JFK's Assassination: An Age of Innocence Shattered

I wish I had something really profound to say about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago today.

I do distinctly remember the day, but I was a first-grader at Mars Estates Elementary School when news of the event that shook a nation began to spread.

While sitting with 40-plus other 5- and 6-year-olds in Mrs. Higgins' comfortable and secure classroom,  I have two standout memories of that day. The first is of seeing Mr. Neutzel, a teacher of the big kids from the back wing of the school, come running around the courtyard toward the classrooms of the younger students, screaming, "The president's been shot, the president's been shot."

The other is of being one of those 40-plus students who then looked to Mrs. Higgins and asked, "What's a president?"

Before you start making snide comments about the sorry state of education, let me remind you of the actual state of education in 1963, at least in our county and community.

In today's era of full-day kindergarten, pre-kindergarten, pre-K 3 and pre-K in utero (or so it seems), it may be hard to fathom, but my school did not at the time offer kindergarten at all (it wouldn't come to be at Mars Estates until the year I was in sixth grade).

In my blue-collar community, there were no nursery schools, no church pre-schools, no private day care centers, and if there were, no one in my neighborhood could afford to enroll.

So we marched off to first grade as absolute clean academic slates. We hit the threshold of Room 3, the domain of Mrs. Higgins, with no prior knowledge of numbers, colors or any letter recognition, let alone word recognition.

Not only did Mrs. Higgins have to lay every brick and block of the very foundation of our public 1-12 education, she had to excavate to prepare the site for that foundation.

So when Mr. Neutzel—in true town crier-style—delivered that tragic, country-rocking news, we looked to the woman who was teaching us everything we knew, comfortable that she would explain to us what was going on.

We were shocked to see tears in her eyes as she explained the president was the leader of our nation, and used the analogy of our parents at home as the leaders of our family, comparing the presidency to that of being the father of a much larger family.

And she told us that a bad person had just seriously injured the nation's father.

I can't remember what transpired after that, including whether or not school was dismissed early.

I just seem to remember profound sadness everywhere, a sort of shellshocked catatonia that permeated all the places in my community that were normally loud and happy.

At the time, at home we had this big, unreliable console television that produced a scratchy picture about 50 percent of the time. Someone would jiggle the knobs, arrange the antenna and then stop breathing to make the picture stay alive. More often than not, it would roll or just go all snowy, and maybe we could catch every third or fourth word—if we were lucky—of what was being broadcast.

In any case, most of it was way above my head, and the lasting memories I have are of seeing all the adults in my life express extreme sadness, anger and outrage at the violence that claimed our nation's leader.

I think if there was an impact made on my young brain, it came upon seeing the pictures of Caroline and John-John Kennedy at the funeral. Caroline was exactly our age, and her brother could have been any of our younger siblings.

It then hit us that, perhaps more importantly than the nation losing its father, children our own age had lost their real father.

That's what made this then-6-year-old member of Mrs. Higgins' first grade class at Mars Estates Elementary School cry.

And still does to this day.