Sunday Morning Coffee - November 24, 2024 (from November 22, 2020) — JFK

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(Note: If you are over 70 years old, or maybe a year or three south, I don’t have to tell you about November 22, 1963.  Like me, you probably remember every moment of that fateful day in our young, impressionable lives and this nation’s history.

With sincere apologies to 9/11, it was a day like none other we’ve ever experienced.

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated that afternoon in Dallas, Texas.  Our world, our lives, froze.

I was eleven, in the sixth grade. I have some recollection of the early 60s— my kid brother being born; my favorite baseball team winning the World Series and the forces of evil — Khrushchev and Castro — teaming up in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis before President Kennedy stared them down. The Crisis scared my parents and thus me. Some of  those memories are still fairly vivid but nothing like November 22, 1963. In so many ways that day still haunts me: from the announcement at Meadowbrook Elementary School, to Walter Cronkite telling us the president died, to my afternoon bowling league being cancelled. Then the ensuing unprecedented weekend. On Sunday we saw accused JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald killed on live television. And Monday was the national day of mourning and the president’s burial.

All of that is nothing but a footnote in history, barely acknowledged anymore by the American media. The majority of  today’s population wasn’t even born yet.

This past Friday, the day before yesterday, was sixty-one years ago.  Longtime SMC readers know there isn’t a year that goes by that I don’t remember the anniversary.  Its impact has never faded.  Most of the country can remember in detail September 11, 2001, so can I, but by then I was 49 and the concept that something so sinister could happen was unfortunately not beyond the scope of comprehension. But the 1963 murder of our president to an 11-year-old kid was way beyond a thought.

Here’s the way we remembered it in Sunday Morning Coffee, four years ago, on November 22, 2020:)

 Sunday Morning Coffee — November 22, 2020 — 57 Years Ago 

It probably started out like any other Friday in the sixth grade at Meadowbrook Elementary School.

East Meadow, the Long Island community that housed Meadowbrook Elementary, was white bread suburbia. At any given PTA meeting you could find Ward and June Clever and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson clones gathered around the punch bowl.

Fifty-seven years is a long time ago. I was eleven. There isn’t much I remember about being eleven other than I wasn’t ten anymore. These days, fifty-seven years later, I can remember fifty-seven seconds ago but would be hard pressed on fifty-seven minutes. But I remember everything about November 22, 1963. Recall is a strange thing. Especially when trauma and emotion are involved. Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, was less than a week away; the air was getting crisp and the New York fall colors were on display. Life was good and so was that morning going to school.

It was just another day until about 1:30 in the afternoon Eastern time. Then it wasn’t anymore. Everything changed. Forever.  It's as vivid today as a Memorex moment, decades before there was Memorex. The school principal, Albert Tyler, got on the public address system. He never did that. That’s the same Mr. Tyler who would walk into the cafeteria and instantaneously everyone stopped eating and talking. I never could figure out why? Still can’t. I bet it happened in your school, too. Mr. Tyler looked like a school principal — tall, stiff, horn-rimmed glasses. He meant business. He majored in being mean. Tyler was probably in his fifties but to us kids he might as well have been a hundred.

His PA announcement shook the school. “The President has been shot.” Those are the only words I remember. “The President has been shot.” Gasp. Quiet. Confusion. Our teacher, Mrs. Miller, had no calming words. Tears.

About thirty minutes later Mr. Tyler came back on the PA. “President Kennedy is dead.” We didn’t know much more. The 46-year-old president was in Dallas, Texas, and killed. We still had an hour of school remaining. I’m not sure why but I was asked by Mrs. Miller to run an errand to the school office. I was scared beyond scared. I can still see it and feel it. My seat, in alphabetical order, was second in the first row right behind Spencer Ackerman. The school hallway was long, or so it seemed to a kid, with glass entry and exit doors at either end. I had no idea how far Dallas was from New York, but I remember thinking as I walked as fast as I could, almost in a jog, that by now the shooter could be close by.

Our after-school bowling league at Bowlerama was canceled. So were all other post-school activities. Our family of five gathered at home, around the kitchen table, watching Walter Cronkite on the Admiral TV with the rabbit ears on the easy-to-wheel TV stand. Mom didn’t cook that night, instead we had Chicken Delight. She took their jingle, ‘Don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight,’ literally. Dad tried to help us make sense of what we were watching.

I have no recollection of a nation in mourning the day after, Saturday, November 23. I’m sure I devoured every newspaper I could get my hands on. I still have my copy of the New York Daily News that Dad bought for me. Cost a nickel. It’s now yellow and parched, much like me.

The next day, Sunday, I was at our neighbor’s house to watch the Giants-St. Louis Cardinals football game. All college football the day before was canceled. The nation was weeping. Sunday's American Football League games were scrapped which meant the Jets couldn’t lose again.  The NFL games went on despite the players not wanting to play. Commissioner Pete Rozelle made the decision to take the field after consulting with JFK’s good friend and press secretary, Pierre Salinger, who said the president would have wanted it that way. Later Rozelle admitted it was the worst decision of his career.

About a half hour before the 1 pm Eastern NFL kick-off, all the networks were live in Dallas awaiting the transfer of Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested as the suspected assassin of the president. He was to be moved from Dallas police headquarters to a local jail. As Oswald was being escorted up a garage ramp, the television audience was stunned when a man jumped in front of Oswald and shot him in the stomach. It was reality television at its earliest and most sensational. A murder played out for all to see. Chaos and confusion. On camera, people yelling and running. Oswald went down as police officers apprehended the shooter, later identified as Jack Ruby, a two-bit mob wannabe, who ran a local strip club. Ruby was known to the local authorities and media and had no problem getting inside police security, which wasn’t too secure at all. We all watched. The networks stayed with the coverage and none of the ill-advised NFL games were broadcast.

I ran home. I’ll never forget my dad’s first reaction. Jack Ruby was Jewish, born Jacob Rubenstein. Dad was worried that Jews might be held accountable for the murder. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Oswald was the country’s number one villain. He also killed a Dallas police officer after he shot the president on that day in 1963. Ruby almost achieved hero status for his action. In fact, the crowd assembled outside the Dallas police headquarters burst into applause when they heard Oswald was shot. The secret of the Kennedy assassination was forever sealed that day. Did Oswald act alone? Did the Soviets, the Cubans, the CIA or the mob commission him and then hire Ruby to silence Oswald? Or did Ruby just act alone, like an American vigilante? Ruby, 52, had a reputation as being a bit of a psycho. Did he feel he owed it to President Kennedy to avenge his death? Like either a good mob soldier or just a kook, Ruby’s secret died with him four years later in jail.

Monday, November 25, 1963, was an official day of mourning in the United States. Schools and businesses were closed. President Kennedy was buried that afternoon. The DC day was wintry cold. One million people lined the funeral route. The bagpipers. Jackie Kennedy, joined by JFK’s brothers Bobby and Ted, walking behind the president’s body riding on the caisson. So did newly sworn-in President Lyndon Johnson, over Secret Service objections. The riderless horse. Three-year-old JFK Jr.’s salute. Arlington National Cemetery. The eternal flame at the gravesite, which had this eleven-year-old mesmerized, still burns brightly today. A country united by tragedy. Chilling.

For my generation that was the end of the societal innocence that we never realized with which we were blessed.  Two more high-profile assassinations before the decade of the 60s ended — Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Then Vietnam, inner city riots, peaceful and not-so-peaceful protests, campus shootings, four dead in Ohio, Watergate, the Challenger explosion, terrorist bombings, 9/11, school murders and now COVID. The list is far from complete but the world, our generational world, was never the same after November 22, 1963.

I never stopped being both haunted and captivated with the recollection of that day. The setting in Dallas of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked and shot out of an upper floor corner window; Dealey Plaza, where the School Book Depository was located; Kennedy’s limousine route through the plaza; the grassy knoll, where conspiracy theorists say there was a second shooter; the mall area where people were eating lunch, gathered to see the president — all of that was so large and prominent in my mind’s eye. Five years ago, in 2015, while on business in Dallas, I finally made it to Dealey Plaza in the West End district of the city. I was excited to be going there. It was something I always wanted to see, feel and touch for myself. I anticipated everything I had seen, read and absorbed for over half a century. Turning the corner on Market Street, I was taken aback by how compact everything was. It looked like a movie set on the Warner Brothers lot. I took the building tour and then spent a lot of time walking the area recounting how things played out. November 22, 1963, was with me.

Vendors were all over the plaza. I had a twenty-something who was selling old newspaper headline replicas and tacky souvenirs approach and ask me, “Do you have any questions about the Kennedy Assassination?”

I laughed. “Young man,” I said. “Have a seat. I’ve got a story to tell you.”