I was in 7th grade, just turned 13, Mrs. Anderson’s French class. The first announcement we got was that both President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson were killed. What I remember most about the day was silence. Disbelief. The shock. Then quiet.
I remember watching the funeral procession on TV. The cadence of the drums. Mrs. Kennedy’s veil. John-John saluting.
My recollections of Robert Kennedy are even more shattering. I was a junior in high school, living in California. My parents had been active in his primary campaign. The big victory. Hanging out at headquarters running errands for the adults, celebrating. So much hope, so much excitement. Then crying. Everyone crying. Then despair.
In retrospect, when I think of that time, I remember how urgent and unsettled everything seemed. I had nothing to really to use for comparison since I missed the relatively calm 1950s. I just assumed it was normal to have assassinations, turmoil, riots, extreme racial divisiveness, an unpopular war, hostility and misunderstanding between generations.
Sitting in chemistry class in high school, when the PA system came on. No warning that I recall, just the radio announcer saying that the President had been shot. Eerie quiet in the room, then the guy next to me turns to me and says “I liked Eisenhower better anyway”. I’ve been a Democrat ever since.
I would be born exactly one year and one day later. My mom spent the time in labor with me watching “One Year Later” news retrospectives about Kennedy and the assassination.
Texas Children’s Hospital, 3rd floor, across from the nursery for very sick babies. Pretty much all I did was watch TV all day anyway, so I watched it intently for the next few days.
I seem to remember that there was an announcement that the President had been shot, but it was a little while before there was video. And it seems like the Zapruder film surfaced pretty quickly. Some of the nurses were very upset.
8th grade, 12 years old. First the announcement came over the PA that the president had been shot, and we prayed. (It was parochial school.) Then they announced he was dead, and they sent us home. But a lot of us, including me went next door to the chuch to pray some more.
I spent the next 3 days watching TV with the rest of my family. It became surreal, between the Oswald murder, the funeral cortege with Charles DeGaulle side by side with Haile Selassie, John-John’s salute to his father . . .
Probably in a playpen or crib, I was just learning to walk then. I wonder if the carnage I grew up with affected my attitudes to this day. I don’t remember JFK, but the Vietnam War broke out not long afterward (for the US); the nightly body counts and war footage on the evening news was my normal world.
Fortunately, the most vivid memory of that era for me was the moon landing.
At home with my Grandmother. I was born when my Mom was 17. Dad was off at Air Force basic and Mom had gone back to school to take her Jr & Sr years at the same time. Mom said they made the announcement at school and then dismissed everyone to go home.
I was 10 when it happened. It was early Saturday morning here, around 5 am, when Kennedy was shot. I heard about on the radio at the cricket match I was about to play in. There were few adults around, mostly just the twenty odd kids about to play. I was shocked and scared. I could not comprehend how/why something like this could happen in a country I thought of as much like Australia. I have no doubt at all that this was the moment I became aware that spooky shit isn’t confined to books and TV and movies - it’s real. It may be a romantic notion but I believe that moment marked the end of my childhood innocence.
In 7th grade. They announced it over the loudspeaker.
Odd thing I remember is that parents all came and picked up their kids from school, although it was never officially announced on the radio or anything that schools were closing. On the way home, my mother noticed that shops were closing up left and right. It was like a ghost town and in the middle of the afternoon.
I do, however, remember after three days of constant news reports, everybody was physically, and psychologically worn out.
You would see people just break down and cry in the supermarket and driving down the street.
No wonder the Beatles came into the USA like a breath of fresh air a few months later. If there was ever a generation who needed some serious cheering up, we were it.
Sitting in my crib after being released from the hospital. I was a preemie and was about four months old …so obviously I can’t remember much about the event.
Mrs. Turner’s class, 6th grade. We were studying world history and the principal, Mr Honeycutt, announced, first that he had been shot, and then that he was dead. I remember watching the principal through the window a few minutes later going out to lower the flag to 1/2 mast.
I was three years old, and probably not yet house-broken, so I was probably at home soiling my diapers.
Now I do remember RFK. My older sister woke me up saying, “Senator Kennedy’s been shot!”. I was only 8, though, and had no idea who “Senator Kennedy” was.
In the U.S. Air Force. In a hanger working on fighter planes. At break time we went into the coffee room and a pilot was in there, listening to a radio. He said: “Kennedy’s been shot.” We all thought it was a joke and kept waiting for the punch line.
He had to repeat and explain about three times before it sunk in. It was tense in the military for the next couple of weeks.
I was a junior in college at Iowa City. I had an appointment to interview a girl as a candidate for one queen contest or an other at one of the sorority houses. When I walked in the women were all gathered around a television in the front room. I remember it was a chilly, gray, drizzling day. After Walter Cronkite made the announcement that the President was dead I walked to the student union and just sat there with some friends staring and wondering how Lyndon Johnson could run the country. It was not a good day. That weekend the football game (with Notre Dame, I think) was canceled. At the time Kennedy’s death effected me more than the death of my own father four years later. While it may well have been all appearance and emotion and public relations, John Kennedy had a tremendous grip on college students of the early 1960s. His loss hit us pretty hard.