How We Remember A Fallen President On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, a day that for Baby Boomers resonates with the same raw force of emotion that today’s college students remember from 9/11. The Boomers are many of today’s professors, administrators and university staff. For them, the violent death of the president of the United States, with some aspects played out in real time on television, was a line of demarcation, a waypoint where life just never seemed to be the same as before. Today’s college students remember where they were on the day the airliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and those more than 50 remember that Friday before Thanksgiving in 1963, when a speeding bullet took the life of President Kennedy, his blood staining the First Lady’s pink Chanel suit. The unforgettable images didn’t stop for days: Walter Cronkite wiping away tears as he announced the president’s death; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV; the horse without a rider in the funeral procession; John Jr.’s salute; the hundreds of thousands who came to pay tribute. Their impact remains in the memories of those days when our teachers and administrators and the clerks at the bookstore were children themselves. Below we present a sampling of JFK remembrances gathered on campus, prompted by the 50th anniversary of that fateful day in Dallas.
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Elisabeth Taylor
technical clerk in audio/visual department by
Morgan Massengill
When Elisabeth Taylor’s principal at Hobgood Elementary in Murfreesboro broke the news that President John F. Kennedy had been killed, her fifthgrade class became quiet. When Elisabeth Taylor’s principal at Hobgood Elementary in Murfreesboro broke the news that President John F. Kennedy had been killed, her fifth-grade class became quiet. “We had just come back from lunch,” said Taylor, a technical clerk at the university’s audio/visual department. Taylor recalled thinking of the letter she’d written to Kennedy a year prior to his death. She had received a reply, enclosed with his photograph, after a few weeks of writing. This moment came back to her when she was told her had been killed Yet, Taylor said she was too young to process all the jumbled emotions she was feeling. “I knew something big had happened,” Taylor offered. After school that day, life went on as usual. Taylor’s parents didn’t mention the assassination. Her parents went on with their weekend date plans. This meant that Taylor and her brothers were shuttled to their grandmother’s home in Nashville. Taylor’s grandmother, Toy Sanders, didn’t discuss the assassination with the children either but remained glued to her rocking chair in front of the television set that weekend. “It must have been too cold to play outside, because my brothers and I were inside watching the funeral procession,” she said. Taylor also remembered watching footage of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. The weekend’s televised images provided a surreal view of the world that Taylor said she did not comprehend. “I knew at that moment that it was a sad time,” she said. After the assassination of Kennedy, the decade only became more violent as the civil rights movement gained momentum. Half a century later, Taylor still treasures her letter from the White House and the photo of a president she will never forget.
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Roger Heinrich
electronic media professor by
Matt Applewhite
The sounds of kickballs humming through the sky filled the air of the frigid North Dakota playground. Children darted about the yard hoping not to join friends sacrificed in the midst of a dodgeball romp. Nine-year-old Roger Heinrich took a brief pause from the recess mayhem to watch the vice principal sitting quietly within her idling
car. Fellow classmates soon too took notice as the administrator sprinted into the school building. Moments later the bell rang, indicating playtime was over. Heinrich and his classmates shuffled to their seats, curious why recess had come to such an abrupt end. His homeroom teacher stood and simply said: “The president has been shot in Dallas.” “We didn’t know what was happening. What does this mean?” said Heinrich, an electronic media professor. “The president has been shot? What is going to happen? Is the world going to end? We didn’t know.” Heinrich remembered school was dismissed early. The coming weekend was not normal either. Continuous coverage of the assassination illuminated the family television as the Heinrichs sat in their living room beside a picture of John F. Kennedy and, his new widow, Jackie. Heinrich said that his father, the Democratic State Chairman of North Dakota, rarely spoke that weekend as he and his mother mourned the loss of their beloved president — their wet eyes focused on the glass tube for any developing information. He didn’t know the gravity of the situation. The assassination was a concept he did not grasp. Heinrich said that he understood that much. The Monday after the assassination, he stopped to gaze at a poster of Kennedy. Fresh streaks of red marker poured from the president’s head — a fellow classmate’s crude attempt at humor. Heinrich said that he turned and continued his stride down the hall. Recess could not come fast enough.
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Gerald Reed
adjunct political science professor BY ANDREA CARDENAS The news that shook the world began with a whisper, said Gerald Reed, an adjunct political science professor. Reed was 11, living in his hometown of Lebanon, Tenn., at the time of the president’s assassination. “I was in school. I was in the fifth grade,” he said. Reed remembered the principal coming into the room and whispering to the teacher before leaving to go on to the next room. His teacher then announced to the class that the president had been assassinated. “There was a lot of shock and dismay,” Reed said. The principal had the whole school go outside and bear witness as the flag was lowered to half-staff. “That’s basically what I remember. That’s what stuck in my mind, the shock, of being in school; the shock, and I really remember the lowering of the flag,” he said. “I think part of the shock was just the fact that the president got shot and killed, but I think to some extent a larger or equal part of the shock was that happened in that day and time, that it could happen in the 20th Century.” Prior to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination only three United States Presidents had been assassinated; the most recent was President William McKinley in 1901. “I think it was just not being able to understand how someone just could — ” Reed paused “— how someone could do that. How they could possibly think that it was okay to kill the president.” Reed doesn’t give the conspiracies concerning Kennedy’s death and politics much weight. “They’re a bunch of bunk,” he said, laughing. “Do we know what happened? Do we know everything that happened, and why it happened and how it happened? No. All these conspiracy theories, do they have any legitimacy? No. Will we ever really know? At this point, probably not. You know, too much time has passed.” Reed reflected on the generational impact of Kennedy’s death. “Who knows what Kennedy would have done and what direction he would have taken in Vietnam had he not been assassinated. But it’s really clear because he was assassinated and [Lyndon] Johnson came into office and got us so heavily involved in Vietnam; I think that impacted me and everyone in my generation.”
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Gail Fedak
director, MTSU Education Resource Channel by
Morgan Massengill
Gail Fedak, director of the university’s Education Resource Channel, celebrated her 11th birthday Nov. 20, 1963. Her time of celebration ended with the nation’s tragedy two days later. Fedak, a student at Alexander Elementary School in Jackson, was in the middle of a lesson with her sixth grade class when she heard the news. She peered over the rims of her glasses, recollecting the moment. “The announcement was made over the intercom to the whole school,” she said. Fedak clearly remembers the shock on her teacher’s face. “I don’t know that she said anything or made any comment at all. I just remembered we stopped what we were doing, and she picked up a literature book and began reading,” Fedak said. “She read for the rest of class that day.” At home, her parents avoided mentioning the tragedy. “My parents didn’t discuss public issues. [They] grew up in a time where children were not made aware of what was going on in the adult world,” she said. But one thing was different. “My parents had the television on, which was memorable for me because we were not a television family. We used it for the news and one or two shows. It was unusual to me that we had the television on all day,” she said. Fedak remembered watching the newscasts and funeral procession on television but noted that there was no footage of the actual assassination. “The world in 2013 is a very different world in many aspects than it was in 1963. When September 11 occurred, we had cell phones. We had news agencies that were on the spot within moments, and the news was instant. We got to watch things as they happened. In 1963, by the time we heard about it, it was over,” she said. Fedak said didn’t feel incredibly effected by the assassination. “At 11 years old, I really didn’t have a sense of the magnitude of it. I knew something terrible had happened, but my experience with death at that point was very limited. My thought was it’s over and done with, and I’m glad they got the bad guy,” she said. After that weekend, life went on as usual. “The adult community seemed to be stressed, but my life continued without any interruption in schedules,” she said. It wasn’t until years later that she began to fully understand the significance of the matter. “As the years progressed, the controversy over exactly what had happened began to gain momentum. I began to realize exactly what the magnitude was,” she said. Much of this understanding came from the turmoil of the civil rights movement. “There were a lot of public and violent deaths. The violence in the 1960s began to say to me [that] the world at large is not the warm and fuzzy place I once knew,” Fedak said.
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Judy Holt
Phillips Bookstore clerk by
Darcy Threet
Judy Holt took a moment to adjust her glasses. She’s small with a big personality and theatrical, easily drawing a crowd of her three coworkers as she tells her story. It’s easy to tell that the working women at Phillips Bookstore really enjoy her presence. “I was 11,” she began. The Woodbury native accompanied her sentences with hand gestures as if to add dramatic effect. “I was in my sixth grade classroom, and that was all that was on TV.” Her teacher, like many others that day, dropped everything and turned on the television. The kids at Woodland Elementary School watched as their teacher cried. Holt shook her head and grew quiet. “It was just that same clip over and over again; you know, the one of them in the car, just over and over again. It was awful,” she said. She continued to explain that she didn’t really understand the impact of what she was seeing at the time. She was young and like most children at Woodland Elementary, very confused. She described going home and seeing her parents’ reactions. “They just kept saying they didn’t understand how something like that could happen. It was really scary,” she sighed. During that time, she said that it seemed as if everyone knew the Kennedys personally. “The funeral was the worst part,” Holt said, recalling it on television. All she could pay attention to was young John F. Kennedy, Jr. “That little boy in the blue suit,” Holt slowly whispered. “That was just so sad, the little boy saluting the casket as it passed by. He just held his little hand up.” She reached for a tissue and pushed her glasses up higher. She dabbed her eyes to prevent her makeup from streaking. Holt sniffled. Standing very still, as if lost in her own thoughts, Holt wondered if he would have even been old enough to understand what had happened. “Just so little,” she said again, dabbing her eyes one more time. She paused, and then looked up and smiled honestly. “That’s what I remember most.” Holt quickly shifted her tone, describing her feelings about Jackie Kennedy and her wardrobe. “Every girl had to have a pillbox hat because of her,” Holt said, pretending to place an imaginary hat onto her short, white hair.
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Ken Paulson
Dean, College of Mass Communication Ken Paulson knew there was trouble when “Bozo’s Circus,” his favorite “noontime watching experience,” was interrupted. “When you’re 9, it’s impossible to process,” said Paulson, a veteran journalist who is just a few months into his tenure as dean of the College of Mass Communication. “The news was really sketchy at noon so it was hard to know in fact what had happened,” he said. After lunch, he returned to the fourth grade at Jackson School in Elmhurst, Ill., outside Chicago. “I will never forget the reaction of my teacher. She came in and told us that the president was dead, and she was somewhat tearful,” Paulson said. “But the reason I’ll never forget it is that I lived in an overwhelmingly Republican county so all these kids had heard their parents criticize Kennedy at the dinner table, and when the teacher came in to announce that Kennedy was dead, there were cheers. And to a 9-year-old it was like saying Darth Vader was gone because they all heard what a bad president he was.” He remembers his teacher becoming very emotional and “horrified by the reaction.” Unlike his cheering classmates, Paulson felt sympathy for the loss of a man’s life. He remembers his parents being sad, but not emotional. “What was unparalleled in our lives was that everything was shut down for four days,” he said. “All the television was about assassination and then a funeral.” Kennedy’s charm was real, but his promiscuous tendencies leave Paulson unsure of the former president’s character. “There’s a tendency to attach legendary status to people who die prematurely,” he said. “An early death seems to change our perceptions of people’s contributions, for better or for worse.” Paulson finds the conspiracy theories fascinating. He has interviewed director Oliver Stone about his Kennedy movie, though he thinks Stone’s JFK is “high entertainment, low on facts.” Paulson thinks the Warren Commission, “got it right,” but he suspects that other groups may have encouraged or funded Lee Harvey Oswald. “I think most of those conspiracy theories are frankly just entertainment,” he said. Paulson’s teacher assigned students to bring in newspaper articles about the assassination. “There was a large stack of newspapers in my fourth grade [classroom],” he said. He suspects the assignment was due to the students’ reaction, so they would understand the enormity of what happened. Following the class period the teacher gathered and prepared to trash the papers. Paulson asked his teacher if he could keep them. “The teacher said, ‘Sure,’ so I grabbed all of them,” he said. He still has them. Paulson wonders if those newspapers provided a spark that pulled him into a career of journalism. “Who knows, but I know that at age 9, newspapers were really important to me.” –Author refused a byline.
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Mitch Pryor
videographer, audio/visual services department by
Morgan Massengill
Mitch Pryor, videographer at the university’s audio/visual services department, was just a toddler when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Two years and two weeks to be exact, he said. But the impact of the president’s death was profound. “I don’t ever remember not being aware of JFK. He had that much of an impact on America and our family,” he said, sitting in his office. Kennedy was well respected in Pryor’s household. At the time of the assassination, Pryor and his family were living in a farmhouse in McMinnville, Tenn. “One of my earliest memories is of a plaque on the wall of JFK. My mom and dad were part of his generation. [They] related to him as a young progressive,” he said. Pryor’s father also related to him as a military man. “[Kennedy] was a Navy man, and my dad was a Navy man. He was tough. After the Cuban missile crisis, to see someone stand up to the Russians, to make them back down proved he was a brave president,” he said. As the years progressed, Pryor began to learn more about Kennedy from his parents. “From what my mom and dad said about him, he had a great sense of humor and was very relatable. The politicians of the 1950s were Eisenhower and Truman, and then this young guy came on the scene, and it was a new frontier,” he said. However, it took Pryor time to realize the magnitude of the country’s loss. “Everyone remembers where they were when it happened, and it came up in conversation quite frequently. My earliest remembrance of it was that a bad guy killed a good guy. I didn’t realize the depth of it,” he said. Television unified the country, Pryor added. “You couldn’t mention the JFK assassination without equating it with television. You actually saw Lee Harvey Oswald get shot,” he said. Another memorable moment was Walter Cronkite’s announcement of Kennedy’s death on CBS news. Cronkite shed a tear during the broadcast. Pryor explained that today the position of the president is looked at much differently than it was in the 1960s. “I grew up as a young person with more respect for the office of the president, and there was not as much negativity geared to it as there is now,” he said. “People were more united even with differing opinions.”
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Robert Hunt professor, history department by
Zach Ward
Robert Hunt, a history professor at the university, has never forgotten how he learned of President John F. Kennedy’s death. He was 11, a sixth grader. “It was right after lunch out on the playground,” Hunt said. “A couple of kids who weren’t, eh, most savory of people walked up, and one of them said, ‘Did you hear the old man Kennedy got shot?’ I thought he was talking about Kennedy’s father. It really struck me the way he said it.” Hunt spent the rest of the day at school and later at home huddled around the television like many other people on that day. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing on TV. “I was in shock about it,” Hunt said. “There was a sense of this doesn’t happen here. This isn’t how we do things.” Hunt was too young to have an opinion on Kennedy, but his parents were diehard Democrats. “My parents were devastated and deeply troubled,” Hunt said. “They wondered how it would affect the Democratic Party.” It was unclear how things would be different with the newly sworn-in president, Lyndon B. Johnson. “I didn’t know who he was,” Hunt said. “I thought, ‘Who is Lyndon Johnson?’” The conflict in Vietnam had started to become a bigger deal under the presidency of Kennedy. No one knew how Johnson would treat the situation in Vietnam and whether it would escalate. “I didn’t graduate high school until 1970,” Hunt said. “My number was high enough to not get drafted. If I had graduated a couple of years earlier, I would have been on a plane. The debate on Vietnam was wrenching.” One of the most surprising happenings in the Kennedy assassination was the shooting and killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. Ruby snuck up and shot Oswald two days after Kennedy had been assassinated as Oswald was being transferred from police headquarters to the county jail. This event happened on live television with much of America watching. “We came back from church and there it was,” Hunt said. “They just kept showing it over and over again.” Ruby’s shooting of Oswald led to a frenzy of theories on what happened to Kennedy. Many wondered who was behind it, and if Oswald could have really acted alone. “It made you wonder about a conspiracy,” Hunt said. “I just remember thinking who was this guy that came out of nowhere to shoot the shooter. I couldn’t believe what all I was seeing. It took much of America’s innocence.”
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Neal McClain
director of library technology by
Michael Davidson
Neal McClain, director of library technology at the James E. Walker Library, ran fingers through his gray hair as he recalled the memories of that grim day so long ago. He was 8, a fourth grader at Carter Elementary School in Murray, Ky.
“I remember that it was probably afternoon recess when we got the word. I was outdoors playing kickball, that much I’m sure of, and one of my classmates by the name of Dan Luther came out and just shouted out, ‘The president has been shot,’ and everybody stopped dead. You could’ve heard a pin drop,” he said. The silence was followed by a mad rush inside, where McClain and his classmates hovered around the only black and white television in the school. “We stood around and watched that TV. By this time the network coverage was up, I think. You know they didn’t have network TV back then quite like they did today, no CNN,” he said. The rest of the afternoon passed as if in slow motion. Everyone was shocked that violence had touched the nation as a whole. “We were shocked, but we were all so young so I doubt that it impacted us quite like it did the adults. The thing I remember most from the day that this happened was that several of our grade school teachers were just crying their eyes out. I don’t know that we had any men who were teaching in those days, they were almost all women, and they were just torn to pieces over it,” McClain said. While McClain’s teachers were affected, his parents also were, but in a different way. “I think they let school out early. I remember my parents came and picked me up later that day, and they were pretty quiet. My parents were maybe not as openly expressive of it, but they were pretty subdued. My dad seemed worried. He had been a World War II veteran and so in his mind this was a bad sign when people going around shooting presidents.” Then there was the weekend that followed the shooting. “I remember that the whole weekend after that. The only thing on the TV was pretty much about the president. To an 8-year-old that’s a little distressing — no Saturday morning cartoons? But I think that sort of gave me some idea of what the gravity of it was.” The marathon of television coverage — the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson, the arrival of the plane carrying Kennedy’s body, the funeral — McClain remembers it all. “I was watching the TV as it happens when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby and saw that. That probably shook me up more than the notion of the president being killed because I’m 8 years old. I just watched a guy get killed on TV live. ‘Bang,’ whoa, that was different.” The lasting impression was the funeral. “I do remember seeing the funeral ... how stately it all seemed with all the horse-drawn carriage and all, and the rest of Kennedy’s family that the cameras kept wanting to look at, wondering how in the world they could handle that. I guess their kids were almost too young to really figure out what it had meant at that time too.”
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