Memories Of The JFK Assassination

Forty-nine years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, Texas.  Bullets fired from high inside the Texas School Book Depository Building as his car passed, not only cut short the life of our youthful and vibrant 35th President, but ripped a hole in the hearts of citizens like myself, shattering for good what was certainly an era of American innocence.

As with most people alive when this tragedy happened, where I was and what I was doing at the moment of that fateful news, is still indelibly etched in my memory. A few weeks earlier I had just been discharged from the Army, and decided to take advantage of the local Junior College system by relocating from New York to California, and living with my dad who I hadn’t seen for almost twenty years.  On that Friday, November 22, 1963, the two of us were at Felix Chevrolet on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, looking for a car I could use for school.  Our brief time walking around the huge lot had been more than strange.  Instead of being mobbed by hoards of salesmen eager to make a deal, it was absolutely deserted.  Even if we had been pushing a wheelbarrow full hundred dollar bills, not one salesman would have been there to notice.

After about twenty minutes we walked toward the showroom entrance looking for someone to answer our questions.  The moment we opened the double doors and stepped in, it was obvious that something was very wrong.  There were small clusters of people gathered throughout the building, many of them crying and sobbing as others held them close.  There was conversation going on, but in such a hushed manner that it was impossible to understand what was being said.  At one end of the showroom was a television surrounded by silent spectators, a few sitting on a lounge with bowed heads, but all with postures that indicated they were distraught.

Dad and I walked up to a man who was standing alone, away from everyone else.  We asked him what had happened.  Turning to us, his answer was tragically simple.  With tears still evident on his cheeks, he said, “The President’s dead.  They killed our President…!”  Dad and I looked at each other, absolutely stunned.  In the time it had taken us to drive the freeway from Orange County to downtown Los Angeles, we had lost our national leader.

The rest, of course, is history.  But it’s funny, isn’t it?  I still get emotional just writing about it.  Not only was the life of my President, my Commander-In-Chief, and the beneficiary of my first vote snuffed out that day, so was much of my youthful optimism about the United States of America.