MOMENTS IN TIME, INNOCENCE LOST

It was November 22, 1963. I was a 20 year-old college junior working as a reporter for a central Kentucky weekly newspaper. My working hours were scheduled around the times of my college classes so on that particular day, I was alone in the news office  working on an assignment during the lunch hour. The rest of the staff had scattered to wherever they  chose to eat...home...the lunch counter at the drug store or the bus station or the college cafeteria. The phone by the editor's desk  rang, I answered it , and with that  one act......lost  the innocence and naivete of childhood. I no longer remember who called...male....female....known or unknown. The name...the voice...have faded into the nothingness of obscurity. The question I was asked will never fade...."Is it true, my God, is it true? They're saying on the radio that someone shot the  PRESIDENT!   In Dallas! Is it true?"

There was no radio in the office and the closest wire service was not accessible.  I called the dorm where I lived and asked for my roommate.  She had a class soon...in the same direction (across campus) as the newspaper office.  I wanted my radio.....I needed some way to check this frightening information.  Finally (after some back and forth conversation) she agreed to bring it on her way to class.  By the time the radio was operational....I think every one was back from lunch and in  the office listening  in shocked silence, What could we think? Presidents didn't get assassinated in the 20th Century....did they?  This couldn't possibly be true....could it?   I honestly don't remember the reaction of the older folk. I do remember that students gathered together in clumps of friends..maybe hoping for security in numbers...I don't know.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first President I ever saw  in real life.and I remember his campaign coming through the mountains of West Virginia....stopping in Fort Gay...visiting the high school...talking to teachers...talking to students...knocking on neighbor's doors. I remember John Kennedy. his brother, Robert...and his mother, Rose.  They seemed like real people which is what I told my grandfather and my uncles later that day. ..By the time I graduated high school..some one my family knew sent me a picture of President Kennedy...a picture that was a cherished possession for many years to come  An event and a person that to my (as then unborn)  children would be only a footnote in a history book...became real life.

Was the death of the President a shock?  I don't think the word, "shock"  adequately describes the emotional bomb that whipped across our campus. No event in the personal lives of young adults  (in 1963) could have prepared us for the news on that day.  Multiply the shock of the totally unforeseen, sudden, unprepared for death of a close family member and maybe...just maybe if that upheaval was multiplied by  100...there would be some approximation of our feelings.   Many of us walked to class in groups instead of singly...probably feeling  there was a nebulous "safety in numbers".  Little did were really know  other than....we were scared...not overtly...but down deep in the pit of our stomachs deep...in a winter afternoon....thousands of miles from where we lived, our sense of quasi safety had been torn from our psyche and we would never again see the world in the same way.

Many faculty and staff reached out to the students with a phone call....a strongly worded "invitation" to "come to the house.: The college dentist was from  Fort Gay and sensing the distress in our very souls...gathered a group at his house...a five minute walk from the dorm. There we sat huddling together in front of his television set...not talking much...just watching history unfold..the aftermath of Kennedy's death...the swearing in of Lyndon B.  Johnson....the death of Lee Harvey Oswald...the state funeral of President Kennedy.  The numbness slowly began to ebb away. We stashed newspapers which covered the events....we went to class....we moved on as the country  moved on...never expecting...never dreaming that we would see   two more assassinations before the end of the decade.