Today is the day, sixty-one years ago that President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas. I was barely eleven and a half years old and in 5th grade at St Peter School in New Brunswick, NJ (in Sister Thomas Anne's class in the basement of what was still a brand-new building).
The announcement came over the PA from the Principal's office, Sister Immaculata, through the speaker in the corner of the room near the end of the school day, and in the blink of an eye, not just for me, but for my entire generation and perhaps all who followed us, the carefree innocence of childhood was over.
As children, we couldn't fathom what would cause anyone to want to kill anyone else (the violence on our streets and in our homes now was very different back then) and how we gathered and processed information was different as well.
We headed home to houses with mothers and fathers and siblings gathered around the radio, there were only three TV stations in those days, and 'live' broadcasting was a cumbersome operation, radio was faster and newspapers rushed out 'special editions',
I think we all had a dim awareness something had changed, but we didn't know what and how much. A lifetime later, many of us still don't.
-bill kenny
-bill kenny
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