Alliance for Progress: John F. Kennedy and Rómulo Betancourt at La Morita, Venezuela, during an official meeting. (Dec 16th, 1961)
Everybody has one, unless they’re just unfashionably young. (Sorry, young people: At our age, all we Boomers have left is our collective snobbishness about being the cool generation.)
Here’s mine…
I was living in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where my Dad was doing quasi-diplomatic duty working with the Ecuadorean Navy. I attended Colegio Americano, which was out of town, on the opposite side of the city from our home. I rode to and from school each day on an ancient bus — very fat and rounded, looking like it could have dated to the 1930s. The bus was named “Don Enrique.” Buses had personalities there and then, and were all painted differently. Don Enrique was tan with brown trim. When it wasn’t taking us to school and home again, it worked as a public colectivo, carrying regular fares all around town. Don Enrique had no doors. It had two doorways — in the front and back, on the right-hand side — but they were always open. Young men were expected to jump on and off as the bus moved. It would stop for women, children and old men.
Perhaps I’m overdescribing. In any case, it took an hour to get home every day. I was one of the first picked up in the morning and the last left off, and there were a lot of stops.
My best friend, Tony Wessler, a fellow gringo whose father was a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, lived about six blocks away from me. Tony and I had an awesome time living in Ecuador while we were in the 5th and 6th grades. It was a Huck Finn sort of existence. With one station, and that only broadcasting from about 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., there was nothing worth watching on TV — we kept ours stored down in the garage our whole time there, and never turned it on. We were always outdoors, roving, having adventures improvised from the landscape, architecture and materials at hand. We used to have titanic king-of-the-hill battles around construction sites, using scraps of bamboo (which was lashed together for scaffolding) as swords. We climbed up on the walls that ran between all houses there, running along them as though they were sidewalks, leapt from the walls to the iron bars covering windows (usually no more than a couple of feet, most houses having no yards), climbed the bars to the flat roofs, and darted across the roofs. It wasn’t faster to cross blocks rather than go around them, but it was more fun.
On November 22, 1963, Tony obviously took the faster route of running through the streets.
Don Enrique had dropped him off at home as usual, then slowly wound around among the intervening six blocks, dropping off other kids. Then, I got off at the corner of Maracaibo y Seis de Mayo.
We lived in the top floor of a huge house. Our apartment had four bedrooms plus a servants’ wing (really, just a hallway leading to tiny room for the live-in maid, and the laundry room). The landlord, who lived downstairs, was a captain in the Ecuadorean Navy. A few months before, he had played a key role in a military junta’s takeover of the government, and now was a big shot in the administration — I want to say minister of agriculture or something. The coup had been planned, in part, in our apartment. The landlord asked my folks if he could borrow the apartment for a meeting. They went out and left me and my brother with the capitan‘s kids downstairs. The junta would take over the next day. The man he met with would be the head of the junta.
I keep digressing.
As I say, we lived upstairs. The only access to our apartment was a set of enclosed stairs at the side of the house, adjacent to the garage. It was sealed off with a sidewalk-level security door with an anchor design in wrought iron. The door was always locked, but could be opened by someone pressing a button upstairs. As usually, I pressed the buzzer, and the door at the top of the stairs opened at the same time that the security door unlocked.
Up the stairs, I saw my mother and — to my shock — Tony. His chest was heaving. I couldn’t understand how he was there ahead of me. What’s going on? I asked.
“The president’s been shot!” said Tony.
It hadn’t hit me yet. “The president of what?” I asked. After all, we had just had a coup. I figured it was some other local upheaval, or maybe something in a neighboring country.
“The president of the United States,” said my mother. And by this time, it was known that he was dead.
It’s kind of hard to explain the depth of shock that we felt. It was a little like taking a spacewalk and suddenly becoming untethered. We were in this faraway country on behalf of the U.S. government. Ultimately, up the chain of command, the president was the guy who had sent us there. We particularly had a sense of that because we saw the evidence of JFK initiatives all around us. Programs such as the Alianza para el Progreso testified to the effect that Kennedy was the last president I can remember who gave a damn about Latin America. We had a sense of being in a place that our country cared about; we didn’t feel so isolated.
And now, the president was dead.
By this time, I had become an admirer of Kennedy. Three years before, I had wanted Nixon to win. I had wanted him to win so badly that I hid behind a chair in our living room and sulked while my mother was watching coverage of Kennedy’s inauguration. I hadn’t liked his tough talk toward the Soviets during the debates. He sounded to me like a guy who would send my Dad to war. (And as it happens, years later, my Dad would be serving in the VC-infested Rung Sat Special Zone during the Tet Offensive — so, in an indirect sense, I wasn’t wrong.)
But by now, I had become enchanted by the Kennedy aura. I particularly loved the PT-109 story, and it seemed like I had to wait forever for the movie to get down to Guayaquil. I had a comic book about it and everything.
And now, the president who had survived that was dead.
The war story was probably enough for a kid my age. But I think I also had a sense of him as an upbeat, optimistic kind of guy who believed that, as a country, together, we could get things done. With great vigah.
And now what? Here we were, so far away, with no prospect of returning home to God knew what anytime soon. (We returned to the States in April 1965.) I had seen, up close and personal, how fragile a system of government could be. Was the United States falling apart in our absence?
The interest in Latin America that JFK manifested was returned. Everyone seemed shocked and saddened by his death. There was a sense of kinship (to the best of my ability to tell at that age) that seemed rooted in his special status as the only Catholic U.S. president ever, but probably also fed on the glamor of Jack and Jackie, and the sympathy for their two little children.
The first time I remember hearing the word “martyr,” it was in relation to Kennedy. I still don’t know exactly what cause he was supposed to be martyred to, but there was that aura about his death. In any case, the reverence toward his memory that I sensed in the people around me had that tinge about it.
When my school yearbook came out a short time later, there was a memorial page dedicated to the president. It consisted mostly of a large photo of the Kennedys emerging from a church after Mass, looking young and healthy and happy, with Jackie wearing a veil…
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I was in 4th grade at BC # 4 elementary when the announcement ,via radio,came over the PA,and was happy to get out of school early.When I walked home,everyone was crying,and then I was terrified.I’d never seen my father cry.
I always connect this holiday season with the assassinations of John Kennedy and John Lennon;only 17 years apart.
I was three years old, and bummed that my cartoons were pre-empted.
One more thought: Wahol 1964-“Blue Jackie”
http://hellosinki.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/andy-warhol-jackie-blue-1964.jpg
5th grade, Mrs. Fant’s class. The principal came on the intercom and announced the President had been shot in Dallas. My clearest memory is of a couple of my classmates clapping. I was horrified that anyone (now looking back, horrified at a 5th grader) would cheer anyone getting hurt.
By the time I got home, I heard the President had died. I remember sitting and watching TV instead of playing outside, sad for Caroline and her brother.
Later that weekend when we came in from church, my brother who’d stayed home sick with Daddy met us at the top of the steps and said that “some man was just killed on TV.” It was Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder.
It was a really sad and violent weekend, but I’ll never forget the boys who clapped. Yeah, I remember who you were.
I was in the 9th grade, walking around the junior high building (I guess they call it middle school now) as we all did during lunch break–it was a kind of after-lunch ritual, especially for our group of five would-be ‘intellectuals’. Somebody came up and said, ‘the president’s been shot!’ We all laughed–sure, big joke–except when we rounded the corner to go back inside, there were lots of kids glued to their transistor radios. Suddenly we realized it was not a prank. Interesting thing though, that they didn’t cancel school early. Classes just went on until 3:30 p.m. Was that because of the extreme conservative nature of Lubbock? But on the other hand, everybody was in shock–this just didn’t happen in the US. Never mind that it had happened before–but not in living memory; I really think it was a watershed event in US history, though I’m not sure why. Certainly it had huge media coverage, and that made a difference. I recall being glued to the TV a lot of Saturday and most of the day on Monday of the funeral.
I was – 6 years old. I remember Reagan being shot, the challenger exploding, the Iran hostage crisis, John Lennon being shot, and 9-11, but was too young for Kennedy. But my Mom talked about it alot. She was quite affected. I kind of feel like I was there vicariously.
As obligatory stories go, Brad, yours is the best I’ve read.
(And yes, I posted one, too.)
I was just a few weeks from turning 3, sitting on the sofa having lunch with my mother as she watched her regular soap, As The World Turns. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, that very episode can be found here, including the surreal Nescafe commercial that followed the first breaking announcement, which cuts into the show around the 9:45 mark.
I’ve seen enough bits of General Hospital these days to know how much soaps have changed…but my gosh, how could anybody sit through something as boring as those 9 minutes on this clip:
I guess if one is ironing instant-starched sheets, while drinking minute-brewed Nescafé, one does not need a diverting tale. It seems like a good way to learn a foreign language….
I was in school and was not watching TV but can you just imagine the suspense that first bulletin left the viewers in. Watching a commercial and more of the soap while contemplating the possibility that the President was dead. By the way, the reason for the bulletin without video and the delay in getting video on was because the networks did not leave TV cameras on unless it was time for the news. CBS had to turn on and warm up a camera before Walter Cronkite could appear live.
Reading this on my always on iPad mini….hard to remember when things took minutes, minutes!, to warm up!
Mrs. Crotinger’s 5th grade class on the Marine Corps base at Quantico, VA. She got a call on the school intercom phone…hung up…turned to us pale as a sheet…and said “President Kennedy is dead…” They let us go home early. I remember one of my bicycling pals and I exchanging vows to the effect “If they let us at the assassin, we’d take care of him…”
I wasn’t terribly up on the news at that age…but I was aware that we’d just avoided SOMETHING horrible involving missiles, Russia, Cuba and our 35 mile ± proximity to Washington, DC, only a short time earlier. In retrospect, I’m amazed that my full-bird-colonel father managed to shield my older brother and me from much of that trauma. He didn’t try with the assassination.
And I do remember watching a lot of the TV coverage…including the murder of Oswald…and the funeral cortege to Arlington National Cemetary.
I was in Washington during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Or rather, in Kensington, Md., which pretty much amounts to the same thing.
I remember seeing the headlines about it in The Washington Post on the doorstep in the mornings.
I don’t remember being worried about it, though. I just assumed that the people in charge, and the U.S. military, would deal with the problem.
I was a very secure kid. I assumed adults were taking care of stuff like that.
I also completely missed out on the duck-and-cover drills — and not just because that fall, I was attending school in a place too close to prime targets to matter. I only lived there a couple of months, while my parents were in language school getting ready to go to South America.
During that era, I attended schools in Virginia, New Jersey, South Carolina and Maryland. And I don’t remember any nuclear-attack drills, or any of the stuff that apparently traumatized other kids my age.
Too close to prime targets to matter: Aiken SC. Jeane Dixon kept predicting that Savannah River Lab/Plant/Site would blow up, in various ways. She was Strom’s go-to guru, I read recently. He lived In Aiken, married to a local girl…..not sure what all that means….
My favorite local business from those days: Atomic Wrecking. Not named with any sense of irony, it was on Atomic Highway.