Di has a historical question for all of us…
Can you remember what you were doing or where you were when this happened, or if you were born after 1963, can you remember your whereabouts for other major historical events that have occurred since?
Jim, Kip, and I were all sick that day and were resting on the couches on the family room, watching Bozo’s Circus. At 12:45, WGN News cut in with a bulletin that JFK had been shot in Dallas. We were then switched over to CBS News, where Walter Cronkite was gathering reports that were coming to him via telephone (that was as high as tech got in 1963). We called Lillian, the woman who kept an eye on us for Mom and Dad while they were at work, and she watched along with us. We were all pretty upset when we heard that Kennedy had died.
I told the story of what my Dad said to me that evening here. And here is what I wrote four years ago today. Dave von Pein’s Kennedy channel, which I link to in the last post, has a ton of videos from that day, including network news feeds and local TV videos, and is worth spending hours of your time viewing.
We were also watching TV when Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald as the Dallas police were transferring him to prison from the police lockup. My parents were busy getting dressed for church and we were sitting in the family room watching TV. None of us made it to church that week…
I’ve seen a lot of history, or heard it on the radio: the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; the first steps on the moon; the resignation of Richard Nixon; the fall of South Vietnam; the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have vague recollections of the Bay of Pigs and Krushchev’s visit to the US…
The Sound of One Hand Typing 
I wasn’t around then but heard my parents talk about it. My parents also watched when Oswald was killed. He maintained it was all a cover up. He told me about Dorothy Kilgaren(spelling??) And said she got too close.
I remember the Munich games, Berlin Wall, OJ found not guilty, Princess Di, ..quite a few actually.
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The book “The Reporter Who Knew Too Much,” about Dorothy Kilgallen, implies that it was the Mafia that hired Oswald, then had Jack Ruby kill Oswald. Dorothy interviewed Jack Ruby during his trial. Dorothy died of a mysterious overdose later, and evidently her notes were nowhere to be found. I highly recommend the book. I wrote a review here: https://thesoundofonehandtyping.com/2016/12/28/review-the-reporter-who-knew-too-much/
Just a side note: Rose Mary Lincoln, Kennedy’s secretary, made a list of everyone she thought might have had a hand in it, and LBJ was very close to the top, as were J.Edgar Hoover, the CIA, the Mafia, the KKK, and “right-wing extremists.”
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I was in college in Fulton, Missouri. It was a dark and scary time. We all huddled around the TV in our dorm lobby and cried. IMO, it was the beginning of many more dark times to come.
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And of course probably not even Oswald knew everyone who was behind Oswald (AND behind his own murder). There’s so much that none of us will ever know, but it wouldn’t help anyone now anyway. Ugh, what a dark time!
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It’s still pretty fascinating, considering all the cloak-and-dagger that still goes on among members of the permanent bureaucracy…
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JFK’s murder (along with all the other carnage that day, too soon followed by more and more) was the darkest saddest day of my entire growing up. It was worse than 9/11 many years later, but perhaps not as bad as when we realized a global pandemic was upon us all. Whew. Too much.
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Right: Governor Connally was shot, too, but recovered, then Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby. Read the book “The Reporter Who Knew Too Much”; it’s about Dorothy Kilgallen and how she was getting to the bottom of all of it, then allegedly OD’ed on barbiturates, but it’s really fishy. It looks like it might have been a mob hit, or maybe members of government agencies…
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I blogged about this very thing today. I was at home instead of school, recovering from a leg broken in three places, in a cast that extended from mid thigh to the tips of my toes. My Mom had gone food shopping and, when she came home, she was crying. She turned on the TV (I probably was either doing homework or reading; I’ve never been a huge television watcher) and watched Walter Cronkite etal. When my friends who lived in my apartment building came home from school, we gathered in the hallway of my floor and talked about it. Alana ramblinwitham
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I’m always telling people to check out the TV coverage videos of it. It’s amazing just how primitive it was, looking at it from 59 years later, but more importantly how professional the news reporters were and how well they dealt with it, even as I’m sure many of them were heartbroken.
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Thanks John.
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