Remembering JFK 50 years later
Who: Grace Richardson, humanities instructor
Age: 17
Where you were: Taking a test in the social studies class, “which was ironic. They did an announcement over the loudspeakers.”
What you remember: “Everybody was watching television by then, and then to have Lee Harvey Oswald shot on television, was really something.”
Impact: “It was scary to think that our leaders were being assassinated. The social fabric of the country seemed to be falling apart (in the 1960s), between the protests in Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the assassination…
“I was a huge fan of Kennedy. I had helped campaign for him. I felt awful…
“It was one of those things that you knew was going to be a big part of history.”
• • •
Who: Jeannie Thompson, physical therapist assistant program instructor
Age: 5
Where you were: “I was at school that day and I remember coming home and, of course, there being a lot of commotion and not knowing what was going on. It was my mom’s birthday, actually.”
What you remember: “The TV was on all day long and there was a lot of tension in the house… that didn’t happen regularly…
“I do remember that she (mom) didn’t let us stay in the room.”
Impact: “I’m not really sure I understood the whole impact of it.”
• • •
Who: Susan Boulden, medical office program instructor
Age: 8
Where you were: “We happened to be out (of school) at lunch time and there was an announcement that brought us all back inside. And there was a television in every classroom tuned to the news and that was how we found out. I still remember Walter Cronkite announcing that he was dead.”
What you remember: “It was very shocking, very, very shocking. There was so much about them (the Kennedy family) in the news… It felt like a new beginning. I could even sense that, as young as I was, that this was historic. Watching the adults in the school get so emotional and many of them were crying and lots of us went home… that’s how impactful it was…
“Everybody, everybody was sad. The entire country. That was the first time I really can remember being part of a large country…
“Everybody was affected and it was the topic of conversation of everyone. A day didn’t go by that we didn’t talk about it.”
Impact: “I think what it did is made me realize, maybe earlier than I might have, that life is so short and that it can end so quickly and so brutally. It also has given me more of a perspective of just how much a president takes on that puts (each one) in jeopardy.”
• • •
Who: Rich Coulston, English instructor
Age: 14 or 15
What you remember: “I remember thinking that that all the things that he had started, which were civil rights and movements that were popular… the Peace Corps and such, were all going to go by the wayside…
“The newscaster, Walter Cronkite, taking off his glasses and saying, ‘The president has been shot; the president is dead’…
“All the people my age got together and watched the television, the funeral and so forth, and commiserated over the fact that it was the end of everything, because nobody would be as charismatic as he.”
Impact: “The idealism that pervaded the culture, at least the youth, just died. I don’t think it was so much his assassination, but the continual involvement in Vietnam, that drained the resources out of it.”
• • •
Who: Maggie Huffman, director of communications
Age: 9
Where you were: “I remember I was in English class and Mr. Graham told us the president had been shot. It seems like not too much later he told us the president had died. So buses lined up and we all got on the bus. Everybody was somber. I remember some teachers were crying.”
What you remember: “It made me scared, because all the adults were afraid. I fed off their emotions…
“I also remember when Oswald was shot. I was watching TV with all the grown-ups and older kids in my family and there we saw a murder right on TV. It was quite scary.”
Impact: The Teletype stories her brother brought home from Seattle University “kept changing by the minute, it seems like. I read all of them. Which is actually one of the reasons I went into journalism as a career.”
• • •
Who: Glenn Wright, graphic design coordinator
Age: 5
Where you were: “I remember that my family and I were eating dinner…
“They were very excited about something. Something horrible happened and they ran to the tiny little black and white television that we had in the room. I didn’t really understand the magnitude.”
What you remember: “For some reason, I remember the patterns that we had on the chairs and the curtains… burned into my memory, because of that.”
Impact: “Over the days that followed I had a stronger understanding of what happened, the magnitude of it and feeling really sad and bad…
“I semi-expect it to happen again.”
• • •
Who: Karen Hannegan, grant writer
Age: 16
Where you were: “I was in biology class at St. Thomas Aquinas High School outside of St. Louis in Missouri. The nun… she was very young and she made an announcement to the class and as she made the announcement she was just weeping, and she told us President Kennedy had been shot and killed.”
What you remember: “At that time, everybody in my age group, we were completely excited about Kennedy and what he was doing and the message he was giving to everyone. It was like there was all this hope and this fantastic enthusiasm…
“It was Catholic school and being that Kennedy was a Catholic, the first Catholic president, it was like he was part of our family…
“All of my brothers and sisters and friends came to my house to watch (the funeral) on TV. We were all just sobbing, just sobbing…
Impact: “It was as if hope had died…
“I think that (now) there’s a real renaissance in young people. I think their awareness is highly involved. I think it’s really rather extraordinary…
“I really see how, for me anyway, and for my generation, it was like that feeling of anything can happen and anything dreadful can happen… This was something that kind of pulled the rug out from our generation at that time.”
Watching video of the JFK funeral on YouTube last weekend, “I was watching and I was weeping again. Just like I did 50 years ago.”
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