11/22/63

That means I'm older than your mother.

 

You and me both, JR!

 

I was 3 years, three months and 2 1/2 weeks old at the time and really have no recollection at all of it live. But around the time I was 8 and Bobby Kennedy was running, we were big supporters of his in my family and then he got shot. I remember in the grade school library they had the book "Four Days," which was basically a reprinting of a lot of the coverage from those days from the motorcade through the funeral. I think I checked it out and read it about three times a year ever year. My mom was about 2 1/2 weeks away from delivering my little brother, but I guess I never really asked her or my dad where they were when they heard.

When I traveled to Dallas on my old job, we used to stay at the Reunion Hyatt, and they have a third-floor sports deck with basketball hoops, tennis courts and a running track. I was jogging on that track and as you come around a corner, all of the sudden you're looking straight over the bridge and up Elm Street, with the Schoolbook Depository building right in line. Having seen so many photos of Dealey Plaze, I was almost knocked over when I came around that corner the first time. In subsequent years I visited The Sixth Floor every chance I had on return trips to Dallas.

Also, happy birthday to Spup and Hoops.

 

J.D. Tippett

 

Where was I? I was crouched on the grassy knoll in a combat stance...

Whoops.

 

Man... and I thought Jimmy Stewart and Robert Mitchum were quite a big deal nine years ago.

 

My memory was very much like Cranberry's. I was about 60 miles north -- Newburgh, N.Y.

Since I had morning kindergarten the first half of the year, my mom took me with her to the beauty shop when I got off school. And that's where the whole thing unfolded for me -- in the beauty shop, about 10 women crying and wailing around me. I was more than a little bit freaked out.

We watched Ruby get Oswald over the dinner table. Live.

Speaking of...

 

I will second-second the idea about going to the Sixth Floor Museum. Actually looking down onto Dealey Plaza through the next-to-last window on the sixth floor (the far one cannot be accessed, of course :) was very surreal.

 

I was in the office of the campus newspaper, where I was M.E., when a TA from the math department rushed in and said he just heard on the radio that Kennedy was shot. I went into our wire room and sure enough, there it was on the AP. It was a Friday, and we had no Saturday paper, so I headed to my night job across the bay. In the middle of the Bay Bridge, Cronkite said the famous words, "From Dallas, Texas, the Associated Press reports that President Kennedy has died." Then he choked up. In downtown San Francisco, people were surrounding the newsstands, waiting for the latest edition of the afternoon paper, which edition by edition had moved its logo down A1, so by its last extra it was stripped across the bottom of the page. (Television had not yet geared up. It was not until that night, probably with live coverage of AF1 arriving at Andrews, that TV realized there was a story and proceeded to do a magnificent job.) On the street, people were crying. There were wild rumors that LBJ had been shot. At work, they couldn't find the advance obit on JFK already set in type, so I sat down to write one. By the time I had about 40 inches written, pretty good stuff, too, in came an elegant piece from the New York Herald Tribune. End of me.

 

Man... you had to be quite a pup to be writing a JFK obit.

I'm sorry yours didn't make it.

 

Wasn't there some big deal about how portions of the Zapruder film wouldn't come out of the vault for 50 years or something?

That was to protect the interests of the company that bought it, but there was also an aspect that the American people should never see the President's head being blown apart. Seems like in recent years I've routinely seen that footage on various TV outlets, Kennedy sitting there, then suddenly part of his head is flying out of the limo.

 

[/quote]Man... you had to be quite a pup to be writing a JFK obit.

I'm sorry yours didn't make it.
[/quote]

Boss made the right decision. Hell, I am just glad I was there. The next few days were, as you can imagine, very intense. I was pretty young, early 20s, and for the first time all the old guys had nothing on me.