6 Comments

6th grade. Mostly I remember the aftermath. The shooting of Oswald. The funeral. The pictorials in the paper and magazines. The picture you posted is iconic. It was a very confusing time. The first of many assassinations. Why?????

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It was very confusing, especially to a child. Scary. Maybe for the first time we learned the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place.

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2nd grade, Mrs. Gates said the president's been shot. I looked up at the portraits in front of the room & wondered, " Lincoln or Washington?"

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2nd grade is quite young. Too young to understand but old enough to be unsettled. If the president can be erased just like that, who is safe? The answer was, of course: no one. I've told younger people it was my generation's 9/11

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lovely post. thank you. i was 5 so i do not remember. but i do as a impressionable child indelibly remember MLK and RFK deaths in 1968

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There was an exchange of dialogue in a movie called Night Moves some years later. Someone says: "Where were you when Kennedy was killed?" The other person replies: "Which one?"

Those murders 5 years later -- when I was older and more aware of the world -- were almost as chilling. But they were no longer unprecedented in my life.

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