Thirty-nine
years ago today, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, I was in the sixth grade. We
were in our classroom on the second floor, having just gotten back from our
weekly trip down to the Bookmobile, which the Newark Public Library parked
outside our school all day every Friday. The shades were drawn, and we were
watching a program on WNDT, Channel 13, the educational station in New York. The
black and white TV images were up in the corner near the ceiling. As usual, the
faint sound of rattling cans from the nearby Ballantine brewery could be heard
in the background.
I can't remember which show we were watching. It could have been "Parlons
Francais," the French lesson show with Anne Slack. Or it might have been the
music show with that nice African-American woman (Negro lady, in those days) who
taught us such hot numbers as "Grinding Corn." Or maybe it was "Places in the
News," the geography/current events show with that nice, smart Jerry guy.
But it was interrupted for a
bulletin. Apparently shots had been fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in
Dallas.
Our teacher, Miss Matheson, wasn't in
the room at the time. She was down in the principal's office, where she
retreated when she needed a break from us, which was often. One of the girls ran
out to find her, because it seemed like this was big news.
The bulletins continued to interrupt
the show, which no one could concentrate on any more, anyway. Each time, the
screen would cut to a card that they showed that said "Bulletin." It also
included the station logo, which was a very simple cartoon owl. Sometimes the
cards they displayed between shows would have three of these owls sitting side
by side on top of the station call letters and channel number. You always heard
the announcer, but you never saw him or her. Now a man was reading copy from one
of the wire services, and sounding very agitated.
By the time Miss Matheson got back,
there was no more show, just the owl card and the news. Indeed, Kennedy had been
hit and was at the hospital. There was a rumor that he was dead. Then Channel 13
switched over to CBS, and just started simulcasting what was being broadcast
there. It was Walter Cronkite.
It looked like he was crying.
We prayed a lot at that school, but when Cronkite confirmed the worst, we did
something we never did before or after: we all knelt down on that cold, hard
tile floor, right next to our desks. We prayed like there was no tomorrow. We
didn't know what else to do. While we offered up Hail Mary after Hail Mary, Miss
Matheson ran down to break the news to the principal. Soon the principal got on
the intercom and told the whole school what the sixth grade already knew. The
last classes of the day were cancelled, and we headed across the street to the
church for another round of prayer, probably a whole rosary, before we went home
to our stunned, frightened parents.
Friday evening at our house usually
featured either fried flounder or pizza -- no meat on Friday, of course -- and a
raft of TV shows. Maybe Man from UNCLE would be on, and definitely
Jack Paar at 10:00. That particular Friday night, though, the three big
network stations broadcast just the grim news, and the other stations continued
to simulcast it. By the end of the night, the grownups were simply dumbfounded.
Our moms and grandmas cried, and the men swore.
Where I lived, JFK was our man. In
any given school, office, barber shop, or veterans post, you were likely to find
pictures of three men: Jesus, Pope John XXIII, and JFK, and not necessarily in
that order. Jack was the bright, young Democrat President. A robust (or so we
thought) Catholic daddy with a beautiful, rich wife and two adorable boomer
kids. And, we all joked,
he had a lot of hair. He played touch football on the White House lawn with
his huge Irish family. He had a temper, and as he showed the steel guys, he
wasn't afraid to use it to his advantage. He stood up to Krushchev. He stood up
to George Wallace. He and his brother even stood up to Jimmy Hoffa. We loved
him, and now they had killed him.
I saw him once in person. He was
coming to New York to address the United Nations, and my godmother, my mom's
sister Peggy, insisted on taking my brother and me over to see the motorcade.
And so over to the city we went on the Public Service no. 118 bus. We stood
behind a police barricade along the curb on one of the big north-south
thoroughfares as the giant parade breezed by. Kennedy was standing in that open
car, smiling, waving at folks. Since we had only seen him on television and in
the papers, we were surprised to see that his hair was a reddish brown, not
black.
I also distinctly recall, as we were waiting for the motorcade to arrive,
looking across the street at a man who was standing in a full-length second
story window doing the same. I remarked to Aunt Peggy that that man could shoot
the President from there. We all laughed then.
The assassination made for an
exciting weekend for us kids, but at our age, we didn't realize how badly the
wind had been knocked out of the nation and the world. We were getting used to
impending disaster. Just a year before, we had trained for weeks about what to
do if the air raid sirens went off. Walk quickly to the cafeteria in the school
basement, where the prayers would start up again.
We knew that New York would be ground
zero, because it was the center of the world. Our folks had calculated that we
were just eight miles from where the Cuban missile would hit. When that crisis
was defused, we had all thanked God, the Pope, and JFK, and not necessarily in
that order. We had gone about the happy business of post-war America.
Then Dallas.
A few months later, the Beatles would
give us our childhood back. But on that Friday before Thanksgiving, that
childhood, and we, were lost.
(Photo of St. Aloysius School by my
friend Bill Montferret)
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