JFK Again: How We Couldn’t Let Go

If you can’t remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when it happened on November 22, 1963, then you probably weren’t alive. Our collective memories of that awful event have become the big generational marker in American History. You were either there and aware, or not there.

Even now, fifty years later, there are really only two kinds of people in this country, maybe even in the world: those who know exactly what they were doing when President Kennedy got shot that day in Dallas, and those who don’t know only because they weren’t born yet.

On that infamous Friday I was alive. So I can remember what took place as though it had happened yesterday.

For me and everyone else at Hiawatha Elementary, November 22, 1963, started out as the perfect autumn day. Blue skies with only a few fluffy white clouds and no hint of the bone-chilling winter winds that would surely come next month -- a happy day with no rain or snow or foreboding.

On that day, it was cool and crisp but sunny and mild enough for the teachers to turn us loose outside for noontime recess. Nearly all the kids in school that day went out to mull around, run around, on the playground. That’s when I first heard the news.

Every school has a little know-it-all -- a self-appointed lil’ opinion leader -- who claims to be a big authority on everything, and ours was no exception. I can’t remember his name now, only that he was the littlest kid in our class with the biggest mouth. On that day, he couldn’t stop delivering his breaking news -- over and over -- to everyone on the playground.

He wasn’t really loud or animated, though. In fact, he seemed to have the demeanor and subdued enthusiasm of a junior funeral director. He was very serious, very deliberate, as he delivered the bad news in hushed tones:
The President has been shot.
Someone has shot President Kennedy.
They shot Kennedy.

Immediately, I was skeptical. Even at that young age, my investigative reporter’s DNA and curiosity genes were operating at full throttle. I simply didn’t believe him and didn’t hesitate to tell him so.

No, I told Little Bigmouth, the President didn’t get shot. Then I continued with my grade school logic and reasoning:

Don’t you think that if he would have been shot, somebody would have told us by now?
Don’t you think they would have let school out early if something like that happened?

I’m not going to believe it unless the teachers tell us. I’m not going to believe it just because YOU said so. Who told you, anyway? How come you know all about it and nobody else does?

That prompted a chorus of other skeptics who had finally found a unified voice. In defiance, they began telling him how stupid his information was:
Yeah, the President didn’t get shot. You’re WRONG!
That’s not true! And how come you know about it?
Why are you always the one who knows everything first -- before we do?

The bell that signaled the end of recess rang before the crowd could erupt into a scene from “Monsters on Maple Street.” So the news source and his dire reports were kept at bay -- but only for a few minutes longer. Back inside the school, we might as well have been extras ourselves in another episode from “The Twilight Zone.”

We entered a school that we barely recognized. What had happened? Was this really our school? Everything and everyone now seemed eerily quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when the grown-ups tell you not to make any noise. But no adults had come forward to silence us -- yet. No instructions had been given to us -- yet. What was going on here?

Nothing looked out of place, but something felt wrong. Almost as if an ill-tempered fairy had sent a depressive cloud though the hallways to bewitch all the students from kindergarten to the eighth grade. An unnatural, uneasy silence pervaded the entire building, and we didn’t know why. There should have been more noise, more hustle and bustle because it was Friday: prelude to our weekend of freedom with no tests or teachers to bother us.

We couldn’t do anything about it, though. We were too little to seriously question or challenge things. We could only feel and wonder.

Maybe our teacher Miss Steiner would know what was going on, I thought. If something bad had happened, she’d tell us.

As soon as my classmates and I got to our homeroom, we hung up our sweaters and coats, as usual. Then we each went to our desks and sat down. Miss Steiner wasn’t at her desk, though. She was out in the hallway by our classroom door talking to someone. Her whispering was so loud that you could easily recognize her voice and make out a few words here and there. Her voice was loud enough to be called a stage whisper but not clear enough to be perfectly audible. So whatever she and the other person were discussing remained unclear to her roomful of little eavesdroppers.

Then Miss Steiner came inside the room, shut the door, walked over to her desk and sat down. She looked at some papers on her desk. Then she looked up and smiled at us. She smiled at us! That wasn’t like Miss Steiner at all.

Even on a good day, she rarely cracked a smile. Now, on this eerily quiet day, a pleasant little smile mysteriously emerged on her face?

That was weird, just weird.

Before her class had time to process her unusual good mood, she left the room. A few minutes later, she returned with the principal. Someone else showed up, too. I think it might have been the school nurse or another teacher. This person didn’t stay long, though. She soon departed, and only our teacher and the school principal remained.

Anyway, Miss Steiner then informed us that President Kennedy had been shot. One of the kids asked if he was all right. No, the principal replied, he was dead.

They both stood there looking at us, with their arms folded and curious little smiles frozen on their faces. Like mothers presiding over high tea who had just discovered garter snakes in the cucumber sandwiches but didn’t want to alarm their guests.

Then the principal left Miss Steiner to face her stunned students on her own.

A few kids managed to ask questions about how or when or where it had happened. Miss Steiner gave some calm, thoughtful answers that didn’t really answer these questions. She couldn’t. She didn’t know that much about the assassination at this point. But you could see how she was making an effort to stay cool and collected.  And how she was trying to reassure her students so they wouldn’t cry or get upset. Suddenly, her frozen little smile made sense.

She was just as confused and as sad as we were, but she was trying not to show her feelings because she was afraid she’d become upset, and she didn’t want us to see how confused and sad and upset she really was.

So she stood there, trying to hold herself together for her students. Everyone was looking at her. Everyone was quiet.

Then my hand shot up. “I think,” I told her and the class, “that we should all say a little prayer for him.”

Miss Steiner said, “I think that would be a very good idea.  Let’s do that now.”

So we all prayed. At our desks. In a public school. And none of the parents or teachers later raised any fuss about our violation between Church and State.

Walking home from school that afternoon became an exercise in balancing the surreal with our own magical thinking. We talked about how the President had died, although we knew almost nothing about the circumstances surrounding his death. We talked about our parents -- what they had said, what they would do, what they would have done -- although we’d had no contact with them when the bad news broke or shortly thereafter. How brave we tried to be that day!

Here we were, a group of gradeschoolers walking home after our President had been shot. We were winging it, playing it by ear, flying by the seat of our pants. We didn’t know what we were supposed to do or say. We only knew something really bad had happened to President Kennedy, and there was nothing we -- or anybody else -- could do about it.

But we wanted him back.

We wanted things to be the way they used to be. Little Caroline on her pony...Little John John hiding under his father’s desk...Kids like us with BOTH a mother AND a father: that’s what we wanted for them.

If those kids weren’t safe, we suddenly knew we would never be, either.

And then we were all thunderstruck with a realization that came too early for us: THERE IS NO REAL SAFETY OR SECURITY IN THIS LIFE.

Now we knew... and we didn’t like what this AHA! moment spelled out for us kids. With no safety or security for us, it was impossible to keep trusting. We couldn’t unconditionally trust the grown-ups anymore, not after they’d let this thing happen. Although our parents and teachers and other adults kept telling us everything would be all right, we knew they were lying, and that made all the difference.

Back home, Mom kept up a good, pleasant front. So did Dad. They were both so afraid that this assassination would adversely affect my little sister Sue and me that they decided to maintain a brave, business-as-usual atmosphere at home. They tried to reassure us that life would go on, that things would somehow settle down. Then we’d all return to normal again.

But we couldn’t. Not really.

Saturday morning came: NO CARTOONS. That in itself was unusual and not well-received by Sue and me. No regular television programming, either. Not for days afterward.

What made it worse, though, was that people on TV kept talking and talking about our dead President that weekend. As though discussing this tragedy would make things better. As though going over and over the same old details of the shooting would somehow undo the damage. It didn’t.

When Sue had a nightmare about a man with a gun shooting Dad, that was it. Mom turned off the television. “No more TV for you,” she announced. “Both of you, go out and play, go out and swing. You don’t need to keep watching this.”

Dad agreed. “There’s nothing new,” he told us. “They just keep hashing and rehashing the same news. Nothing’s changed.”

Yeah. OK. No more TV. No more new information. Nothing’s changed. Nothing new to see or talk about. Until Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on TV for all the world to see.

After that, we began to look back on our halcyon days -- even though we should have been too young to have had any halcyon days. We remembered the time when we used to think everything would be all right, just because the grown-ups were in charge... Gee, that was just a few days ago. Our nostalgia for the good old days went beyond ironic into the absurd. Our “good old days” were literally just a few days ago.

Now autumn was over. Nothing but bleak days and bitter cold ahead for us. For all of us.

That realization made us sad at a time when we didn’t want to be sad. We wanted to be hopeful. Isn’t that what President Kennedy would have wanted?

Maybe that was why we couldn’t let JFK go. They say the ones you love always go too soon, while the ones you don’t can’t go soon enough. With John Fitzgerald Kennedy, we wanted him back so badly that we wanted to put his name, his image, his likeness everywhere.

Most Catholic households had some kind of  illustration of him hanging on the wall somewhere in their houses. If he wasn’t in a frame, he was embossed on a commemorative plate next to Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

But even non-Catholics began to keep Kennedy memorabilia. They saved old issues of “Life” and “Look” magazines with his pictures on the cover or inside. They accumulated heavy coffee table books with photographs of him, as well as Jackie, Caroline, and John John, inside. Suddenly, JFK become an omnipresent visitor in homes across America.

If this President and his First lady weren’t on your salt and pepper shakers, they were ubiquitous guests on your calendars, key chains, prayer cards, and mementos. Even in your curio cabinets. For a few dollars more, you could get Jack and Jackie immortalized as lovely bisque figurines and set them next to your Hummel or Lladro pieces. JFK stayed with us, albeit in personal keepsake form.

Then he became part of our national landscape. Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy. High schools, grade schools, stadiums, and streets were all named in his honor.

His face soon got stamped on our national currency. Suddenly, there were Kennedy fifty-cent pieces to keep. And I do mean keep. So many people (like me) held onto these coins that they weren’t in circulation the way they were intended to be.

Then he became part of another culture’s language. Through our “Weekly Reader,” we learned that a tribe in Africa now used the word “Kennedy” to describe anything really great that the natives liked.

That’s how beloved this man was to us back then. We loved him so much we couldn’t let him go. We couldn’t seem to put him or his family or his image to rest. We knew he was dead. We just hadn’t wanted him to leave us so soon.

Our prolonged national mourning was intense -- and it was showing up in so many ways that we didn’t realize how bad it really was.

A couple of years after his death, I found that Vaughn Meader LP in my aunt’s record collection. He was the guy who did this uncanny impression of President Kennedy. Then he got some other comic actors together to do a comedy album about the Kennedy clan at the White House. He called his series of humorous verbal vignettes “The First Family,” and it sold millions of copies. Not only was it wildly popular in the early 60’s, it was also awarded a Grammy for 1962 “album of the year.”

I asked my aunt to play it because I’d never heard it before.

Since her stereo was in the living room, everyone in the extended family got a chance to hear it -- or hear it again. It was hilarious. I could see why the record had been so popular. But no one was laughing. We just couldn’t laugh. We’d start to chuckle or giggle, then we’d stop.

Oh. That’s right, I thought. We can’t laugh now..He’s dead. He really is dead...

After that, I stopped saving my Kennedy fifty-cent pieces in the old glass jar and started spending them.