Freshman, high school biology. The main office played a news report over the PA.
First reports were the President had been shot. By English class they announced he had died. One normally quiet student freaked out that this was the first strike of the Communists and WW III was about to happen.
All I remember is a neighbor lady talking with Mom in the living room very seriously. It struck my as being the most important event of my entire five-year-old life.
mmm
I was a college freshman. Architecture class was about to begin, and one of the kids came in and announced that Kennedy had been shot. But this kid was always joking around, and nobody believed him. Then a couple of other kids came in with the same story, and we knew it was true. Nobody knew what to do, until the professor came in and said he had talked with the Dean, and all classes were canceled until the following week.
I was living in a rooming house at the time, and the only TV was a little black-and-white set that one guy in the top floor had. So we all crowded around that little set, and watched history happen. We saw Oswald getting shot, and we watched the funeral.
The entire country (and even the entire world) was in such a state of shock, and we knew that everything was going to be different now. In some respects it was similar to 9/11.
I called my parents that night, and my mother said that she had gone to the supermarket that afternoon, unaware of what had happened. There were other shoppers who were crying, and she had to ask what the hell happened. Then she cried too.
Another rather indignant senior here. Never ever been addressed in a thread as a senior before in my whole life. You’ve gone and hurt my feelings! 
I was in Mrs. Martin’s 2nd grade class. They interrupted class by playing the radio news report and about 15 minutes or so of coverage over the intercom. Then after a little bit (can’t remember) they dismissed school. I was a walking kid so I don’t remember what happened with the bussed kids but I remember walking home, basically thinking it was neat to be getting out of school early (I was 7), but I remember some of the girls that walked home the way I did walking along squawling away. Then a couple of days later I watched Ruby shoot Oswald on television. Think we’d just gotten home from church. Pretty crazy stuff for a little boy.
Sorry Eugene that I hurt your feelings … we all get old sooner or later. I remember my worst birthday was turning 31 … I thought it was all over, the fun I mean, but it wasn’t. I’ll live to turn 70 around Easter next year.
Thank you for your post 
I was in ninth-grade English class. We were due to take a quiz which was never given. She sat there stunned and then went to an assembly. We had no school on Monday but went to a memorial service. I do recall being upset that we got the day off, but they interrupted my free time.
I also recall seeing Ruby shoot Oswald on live TV.
My birthday is the 23rd, and I was six, about to turn seven. My mom had planned a birthday party for me with all my friends, and I was excited about that.
I don’t remember anything about the day the President was shot, but the next day, at my birthday party, all the moms were sitting around the t.v. set, watching and crying. Us kids were trying to have a good time, but it’s hard when all the moms are crying and forgetting to serve the cake and ice cream.
And I remember worrying about little Caroline, who was the same age as me and her Daddy had died. I felt very sad for her.
Just as class was letting out at PS#44 Bronx, NY, a student who probably had a (contraband) transistor radio excitedly told everyone “Hey, Kennedy was just shot. Yeah, shot him in the head just like Lincoln” “Naw man, you fullashit”, we all said. Nevertheless I hurried home and turned on the TV and saw that it was indeed true.
Now, this is the cool part. My dubious claim to fame.: It came to light after a few days that **Lee Harvey *fucking *Oswald **had attended PS#44 about 10 years earlier!!!
And, being a typical 14 year old, don’t give a shit, smartass, wiseguy, punkass kid from The Bronx, I, of course, proceeded to write on every desk I happened to sit at, things like: L.H. Oswald, Lee O. was here, LHO hates JFK etc.
We had one teacher who claimed to have remembered him, but I don’t know if that was any more true than the names I wrote on the desks.
At home, I was just under 2 years and a month old. I was probably drooling on something. My brother was 4 and my sister was 6, so she was off at school and my brother and I were probably at home [what time would it have been in Germany? Adjust kiddy activities accordingly.]
I was co-managing a field office for a regional study in Portland, Maine, in the offices of a state highway agency.
The agency’s radio room was adjacent to the office where we were working, receiving and processing interview forms.
Ben Bean, the on-duty state trooper manning the radio, came into the room on that Friday and said, “How’s it feel to be without a president?”
This was of course a misstatement because, at the moment of JFK’s death, Lyndon Johnson became President automatically. Only later, would his “official” swearing-in occur, on board the plane carrying JFK and Jackie back to DC.
I was in the second year of my first post-PhD job as an instructor at Columbia University and I was sitting in a course taught by eminent mathematician and dept. chair Sammy Eilenberg. No one dared interrupt Sammy’s class. So when the class ended, say at 2:30, when Kennedy had been dead for a half hour at least, there was another member of the department waiting to tell us what had happened. It was all over. Needless to say, it was a tremendous shock.
That weekend I spent hugging my GF. We really bonded. We will celebrate our 50th in March. Curiously, exactly the same thing happened to my daughter on 9/11; she bonded with her eventual husband.
First grade. Don’t remember much, except vaguely that it happened. If WW3 was about to start, nobody mentioned it to us. Don’t remember anything about Jack Ruby at all.
I was in third grade. I lived very close to the school, so I went home for lunch. We didn’t have the TV on. When I returned to school some of the other kids on the playground were saying they’d heard the President had been shot.
We went in to class. Then Mr. Fernkopf, our principal, came in and told us personally that the President was dead.
Not long before I’d been to the funeral of my great grandmother. Up until then I hadn’t known that grownups cried. Silly of me.
But the look on the principal’s face, and that of our teacher, Mrs. Huffman, told me that they wanted to cry, but didn’t want to do it in front of us. We finished out the school day.
I did see the funeral procession on TV, and remember my mother explaining the custom of the riderless horse.
What a weird experience that I will never forget.
I was in school and a friend said to me “Kenny has been shot.” There was a kid in our class named Kenny and I imagined that some guy had come into the school with a deer rifle and shot him. Nothing made sense.
Of course, shortly thereafter I learned it was Kennedy. Then the whole event became surreal.
The aftermath was something. The whole country practically shut down. The only music on the radio was funeral music until he was buried. Then to make it crazier Oswald got shot. To a school kid it was almost too much to take in. The whole weekend is pretty much seared in my mind.
yeah, Herbert Hoover and General MacArthur died in 64. A few months after Kennedy. Quite a few state funerals in a short time.
It’s interesting how much TV began to influence our country in the early 60’s. Kennedy’s televised debate against Nixon is credited with helping him win the Presidency. His assassination was caught on a movie camera and televised. Oswald was shot on live tv.
The Zapruder film made the assassination very personal and real for Americans. It’s censored these days. I’ve seen the real version and it’s very graphic.
I was 19 and doing clerk work. A ding-bat typist came in from lunch and told us the President had been shot and we went “Yeah sure”. It took a while to believe her and find out for sure what had happened. They closed the office early and sent us home.
Old geezer senior citizen: I was working a door to door sales scheme in Garland, Texas; a nice customer let me watch all the stuff on her TV.
I was watching live coverage of Oswald being moved from one place to another and saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. I remember hearing a cop say, “Jack, you son of a bitch.”
I was on a mission for the Mormon church in a small town in Finland (Pietarsaari). My companion and I were the only Americans in the town, and we had spent the evening visiting an elderly lady member of the church (she didn’t have a TV) and we were unaware of the events until we arrived home.
We roomed with a Finnish family and the husband met us at the door and said, “Boys, your president has been killed.” We really had no idea how to deal with it (we were 21, not given to deep political philosophizing or understanding of history) and were more concerned with the ascension of LBJ to the White House. Neither of us being Catholic or Democrats, we were not so greatly saddened as much as shocked.
We watched television for a while (it was late in the evening there) and then turned in. The next day we got a lot of strange stares, and several offered condolences . We really had no one to bounce the news off of, being, as I said, the only Americans in the town.
High school junior in math class when they turned on a newscast over the PA system. We all sat there in stunned silence and a few girls started weeping. The guy sitting next to me turns to me and says “I always liked Eisenhower better.” I just stared at him in disbelief.
I was a mere infant in my crib but the fact of Kennedy’s death has been overwhelming presence in my life. I grew up in a completely Democratic small rural town, and Catholic. Kennedy was larger than life and was discussed constantly. I was fully an adult before I could look at a picture of him and see him, objectively, as just a man.
I don’t know if it’s others’ experience, but every courthouse in Kentucky that I ever went in had a picture of Kennedy on the wall somewhere. This was true at least until the late 80s. It may still even be true.