BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day

Subject: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Fiolar
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 05:06 AM

In memory of John F Kennedy who went to meet his maker on this awful day in 1963. Will the true facts ever emerge?

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Charley Noble
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 08:31 AM

Doubtful, especially from this Forum.

I remember that day as the first time a "normal day" became unstuck in time. I was conducting some archane chemical experiment in my college laboratory when someone pooped in and announced "The President has been shot!" Well, no one believed him but he didn't change his story and looked convincingly pained. Enough so that sme of us decided to find a radio to listen to. Afterwards I went back to my experiment and was surprised to find that I wasn't able to focus on the instructions, and found myself drifting back to the TV room at the Student Union. That evening I got together with a small group of folk song friends to attend a distracting movie, and the laughter from some in the audience soon drove us out, and the next thing I remember we were in my car heading for a campus 40 miles away where we had some other music friends. There are more vague memories of three days of driving around, down to the shore, off to the hills, assembling blankets as we traveled, stopping at small general stores (this was Maine), and finally ending up at my parents' farm where they feed us a big dinner and demonstrated a depth of empathy I did not know they were capable of.

It's a sad day, but it's certainly one that I'll never forget.

Charley Noble

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Genie
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 08:49 AM

Charley, your post reminds me of my own experiences on 11/22/63. Not only are my memories vivid of where I was and how I got the news, but like you I went to the movies later that evening. Only in my case, it was on a blind date with a real jerk who kept badmouthing JFK on political grounds and took me to see probably one of the most depressing films ever made -- The Lord Of The Flies! (It's a great movie, but that was not the right night for it for me.)

I got more and more depressed over the weekend and I remember Thanksgiving the next week as being overshadowed by the aftermath of the assassination.

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Steve in Idaho
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 09:53 AM

And it was the day Vilis "Willy" Lisments, John Campbell, and Larry Allred were all killed in a river crossing in Quang Nam Province Republic of Viet Nam 1965.

Glad I am alive and having new adventures and experiences. None of those killed, including JFK, would want us to be wallowing in misery.

Steve

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: John Hindsill
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 10:15 AM

Fiolar, how do you know they haven't? You may just not like the facts.

Also passing at the same weekend as that awful assasination, was Aldous Huxley. His death went virtually unmentioned because he had the ill-fortune to die at that time.

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: kendall
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 11:10 AM

I expect that everyone alive remembers where they were that day. I was helping my father-in-law put up storm windows. I was shocked that this could happen in this day and age, and, angry that someone would think he had a right to take out our president. But, on the political side, I was a republican in those days, so, losing a democrat was no big loss to me. God, I can't believe that was me!

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 11:21 AM

A date of mixed emotions for me. On the five-year anniversary of JFK's assassination (11/22/68) I got to see Jimi Hendrix for the first time, and I was in total awe of the man at the time. So, the same date reminds me of both the lowest and a highest points of my younger days.

Bruce

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Ebbie
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 01:03 PM

I too was a Republican in those days- to me, that means that I had been a sponge absorbing uncritically what I'd been fed my whole life. When Kennedy was shot, like everyone else I was shocked at the act and grieved the waste of a human life but politically I felt, not triumphant, but kind of: "OK, now let's see some change of direction here".

It was not until I started listening to what Bobby Kennedy - and others, notably Mo Udall- was saying that I began questioning my Republican mindset. By the time he was killed, (1968 was a terrible year, what with Kennedy and Martin Luther King dying, and the agitated undercurrents and the non-responsive non-caring of the upper currents) I'd been clamoring for change in the opposite direction for some years.

Today's climate resembles 1968 to an alarming degree- will we have to have the blood bath too?

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Kim C
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 01:09 PM

Well..... I wasn't born yet.

However - my ex-boyfriend in college, was not even a year old at the time. He is from Dallas, and his parents (with baby in tow) were on their way to the square to see the President.

Mister was in grade school, and remembers the announcement coming over the PA system, and being sent home from school early.

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Amergin
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 01:12 PM

yeah my mom was in grade school...she says the principal announced it over the pa system too....

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: GUEST,Chip A.
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 01:33 PM

I was sitting in a dentist office with my then wife. We were 15 & 17 years old.

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: catspaw49
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 01:34 PM

I remember it very well. A few years ago when we were visiting Arlington Cemetery, as the bus crossed to go through the gates I looked down at the bridge and the Lincoln Memorial and my mind immediately flashed onto that same scene filled with the funeral procession and the trail of leaders on the way to Arlington. Truthfully, it was a bit of a scary moment...very weird.

We will never know the truth of it. Anyone who believes in the Wareen Report probably also believes in the Easter Bunny. Stone's film was ridiculous but even that came closer than the friggin' Warren Report. There are too many people now dead and too many pieces of evidence missing to ever get a real take on what happened but looking at what little remains of the initial info can only assure you that there were more than three shots, at least two came from the front, and the single bullet theory is complete horseshit.

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Clinton Hammond
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 01:43 PM

Rick Mercer does a really good bit about how good it'll be when all the baby boomers are finally dead and we can stop hearing about The Summer Of Love and where they were the day JFK was shot...

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From:
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 02:01 PM

Aldous Huxley got lost in the big news of the day, as noted. So did C.S. Lewis.

I was a toddler, and have dim memories, if not entirely fabricated. But my father tells how he was in a conference with his boss. The phone rang. The boss listened, nodded and hung up. He smiled and said: "GOOD! They finally killed the sonofabitch."

Adam

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: beadie
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 02:16 PM

It was, perhaps, the first really disturbing news I had to deal with outside the protective environs of the family home. I was a senior, in the school lunchroom, folding tables and setting up the room for band practice. The principal came on the PA, made a brief statement that the President had been shot (his death had not yet been announced), and then plugged the system into the radio and let it play. One by one, parents who lived in town came to get their kids. Those of us who lived in the rural areas went home on the bus earlier than usual.

I remember most of all, how quiet things were for the better part of a week.

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 03:09 PM

Ah well, people do love to honor themselves by applauding/honoring the memories they most closely identify with, I guess.

I have a cousin whose birthday is September 11th. Mine is September 12th. Another cousin's is September 13th. We used to all celebrate together when we were growing up. So this new 9/11 thing is pretty strange for us.

It is ridiculous to try and claim any day, regardless of the catastrophic nature of an event that might befall it, to be wholly sad, or wholly happy. There were a lot of babies born in the US on September 11, 2001, just as there were a lot of babies born in the US on November 22, 1963. Those days aren't sad days at all for a whole lot of people. That is why it is always a good idea to keep proper perspective about public events. No event, public or private, effects "everyone in the world" regardless of what the US mass media propagandizes to the contrary.

As someone pointed out, other notable people died on November 22, 1963. In 1497, Vasco da Gama was the first navigator to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1906, "S-O-S" was adopted as a distress signal at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin. Good things to note on this day in history.

You should also wish happy birthday to Terry Gilliam, Little Stevie Van Zandt (E Street Band), Aston Barrett (Bob Marley & The Wailers), and my dad, who turns 75 today.

Of course it is a sad day for the Kennedy family. And it was a sad day for the nation the year JFK died. But that was sadness that filled just that one day only for some people. For others it was a joyous day, regardless of the Kennedy asassination. It doesn't make TODAY a sad day at all, even for citizens who loved JFK--it was much too long ago now to be sad about it.

I suggest we should wish happy birthday to Terry Gilliam, Little Stevie Van Zandt (E Street Band), Aston Barrett (Bob Marley & The Wailers), and my dad, who turns 75 today too.

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 03:13 PM

Is there an echo in here? ;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From:
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 06:36 PM

Well, some of us value the touchstones. Bully for those who can get on without 'em. If the date gives us pause, it's because it serves as a kind of benchmark. Things after were different in some way from things before, even if the difference did not have that event as their cause, or if (as some suspect) the differences and that event shared causes. The conspiracy theories would be attractive even in the absence of certain inanities in the Warren report simply because it's not a happy thought that some grandiose loser with a mail-order rifle could do that kind of damage.


The Atlantic Monthly, just arrived yesterday, has a lead article on what an incredibly sick man JFK was (physically sick, that is).

Adam

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: Nancy King
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 07:33 PM

I think JFK's assassination was when America lost its innocence. If somebody could do THAT, then somebody could do ANYTHING. The world was different in some ways after that date, just as it is different now after 9/11. We remember what we were doing those days because they were such monumental and frightening events. My parents remembered what they were doing on Pearl Harbor Day.

I was a senior in college at the time of JFK's assassination, and a classmate came through the dorm saying the President had been shot. We turned on our radios (no TV in the dorm) and a group of us listened all afternoon. That evening I went out to dinner with some guys I never would have spent time with under normal circumstances, and then went -- with virtually the entire college population -- to the chapel for a memorial gathering. I desperately wanted to go home to Washington DC, but couldn't because it was the weekend before Thanksgiving, and substantial fines were levied for cutting the last class before a holiday. The next morning I did my regular babysitting gig for one of the professors, and sat glued to their TV, watching dignitaries arrive at the White House in the rain, while the kids whined about wanting to watch Roy Rogers.

My Dad was a reporter for Associated Press, and covered the Warren Commission. He once made it onto the cover of Time Magazine, in the background of a shot of Marina Oswald. Several of his friends sent him doctored copies of the cover, one with the caption "Dirty old man ogles bereft widow." I never knew what he thought, then or later, of the Warren Commission's findings. I have never been interested in all of the conspiracy theories, etc. It happened. It was horrible. I don't want to dwell on it, even if I can't forget it.

Nancy

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 07:34 PM

Yawn.

More Kennedy celebrity cult bullshit, Atlantic Monthly or not. The Kennedy name on the cover sells magazines, especially at these "touchstone" moments with Hallmark card appeal.

Kennedy was one sick mother all right, and I don't just mean physically.

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 09:49 PM

Well, you know what they say, opinions are like assholes. And some really stink.

Subject: RE: BS: Novermber 22nd - Sad Day
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Nov 02 - 10:33 PM

Don't be absurd Guest 9:49. We aren't all Kennedy worshippers, you know.