I Was At Home, In The Basement

As so many people are doing today, I’ve been remembering where I was fifty years ago, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

I was seven, in second grade in a Catholic school in Kansas City, Kansas. For some reason, possibly a cold or some other ailment, I was at home. My father was at work, my next younger brother would have been at school, my oldest sister would have been at kindergarten. Four other siblings would have been in the house, the youngest only six months old, and my mother was in one of those rare moments when she wasn’t pregnant. (I’m the oldest of eight kids, the last one born in September, 1964.)

I was alone in the basement that my father had converted to a family room. The laundry room was also down there. I remember my mother coming down the stairs off and on to check on me, but I have no recollection of any of my siblings around. This may have been in part because I was sick and we were trying to limit the plague’s spread through the family (a futile effort, I’m sure). The other factor in isolating me was that I was supposed to be studying.

As a good Catholic boy, I was studying my doctrine lessons for an upcoming religious test of some sort. I’m pretty sure I had gotten First Communion in first grade, so by the middle of second grade I was probably studying for a Confirmation test. The television on for some reason, possibly for my mother to watch, since I was supposed to be studying and I didn’t watch daytime programming.

As everyone says, “I’ll never forget”. I’ll never forget sitting on the couch in that basement rec room, studying, when they broke in with a special bulletin. My mother was upstairs at the time and I remember running to get her to tell her about it. She came back downstairs and for the rest of the day we watched the grainy black & white images that we’ve all seen so many times. Walter Cronkite, the frantic live reports, conflicting news, finally the word that the president was dead, and the news that LBJ had been sworn in. I remember the funeral coverage. I remember watching live as Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24th.

As part of the news coverage for today, NPR has a great audio clip (here) of radio communications between Air Force One, the Situation Room in Washington, and a plane (Aircraft 972) which was two hours out of Honolulu on its way to Japan. That plane carried Secretary of State Dean Rusk along with five other members of Kennedy’s Cabinet, so one can understand the concern for that plane and its passengers. If the assassination of the president was part of an attempted coup or other attack on our government by foreign agents, that plane would obviously be a target. It’s fascinating to listen to these recordings, hearing these men trying to do their jobs and figure out what to do on the fly in the middle of an enormous crisis.

It’s one of those moments. I’ll never forget.