November 22, 1963 -- a birthday remembered

It was Friday, November 22, 1963. My 16th birthday. 

After school, Daddy was going to take me from Edmond into Oklahoma City to pick up my best friend Vicky. I was three months into my first year in high school, the first time in six years that Vicky and I had not lived across the creek from each other and been in the same classes at the same schools.

We had been best friends since my family moved to Oklahoma City from my parents' very small hometown about thirty miles away. Of course that was a long time ago so thirty miles took an hour by car -- no Interstate Highways. It was a long way in other ways, too. No cell phones. In fact, telephone calls between towns were long distance and expensive. No internet for nearly instantaneous communication. Snail mail, which we called mail, usually took three days from that small town to The City.

I came to Valley Brook Elementary School as a member in good standing of the Baby Boomer Generation which meant there were too many of us kids and not enough teachers. So five of us Fifth Graders were chosen to move up to the Sixth Grade classroom -- three boys and two girls. Being the new kid, I didn't know anyone yet. Neither class knew me from Adam Allfox. It didn't help that the regular Fifth Graders wouldn't have anything to do with us because we were too smart or something. The Sixth Graders wouldn't have anything to do with us for what to them was a much more obvious reason, we were "too immature." So we five were pretty much on our own socially. Vicky and I were the two girls. Plus, Vicky was really nice and she could do the splits and cartwheels! Instant best friends.

By the time we moved up to Junior High School, the Oklahoma City schools were adhering to President Kennedy's program to turn out more scientists. The Cold War had taken on Space Race attributes following the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik. Consequently, we were all tested and those who tested well in math and science were put on accelerated educational tracks.

When we moved to Edmond, their schools were not putting students in advanced classes. I again needed to make new friends. But because I'd already had the normal math and science classes for Tenth Graders, I was put into classes with upperclassmen. Add to that, I had pierced ears and all my hems were well above the knee. Neither fashion had yet arrived at Edmond High School.

After lunch that Friday, November 22nd, when I came into my English Class, a particularly aggressive classmate who regularly made fun of me told me, "Someone shot Kennedy."

I thought he was just being mean, but the principal came on the intercom and announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was in the hospital. Then in Physical Education Class an announcement came over the intercom that a priest had been called in. I knew it was for Last Rites. They thought he was dying.

Vicky's father, a Master Sergeant in the Air Force, was based at Tinker Air Force Base, a few miles from where we'd lived in Oklahoma City. He'd flown missions during the Berlin Air Lift over Soviet controlled ground. We knew that what he was doing was very dangerous. We also knew what number Tinker was on the Soviet's missile target list.

We'd held our breath during the face-off between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba. Plans were made about how to get back with our families if "something" happened while we were at school and they were at work or home.

Magazines at the grocery store check-out had recipes for Jello salads and blue prints for backyard bomb shelters. Official bomb shelters were marked by yellow and black signs on doorways into school basements and government office building basements. They were stocked with big olive drab cans of water and nonperishable food.

The Cold War and its attendant threat of becoming hot was a daily reality. But no shots had yet been fired on American soil.

In 1963 TV shows were not commonly interrupted by news stories and the term "Breaking News" was not used. On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Walter Cronkite interrupted the soap opera As the World Turns with the news of President Kennedy's assassination.
Click here to watch https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=walter+cronkite+jfk

That Friday no one knew who killed President Kennedy. Then when they did identify the killer, we still didn't know why. As if that were not horrendous enough, the murderer was killed two days later, live on TV. Had the killer and his killer been the opening salvo of World War III?

Pearl Harbor ended my parents' generation's Age of Innocence. My generation's tenuous hold on innocence was destroyed by two murders in Dallas.

Vicky spent the weekend with us. We had cake and went to the movies. I don't remember what kind of cake or what the movie was. Our world had changed. Cake and movies were not important.

November 22, 1963 -- November 22, 2013

 President Kennedy's Grave

with the Lincoln Memorial in the background

 

   I knew this year would be worse than last year or eleven years ago or forty-three years ago. I knew the media would fill the days leading to my birthday with questions and comments and constant reprise of the Zapruder film. That's right. My birthday.
   Sometimes Thanksgiving falls on my birthday, but the anniversary of President Kennedy's murder always falls on my birthday.
   November 22, 1963, my sixteenth birthday. My world was already dangerous. We were in the middle of the Cold War. My best friend's father had flown in the Berlin Airlift several years before and we had been afraid a Third World War would start then. President Kennedy had threatened the Soviet Union if they did not remove their missiles from Cuba. And we had been afraid of nuclear war then. Women's magazines had recipes and diets and articles about home bomb shelters. We had tornado drills at school and bomb drills.
   Fear was already a backdrop for my life. But like other almost-sixteen-year-olds, backdrops are just that. Mind catching each time they change, but quickly moved to the background as the activities of  life took center stage. And each time the scary moment passed, somehow my sense of security was recovered and all the dangers of the world receded.
   And then a man murdered President Kennedy. An English-speaking, white American whom I would not have recognized as different from my neighbors or me had I met him on November 21, 1963. And he did it in Dallas, Texas, a city more like my Oklahoma City than any other major American city. It was too close to home. It would not recede into any background.
   The murder of President Kennedy was the end of my sense of security, just as Pearl Harbor must have been the end of my parents' and the murder of President Lincoln must have been for Walt Whitman's generation and the burning of Washington, D.C., must have been for the young people of the War of 1812.
   Each of us must surely come to the realization that the concept of 'security' is false. That the concept of ideal is illusion. For me it came with the assassination of JFK. For my son it was probably the Oklahoma City bombing. For my daughter, fifteen years younger than my son, it was September 11. I don't know what it will be for my grandchildren, but it will surely happen. And the event will be just as shocking and just as threatening. It will not recede into a backdrop but become the next layer of tragedy on which our human condition rises.
   For every tragedy that reminds us how fragile and flawed we humans are, there are countless triumphs. The English burned our capital city, but with each generation we come closer to achieving a class-free society. And truly, so do those English and the rest of the world. President Lincoln was murdered and freedom and equality for all may have been delayed, but with each generation we come closer. And Pearl Harbor did not begin the end of human civilization, but began the end of another in the list of tyrants who would subjugate humanity. A long list that each generation faces.
   I gave up on security and ideals a long time ago. Fifty years ago, to be precise. But I do not give up on humanity. And hope is a great replacement for security.