I was in 5th grade in a catholic school that day; St. John the Evangelist Parochial school in Girard, Pa. All of a sudden the overhead speaker brought us all the voice of sister superior. She asked that we please get up from our desks and kneel next to them quickly. And then we heard the news, our president had been shot and we must pray for him. And so we did, we prayed aloud and we prayed silently; we prayed collectively and we prayed with tears running down our cheeks. Even though we were 10 and 11 we knew that if the nuns were crying then this is a tragedy. Nothing else was mentioned before we boarded our busses home; in our case, my sister and three of my brothers and myself.
The 10 mile trip home was quiet, as was every catholic school bus back then and when we were dropped at our stop I ran as fast as I could to be with our Mother, a big fan of JFK and Jackie and Camelot and I knew that she would be distraught.
As I ran in she was vacuuming and I said something to the effect that the president was shot. She gave me a look of complete bewilderment and asked me to say it again and I did. This was of course 1963 and Mom was cooking and cleaning for seven kids and Dad and that day she hadn't turned on the TV.
Once she did it confirmed what we, by then all of us, were telling her. And to make matters worse they were saying that he was dead. Camelot itself was dead. I had never seen my mother cry like she did that day and for many days to follow and for a time I felt that I was the one that caused her sadness. An era passed into history that day and I will never forget it.
Glen C. Schulz.
Not many, but rather a few people only, has seen Lee saying what he was going to do in the room from where he was going to shoot. Of all the images I've seen about JFK's assassination I've had focus on the suspects that may have taken from Lee Lee's own filmation.
I left my college early on that Friday afternoon with anticipation that I would be having surgery during the Thanksgiving week on my spine to determine what was happening to my left arm and hand. I always had the radio on rock music, but don't recall hearing any announcement. We had TV that my mother watched religiously, the evening news, but I don't recall anything special happening that weekend even though I voted for JFK at 18 and loved everything about what he was doing I walked 50 miles for him. Our family generally gets a bit sad about terrible news like that, but realize that there was nothing that we could do and quickly move on to what is going on with us. That weekend it was all about me going to the hospital.
It was only when I was waiting for a myelogram to try to determine the site of the injury for the operation that I was playing pool in the hospital lounge and watching TV that I first saw Ruby kill Oswald and then, many times after. Fortunately through history TV sources, I have seen firsthand video of what happened in Dallas and after when Johnson was sworn in from videos to add to my memory of the tragic event the changed the course of history.
Ron