and there was very little of that) they did so in a daze. People were glued to their television screens and beyond that all that could be heard were sighs, whispers and sobbing.
Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Monday. It was interminable.
On Sunday, my sister, brother-in-law and I hopped into a big Pontiac Bonneville with neighbors, drove to Washington and waited in an endless line into the wee hours to pass by President Kennedy's closed coffin under the Capitol dome. Again, the hushed atmosphere with muffled sobs and sniffles.
My classmates knew how I felt about JFK. So during this period they stopped by the house or called me to tell me how sorry they were. The truth is that we were all witnesses to a nightmare! Our high school yearbook that year was dedicated to the memory of President Kennedy. Here's part of what the dedication said:
We have been called the ugly Americans, crass materialists bent on making money; a people overstuffed and overstimulated. But on the day Kennedy died our people displayed their innate nobility, their love, their profound goodness by the way they mourned his tragic passing.
The tribute of the people fit the man. Kennedy was a great President whose greatness grew with every year. Not that we always agreed with him . . . yet who can doubt the brilliant range of his ideas, the magnificence of the blueprint he presented to America to explore a New Frontier? . . . He was a politician as well as a statesman, knowing the practical demands of political patronage could never be completely divorced from the noblest statesmanship. He was a dreamer but certainly not starry-eyed and impractical. . . .
Truly, our tribute to President Kennedy lies now not in words but in how we wear the mantle of courage which was his legacy to us.
When those words were written it had been 62 years since a President had been assassinated. Yet, the years that followed 1963 seemed awash in bloodshed as we later witnessed America's descent into the protracted Vietnam war, the loss of more than 50,000 American lives in that war and the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
November 22, 1963. The day the music died!
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