We weren’t there so much to see the young president and the beautiful Jackie – rather the Dallas Independent School District had announced an excused absence for any student who wanted to go downtown to witness the event. Little did any of us know what would unfold before our eyes and how it would change us. My two school buddies and I didn’t need much encouragement to take advantage of this get-out-of-jail-free card. We liked cars, almost to the exclusion of anything else, and the opportunity to see the presidential limousine up close was another draw. We’d heard how it was heavily modified to be bullet-proof for protection of its all important occupant and that was petty cool. Of course with the top removed it offered scant protection as we now know.
We stood on north Harwood near Live Oak on the west side of the street as the motorcade approached, and the Dallas police kept shooing us all back up on the curbs as the crowd kept pressing out into the street, craning our necks to see. Soon the first cars came b
y and then the president’s limousine. I can remember the smiling faces and waves and the stir of the air as the car passed by us. My mother had given me a Brownie camera and I snapped off one shot.After the motorcade had passed I can still hear my buddy say, “gosh Gary he was close enough to spit on! We could have reached out and touched him!”. We didn’t, of course. Like everyone else there, we were proud a president would tour our town and we waved and smiled back.
The main event over, we were hungry and had a free day ahead us, so we thought. So we walked over to Main Street and then west just a couple of blocks and found a little hot dog joint and ordered. I think I had just taken my first bite when we heard a siren, which is not unusual in downtown Dallas. But as many squad cars, fire trucks and other vehicles roared past it was apparent this was a major event, and my buddy said, “gosh Gary, somethin’s happenin’!”. We dropped our hot dogs and began to sprint toward the area of commotion and, being 13 years old and pretty nimble, we soon found ourselves at Market Street where hundreds of people were sharing various information and listening to transistor radios if they had them. Some of the information was wildly inaccurate, but one thing was clear; there was a terrible shooting and the motorcade had sped away toward Parkland Hospital. In 1963 local news stations did not have helicopters or satellite up-links, and there were no cell phones, i-phones, digital cameras etc.
The third buddy then informed us that his mom worked on the third story of the Records Building which is on the opposite corner from the School Book Depository, so we quickly ran up to the third floor, found his mom and a perch at a window on the Elm Street side of the building. With my Brownie I grabbed a shot of the scene to the right.
...
I don’t remember the trip home that day, but I do recall the grief that settled over the nation that weekend as the shocking news sank in and we tried to process what had happened. Adding to our grief was the shooting of a young Officer Tippett. And then the unbelievable shooting of the assassin right before our eyes on national television. All the radio stations changed their format not only to report the news but to play music more in keeping with the nation’s grief.
Suddenly it did not matter whether you had been for this president or opposed. The images of Jackie’s blood spattered pink suit, the hasty swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson, the reactions streaming in from around the globe all combined in a strange way to make it terribly real. What I did not realize at the time was how much innocence we lost as a nation that day.
More recently another layer of innocence was violently stripped away from our national psyche when Islamic terrorists struck on the now-infamous 9-11. What were the odds my generation would be witness to these two important events?
I'm mildly amused by the conspiracy mongers -- for both of those events.
I’m a grandfather now, and I reflect on what seems really important to me, and what is ahead for our nation, our children and grandchildren.
