Memories of the JFK Assassination

We all have them — memories of those “where were you when …?” moments.

For me, one of the most prominent such memories is that of a crisp, sun-dappled Friday afternoon 60 years ago. It was late November 1963, and I was a Grade 8 student at Frontenac Public School. With the week winding down, like most of my classmates — and probably our harried math teacher — I was musing about the weekend ahead and not at all about why an understanding of integers was essential to me or to the course of western civilization.

The school day was 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. back then, and at the front of the classroom on this day the big wall clock beside the photo of the Queen told me there was less than an hour before we could all go home. My reveries about that were interrupted by the sound of a tap, tap, tap on the classroom door. Our math teacher, evidently as surprised by this as I was, went into the hall to speak one of the secretaries who worked in the principal’s office. The women’s body language suggested they were talking about something serious.

A minute or two later, our teacher returned the classroom. She was pale and had a pained look on her face. “I’ve just heard that the American president, John F. Kennedy, has been shot and killed,” she said in a soft voice that trembled like a reed in the breeze.

That news set off a thrum of excitement. “Does this mean we can go home early?” one of my classmates was quick to ask. It was the question we all were wondering about. We could only hope.

Although I didn’t give it a second thought at the time, it’s still a mystery to me how in those bygone days before cellphones and social media the staff in the principal’s office had heard so quickly about events in Dallas, 2,600 kilometres away. I expect that someone who was at home watching Art Linkletter’s House Party (a half-hour weekday afternoon show that aired on the CBS network in the States and was seen locally on Channel 7 out of Watertown) must have called the school office to report a shocking newsflash.

At 2:38 p.m., newsman Walter Cronkite’s face had suddenly appeared on television screens. Cronkite, who was sitting at his newsroom desk, dressed in a shirt and tie, looked ashen, even on black-and-white television. He struggled to hold his emotions in check. “From Dallas, apparently official …. “ he announced, “President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 o’clock Eastern Standard Time … some 38 minutes ago. …” (Check out the video, which you can find posted on YouTube.)

I don’t recall the jangling of the school bell that Friday afternoon so long ago, only that when I got home, my mother was baking cookies. And in a corner of the living room, the television was droning away. Unwatched. Both my father and sister, who’d graduated from high school earlier that year, were still at work.

As for me, I grabbed my hockey stick and raced out the door in hopes my pals and I would have time for a quick game of street hockey before it got dark. It never occurred to me to sit down in front of the television to watch as history was being made.

All three American networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — stayed on the air four consecutive days, providing live, continuous coverage of the national crisis. “The only thing on television anywhere in the (United States) was the Kennedy assassination,” former CBS News anchor Dan Rather once said. He was right about that. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Those marathon broadcasts that filled the airwaves that fateful weekend created a new template for broadcast news. There would be no going back.

Viewers quickly got used to watching wars, disasters and political crises happen in real time. And unlike today, when social media and the scores of broadcast outlets serve up news and current events 24-7, in 1963 there was only a handful of news sources. Everyone watched the same coverage of the tragic events. Not that I cared much about any of that at the time.

If I was concerned about anything, it was that the extended coverage of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath both on CKWS, Channel 11, here in Kingston and on the Watertown station, pre-empted my favourite television programs. Foremost among them were reruns of the series Sky King, which aired on Channel 7 at noon on Saturdays.

Part of that extended coverage was the murder that happened on live television around noon on Sunday, Nov. 24, in the basement parking garage of the Dallas police department. As alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly was being transferred to a more secure facility, Dallas strip club owner Jack Ruby suddenly emerged from a crowd of on-lookers. Jamming a .38-calbre handgun into Oswald’s belly, Ruby pulled the trigger.

An ambulance rushed the mortally wounded Oswald to Parkland Memorial Hospital — ironically the same hospital where President Kennedy had been pronounced dead two days earlier. Kennedy’s alleged killer died there a few minutes after 1 o’clock, never having had the opportunity to explain exactly what role he’d played in the president’s murder.

As if that wasn’t enough to keep adult eyeballs glued to their television sets, on Monday, Nov. 25, live coverage of the Kennedy funeral in Washington certainly was. Tens of millions of viewers tuned in to watch the broadcast. Even I did. At least until I got bored and went in search of another road hockey game.

It was only a decade later, when I was studying history at Queen’s University, that I took a serious interest in the Kennedy assassination and what had happened over the course of the four days that followed. Then, shortly after my student days, I had an opportunity to talk with the late Canadian newsman Peter Worthington, who share with me his memories of being in the parking garage of the Dallas police department when Ruby forever silenced Lee Harvey Oswald.

As Worthington recalled, he was more than a little surprised that Ruby, who had no reason to be in what was supposed to be a secure area of the Dallas police station, came and went freely and was chatting with cops; many of them, it came out later, were patrons of Ruby’s strip club. If on that fateful day had Worthington wondered who Ruby was, he wondered even more after Ruby fired the shot that silenced Oswald forever and spattered Worthington’s white shirt with droplets of blood.

The story that has been “officially” accepted and that was endorsed by the 1964 report of the Warren Commission is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill President Kennedy. As for Ruby, the Warren Commission concluded that, like Oswald, he had been a lone wolf. Like Peter Worthington and so very many other people, I have my doubts about that.

The Kennedy assassination is the ultimate murder mystery. Sixty years on, it seems doubtful we’ll ever know the truth of what happened on that fateful day in Dallas. That said, what I do know for certain is that if ever I could invite one historical figure to sit down at my dinner table, it would be Lee Harvey Oswald. I have a feeling he could unveil stunning truths about the Kennedy assassination, an event that has had a profound, wide-ranging impact on the history of the United States. And of our world.