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“The president has been shot.”   Nonchalantly, that was the comment from my friend Anthony Santos as we were hanging out on the sun-drenched playground during recess that Friday morning at Linda Vista Elementary School in San Jose.   Oblivious that the world around us was at that very moment changing forever, I jokingly said, “Yeah, he shot himself in the foot.”    That reaction from a naive ten year old was based on the fact that my Republican parents were no fans of Kennedy, and the few comments I heard about him at home were less than glowing.

“No, really,” Anthony replied at just about the same time the school bell rang cutting short our ten minute recess to the groans of kids who were just starting to release the energy that naturally builds as you sit in your fifth grade class for fifty minutes.  

“Return to your classrooms right now, everyone,” exclaimed my teacher Mrs. Naomi Churchwell, who was stuck with yard duty for that recess.  She rounded us up and lead us down the open air corridor to our room.  At the same time, other bewildered teachers, some with cigarettes still dangling from their lips, flowed from the teachers’ lounge, hurriedly heading back to their respective classrooms as unknowing grade schoolers lined up to be let back in for what would be a lesson most would never forget.

Once we were corralled inside, Mrs. Churchwell asked for complete silence. She mirrored what Anthony had already told me.  “There is some news that President Kennedy has been shot, but I don’t know much more.”  She said the principal of Linda Vista Elementary, Mr. Pierce, was going to try to get some news on the radio and then pipe it through the ancient speakers that were hung in each classroom … those being the same speakers that in the five years that I had been at Linda Vista never made a sound.   On November 22, 1963, while the world changed, the speakers didn't.  They still didn’t work.  We sat in silence, waiting.  Then, Mrs. Stebbins stolled into our classroom.  Mrs. Stebbins was the tall self-assured bleached blond sixth grade teacher from the room next door.  Her classroom had a television set.

As she brushed by my desk, still reeking of the lingering smoke from her abbreviated cigarette break, she told Mrs. Churchwell that her fifth graders could come next door to join Mrs. Stebbins' sixth grade classroom.  Since the worthless speaker system didn’t work, we could watch what was happening on TV.  So, we lined up and marched next door.  We huddled around the oval-shaped black and white TV along with Mrs. Stebbins' sixth graders who weren’t all that welcoming to a bunch of fifth graders invading their space.  The picture was very poor.  We were in San Jose and the only 4 TV stations we got were 50 miles away in San Francisco.  But through the blurry fading signal, the message came through.

I don’t remember the exact moment it was confirmed that the President had died, my memory on that part perhaps skewed from seeing the replays in more recent years of Walter Cronkite’s emotional announcement:  “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00PM, Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.” 

I do remember girls in the classroom were crying, and I remember wondering that if the President was killed, did that mean that we would be taken over by Russia (I was never really good in civics lessons). 

Because those speakers in the classroom did not work, Mr. Pierce, the principal, had to make the rounds from classroom to classroom announcing that we were to go home.  They were trying to get buses in for the students who rode the bus.  The rest of us could walk home or come to the office to call our parents.  Life was much more simple then.

Since Linda Vista Elementary was only three blocks from my home, biking was my transportation.  I recall, as I made the turn from Gordon Avenue onto Valley View Avenue, seeing about a dozen cars parked in front of our house.  My mom, being a member of the San Jose Women’s Club, had planned a luncheon/bridge party for that Friday.  As I entered our home, there were the fashionably outfitted ladies, sitting around, eating and chatting.  When my mom asked why my brother and I were home from school so early, we told her the school had closed because the President had been assassinated.  She told us she had heard that and wasn’t sure if she should have continued with her luncheon plans, but when all the ladies started showing up, there wasn’t much she could do.  The party went on.

Retreating to my room, I turned on the radio and discovered that my favorite Top 40 station, KLIV, was playing funeral music.  It was the same with most other stations.  The rest carried news reports.  My brother had a TV in his room (and since we had an antenna on the roof, unlike Linda Vista, the stations came in perfectly, at least perfectly for 1963), we sat around and watched TV for a while, but soon grew bored of that.   All that was on was news.  So, we went outside to play.  Just a couple of kids, 10 and 9 years old, not so sure what was going on.

My dad got home early that day as well, just about the time the ladies were leaving.  He owned his own office machines business in downtown San Jose and let the employees go home after hearing what had happened.  It was what people did back then.  He came outside and played basketball with us.  That night he barbecued, like he normally did, as my brother and I sat in the living room and played board games.

The next day, a rainy Saturday, my dad took my brother and me to Santa Cruz for a delivery he had to make for work.  It was a gloomy day. 

The storm had passed by Sunday morning and my brother and I were just about to walk out the front door and head to Sunday school at the church a block away. That's when my dad said hold on for a minute.  On TV they were about to walk Kennedy’s suspected assassin out of the jailhouse in Dallas and he thought we should see him.  Being fans of shoot ‘em up Westerns on TV,  along with The Three Stooges and All Star Wrestling on Channel 2, it was at times difficult for a little kid to discern reality from fiction.   When Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead right there on live TV, I thought, wow, how cool, they got him!   My dad ushered us out of the house and told us it was time to go to church.

My grandparents lived next door to us, so on Monday we went to their house to watch the funeral.  I was sad, but also after a while kind of bored.  I don’t remember seeing the famous photo of John John saluting the casket until years later.  On Tuesday, school reopened, businesses reopened, life went on.

There have been other historically defining moments that are etched into our memories.  They are now conversation starters. “Where were you when …” (fill in the blank) Robert Kennedy was killed, the Space Shuttle exploded, the San Francisco earthquake struck, 9/11 happened, and so on.   For generations to come, there will be those moments.  For our generation, the baby boomers, it was the event 50 years ago, November 22, 1963, that was the first memorable defining moment in a lifetime of world changing events.