I was five and a half years old. I recall our neighbor coming over and talking to Mom about it.
Well I would hope not. Did you graduate?
mmm
My father was 21. My mother was 15. They hadn’t met yet and wouldn’t marry until 1967. I came along in 1969. I’ve always heard about their reactions but the assassination was ancient history to me.
1963 was 18 years before I was born.
However, after my mom passed in 2023 my dad gave me a newspaper she had saved from that day. She would’ve been just shy of 10 years old. It was the county newspaper from Hill County, Montana. The assassination was, of course, the big huge headline.
But interestingly, buried in the back pages, there were a few one- and two-paragraph articles about other things related Dallas since, presumably, the denizens of Hill County Montana were not wise to goings-on of a big city in Texas. One of these short articles was on the shooting death of a Dallas police office named Tippit, and describing how his shooter was still at large…
JFK was killed on Jamie Lee Curtis’s fifth birthday.
16 months old, so nowhere near old enough to understand what had happened; I am sure I just happily played in my playpen all day while my parents (my father was also an Irish-Catholic) anguished.
I wasn’t born yet. My parents were in elementary school.
I was a couple months past my fifth birthday and would have been in kindergarten morning session that Friday. I have no recollection of anything special happening that day or the days after. I have no recollection of any adults I knew acting unusually.
I do recall being annoyed that Saturday morning cartoons were pre-empted one day for something I vaguely understood was a funeral of somebody important. I don’t know if that was the next day, or two weeks later, and don’t much care to check now.
For me the whole thing had next to no significance. Obviously later I learned better, and the major consequences for probable US history from his assassination. But at the time it was somewhere between incomprehensible, irrelevant, and out of sight out of mind. Even now it’s not an anniversary I ever think of unless reminded.
I was 11 years old and in 6th grade. The principal (a nun, since it was a Catholic grammar school) announced on the PA that the President had been shot, but his condition was unknown. So everybody went over to the church to pray for him. I don’t remember much about the prayer service, but we probably said the rosary. We then stood up to leave, and the principal walked in, announcing “The President is dead.”
I went home, then left to help my brother deliver his paper route. The news truck was understandably delayed.
I was a year old, so no personal memories.
I wasn’t born yet.
My father, however, was serving in the Air Force Reserve at the time, posted to a MATS unit at a local air base, and his unit was tapped to march in the funeral procession.
I was almost exactly nine and a half years old, in 4th grade. We were taking a little break in class for some reason when the principal announced it on the PA.
I stopped by a friend’s house a few days later and was met at the door with the news that Oswald had been killed – I’d missed it by five minutes or so.
I was 5 1/2 years old. I saw JFK the day before when he was in San Antonio. I remember standing on the steps of the church watching the motorcade go by. Don’t really remember seeing him. I was playing with my friend two houses down the next day. I came home and my mom was standing by the radio crying. She told me that he had been shot but the importance was lost on me.
I was in 6th grade. It was right after lunch. I don’t recall either the principal or a teacher saying anything, just the radio broadcast coming over the PA system.
It was Catholic school, and we were scheduled for an early dismissal anyway, so the principal rounded up one of the priests and herded the entire school into church for a long prayer service until it was time to go home.
I think I was eight. We got at least one day off of school. Being eight, I was expecting to watch cartoons on TV, but no. I was in the LA area, so there were five channels available, rather than three. But all of them were showing the same scenes over and over and over. And they were all sad.
I was 13 months old so obviously no memory of it.
That’s all I remember. I was OUTRAGED that they would even consider news coverage on all three channels on Saturday morning. That was CARTOON DAY. How dare they.
Yep. That was me. Got bored real quickly and had to come up with something else to do on that Sat morning. Bastards.
I’ve wondered if there was live footage of LBJ taking his oath in the plan post-assasination. I’ve seen the photos but couldn’t imagine they enlisted a videographer/moving camera person. I think they were in a complete rush to take off so my question probably is a nonstarter.
In 1963? Almost certainly not.
I’d never before read that it was taped on a Dictabelt. My sister said “That’s right bro, in the days before Walkmans and cell phones.”