50 Years Ago Today! Where Were You...............?

[marv2]

November 22, 1963 ,the country received the terrible news that President John F. Kennedy had been assasinated. Can you remember where you were and what you were doing when you first heard the news?

I was at home with my Mom, waiting for my brother to come home from school which was usually around 3 pm in the afternoon. He came home early that day........

[JIVE FIVE Mary G.]

I was in class at Boston University when the news came. Classes were dismissed and my friends and I went to a nearby church to pray. The next day we went home for Thanksgiving. I remember walking in my house after the ride home from Boston just as Ruby shot Oswald.

The country lost its innocence that fateful day... No one who was alive then will ever forget it.

~~Mary~~

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[ceasar]

Greetings all,
Every year this time I think back to that day in Dallas.
We [[THE TYMES ) were on tour, THE DICK CLARK CAVALCADE OF STARS.
LEN BARRY, GENE PITNEY, THE RONNETTS, THE CRYSTALS, THE ORLONS, and more.
We arrived in Dallas that morning checked into the hotel.
Gene Pitney asked me if I wanted to go see the presidents parade.
As we were leaving my room, the news came on, we heard what had happened
Our hotel was across the street from Jack Ruby's club where we were going to have a party that night.The jail where they held Oswald was on the next corner.
We left that morning drove pass the jail got to Kentucky heard the news about Oswald.
Our lead singer, George Williams got sick the night of the assignation,
Took him to the same hospital. There was still spots of blood they didn't get up.
It was quite an adventure.
Ceasar
The
Original
Tymes

[JIVE FIVE Mary G.]

OH MY, Ceasar!! That is quite a story. Thanks for sharing.

~~Mary~~~

[marv2]

Greetings all,
Every year this time I think back to that day in Dallas.
We [[THE TYMES ) were on tour, THE DICK CLARK CAVALCADE OF STARS.
LEN BARRY, GENE PITNEY, THE RONNETTS, THE CRYSTALS, THE ORLONS, and more.
We arrived in Dallas that morning checked into the hotel.
Gene Pitney asked me if I wanted to go see the presidents parade.
As we were leaving my room, the news came on, we heard what had happened
Our hotel was across the street from Jack Ruby's club where we were going to have a party that night.The jail where they held Oswald was on the next corner.
We left that morning drove pass the jail got to Kentucky heard the news about Oswald.
Our lead singer, George Williams got sick the night of the assignation,
Took him to the same hospital. There was still spots of blood they didn't get up.
It was quite an adventure.
Ceasar
The
Original
Tymes

Wow! That is an amazing story Ceasar! You witness history and personal recollection of that time and place is remarkable. We saw Oswald get shot on television. Not sure if it was a live feed then or taped, but we saw it on the same day that it happened. Were you in Kentucky the day of the funeral or back in Philadelphia?

[dinelle_watson]

Wow, Cesar. That's crazy. I know I wasn't born yet, but my mom had just turned 5, her second oldest brother was 8, and her oldest brother--rest his soul-- was a month shy of 10. The scariest part that still gives me the chills is the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a graduate of the same high school that I attended in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina: Warren Easton Fundamental Senior High School. If THAT's not creep enough, I don't what is.

[smark21]

With all due respect I’m going to take issue with the statement that the country lost its innocence 50 years ago following JFK’s assassination. Any nation that was founded on slavery, the expulsion of Native Americans from their lands and saw a Civil War, the assassination of 3 other Presidents, and many other ills, such as the bombing of a Birmingham Church that killed 4 little girls just months prior to JFK’s assassination is not a nation that can be considered “innocent”. I think Malcolm X summed it up best when he impolitically stated in the aftermath that JFK’s assassination was chickens coming home to roost for America.

[jobeterob]

With all due respect I’m going to take issue with the statement that the country lost its innocence 50 years ago following JFK’s assassination. Any nation that was founded on slavery, the expulsion of Native Americans from their lands and saw a Civil War, the assassination of 3 other Presidents, and many other ills, such as the bombing of a Birmingham Church that killed 4 little girls just months prior to JFK’s assassination is not a nation that can be considered “innocent”. I think Malcolm X summed it up best when he impolitically stated in the aftermath that JFK’s assassination was chickens coming home to roost for America.

Yes, but don't you think there was a quality of life from about 1948 to 1963 that never was the same again?

You could never again watch comedy as silly as the Beverly Hillbillies and Red Skelton and Green Acres with quite that level of innocence.

On the Sunday following, when we heard Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, I was only 7 years old. My Dad was going to go downtown and I yelled "Don't do that! They're shooting everybody. They'll shoot you!"

[splanky]

For the most part I have to agree with Smark, in fact i was just about to take issue with the
talk of innocence until I read his post. Though I know Malcolm's comment was not one of
his best thought out responses and did incidetally get him censured by the NOI, I think it
comes back to the point of two Americas. The sad irony is that Kennedy himself had addressed the issue as no other president had. I too was 7 at the time, home in New York
from school and understood what had happened but not why...

[nosey]

Back to the thread. I was 16 and in the hospital recovering from spinal surgery in a full [[Herman Munster) body cast. I was placed in a ward with adult women and was very depressed about that then I hear about the president and really got sad. I lost my innocence about people that day.

[JIVE FIVE Mary G.]

My statement regarding loss of innocence was probably a poor choice of words. I'm well aware of our history. I do consider my childhood growing up in the 1950's a more innocent time than what followed after Kennedy was assassinated. The 60's, my high school and college years, were turbulant, to say the least. But, the 60's was also a time of great change in this country. Civil rights, women's rights, the Viet Nam War, protests in the streets, Medicare, etc.. It also seemed like a time when one leader after another was assassinated - Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, for instance. Great change always comes with a price. The country was confused and divided. The "innocenct" or more placid times of the late 40's and 50's were gone.

~~Mary~~

[JIVE FIVE Mary G.]

Back to the thread. I was 16 and in the hospital recovering from spinal surgery in a full [[Herman Munster) body cast. I was placed in a ward with adult women and was very depressed about that then I hear about the president and really got sad. I lost my innocence about people that day.

Well said, Nosey. You expressed it better than I did. I lost my innocence about people that day as well.

~~Mary~~

[marv2]

My statement regarding loss of innocence was probably a poor choice of words. I'm well aware of our history. I do consider my childhood growing up in the 1950's a more innocent time than what followed after Kennedy was assassinated. The 60's, my high school and college years, were turbulant, to say the least. But, the 60's was also a time of great change in this country. Civil rights, women's rights, the Viet Nam War, protests in the streets, Medicare, etc.. It also seemed like a time when one leader after another was assassinated - Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, for instance. Great change always comes with a price. The country was confused and divided. The "innocenct" or more placid times of the late 40's and 50's were gone.

~~Mary~~

....Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, etc,etc,etc .......

[JIVE FIVE Mary G.]

....Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, etc,etc,etc .......

Yes, like I said, one leader after another.

~~Mary~~

[robb_k]

Yes, but don't you think there was a quality of life from about 1948 to 1963 that never was the same again?

You could never again watch comedy as silly as the Beverly Hillbillies and Red Skelton and Green Acres with quite that level of innocence.

On the Sunday following, when we heard Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, I was only 7 years old. My Dad was going to go downtown and I yelled "Don't do that! They're shooting everybody. They'll shoot you!"
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You thought that because another country's leader was killed in a faraway city in southern USA, that people might shoot your father in Downtown Vancouver? Even at 7 years old, that is quite innocent, indeed.

That Innocence from 1948 through 1963 only may have existed for a minority of relatively well-off, very sheltered people. Certainly, African-Americans, Native Americans, other American minorities, Jewish families impacted by WW II's Holocaust, sympathised with the Kennedy family, but didn't think his assasination was more of a tragedy than the daily murder of innocent people by starvation or forced combat in wars, or political murders in 3rd World dictatorships, or racist murders in any country.

Even in Canada, many many of us were not innocent, even at 7 years old. I grew up among many people who were not starved and gassed to death only because they were used as guinea pigs for sick doctors' experiments, or saved by Allied armies just before their being worked and starved to death would have occurred. In relatively decent Canada, one of the very nicest, safest nations on Earth, by 7 years old, I, myself, had already been jumped and beaten up by gangs of Ukrainians because they hated Jews. So, no, I don't think things changed so very much with John F. Kennedy's assassination. His, and Robert Kennedy's and Martin Luther King's assassinations were tragic, and made the varied groups within the US Civil Rights Movement come together faster than they might otherwise have done. They may have made a lot of people in small-town America take notice.

I suspect those events scared a lot of people in Canada, who would not want a chaotic "Banana Republic" on their southern border, who just happened to already own half of their own nation.

I was 17 years old, and already living in USA. I heard the news on a special bulletin on WVON radio. I was shocked. That was not a normal occrence in the countries of my young life [[Canada, USA and The Netherlands). But, it wasn't as impactful to me as having known scores of people who had had close family members murdered.

[marv2]

I do think we as a country lost our innocence forever around the time of the riots. I remember it was just a very sad time when President Kennedy was killed. A few months later........the Beatles hit and the beat went on.........