The Kennedy Assassination - How I Heard of it. My twin brother, John Simon and I were sitting in 6th grade practice. , Kevin and I were sitting at the left side of the room towards the front. The practice was proceeding as usual when suddenly, someone put their head into the door and yelled out, President Kennedy has been shot. Instantly, the girls let out an involuntary scream crying - NO, NO! I will never forget that moment of shock and terror. This was my first exposure to what you would call, today, a terrorist act. We all started looking at each other side-by-side. I looked at my brother with a look of complete surprise. The expression, words can not describe was made for such a moment. For a while, we though he had only been wounded. Within less than an hour we heard on the radio that he had been killed. Of course as little history nuts, Kevin and I were well aware of presidential assassinations, but THAT was a thing of the dim and distant past. It could NOT happen in modern times and yet.... it had happed, right now! The Kennedy Assassination was the first national tragedy that we were personally aware of. Our dad, Jack Simon told us of the sheer shock of hearing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his hero and our War-time President had died and had not lived to see the end of the War that FDR had so magnificently shepherded the United States through. But FDR was a much older man and had obviously been weakened by the war years. Kennedys assassination was different. He was a young president in his early forties - with small children and a 34 year old wife. While we now know that JFK was not at all that he seemed with is affairs and much disguised medical illness from an back injury when his Navy Patrol Torpedo (PT) boat was sunk in the south Pacific. He suffered from horrific back pain for which he was drugged day-and-night - for me, his murder all but ended the age of American post WW-II innocence. The World was a much nastier place than any of us children could have previously conceived. We would have to steel ourselves against the twists and surprises of human experience. Our innocence was gone. But we would survive and thrive as did our beloved Country. It is still the great continuing experiment in Liberty and Hope in an uncertain world.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 14:12:35 +0000
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