1963....Dallas, Texas..."Shots ring out"

(Editor's note: Because of the enormity of the event, this post will deal only with the assassination of JFK, a subsequent post will have additional information from 1963.)

Fifth period Science class,  Fairview High School, Dayton, Ohio.. an announcement comes over the loud speaker in the classroom. "The President has been shot".................nothing more...no explanation other than those five words..... except for a few muffled cries,  the room was completely still 

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Was I going to go to war?.....Would there be a bomb dropped on my hometown?......Why would someone shoot my President?.......Should I go home and cry in my own room?...Should I even cry?.......I was only 15 and my life was turned upside down and hundreds of questions were racing through my mind.

Dallas was as foreign to me as China but that was where my President was dieing, .. bleeding to death from a gunshot wound to his head while his wife, covered in his blood, tried to gain some sense of what was happening.

 

Little did I know, I would be in Dallas only a year later......on my way to see my newly born niece in Waco and then 15 years later be moving to Dallas where I would spend the next 34 years of my life.


Most of you have heard the story told over and over about how the President and the first lady came to Texas to smooth over some ill feelings among the members of the Democratic Party, and you'll hear it again next year when the City of Dallas prepares for the onslaught of thousands of reporters and visitors as the 50th anniversary of his death is commemorated.

But this is simply my story....one that I think about every time I pass through downtown Dallas....every time a new conspiracy theory is debated over the local talk shows...  every time Dallas is in the news for something other than that dreadful day.... yet the newscasters find a way to bring back those events

I can remember Walter Cronkite wiping the tears from his eyes as he told the nation that the President had died. I can remember watching the Zapruder film over and over as Jackie climbs over the back of the limousine trying to protect her husband. I can remember the horror of seeing Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down. I can remember the picture of little John-John as he saluted his father's body as the funeral possession passed by led by the riderless black horse with the boots turned backwards in the saddle.

As I mentioned earlier, my first visit to Dealy Plaza was only a year after Kennedy had been shot. What surprised me the most was how short the span was of the path that the motorcade took when the shots were fired...and of course for that reason there have been so many conspiracy theories.How could Oswald have fired three shots?  Were there others hiding on the railroad tracks of the triple overpass. I wanted to get out of the car and stand on the grassy knoll.....try to embrace the moment...but we simply drove down the street and went on about our way.

Later, after I lived here for several years, I decided to take some time and try to learn as much as I could to   objectively format my opinion of what really happened. After the years have passed and millions of words have been written, I think I can finally put the events of that day to rest, well at least for now.

Sometimes we feel a need to magnify the villain  in these horrible crimes to the level of the event or to the level the person who was killed. The thought of simply a deranged man performing a deranged deed just doesn't seem to want to fit into our scope of imagination. We feel the need to make the perpetrator more than he was.

Whatever the reasons, whatever the facts may be.......the memory of where I was and what I was doing on Nov. 22, 1963 is embedded in my mind.


Next:   more of 1963...A year of unrest