It’s fitting that the word nation plays a big role in the word assassination as the events of November 22,1963 ( 50 years ago) certainly gripped not only the U.S. nation but the whole world.
I was a kid, 7 years old and I remember like it was yesterday all the pomp and circumstance leading up to the presidential visit to Dallas.
Even with two TV stations and a pair of rabbit ears all you heard about was the visit.
Speaking of rabbits, I remember what I was doing when the fateful moments occurred.
I was living in Winnipeg and either sick or home for lunch sitting in front of the TV watching a Daffy Duck cartoon on the Bugs Bunny show when the station cut in and pretty much preempted your life for the next little while.
Even at 7, I remember shedding tears and watching the whole thing with utter amazement.
I remember the funeral as I watched it on a friends TV ( the Saunders family actually) and how sad it was.
Imagine as in the image above a 3 year old boy saluting at his owns fathers funeral ( He would later meet with his own grisly death in a terrible airplane accident).
As a kid I remember wondering if I would experience this again in my lifetime. ( That year I had already had my first experience with unplanned death as my young friend Denise was run over by a car more or less in front of me. Her lifeless body under the front wheel of the car still haunts me today as I am sure it does the women who ran her over and Mrs. Small my former kindergarten teacher who tried to save her.)
Little did I know it would only take 5 years and JFK’s brother would suffer the same fate ( I was in bed sleeping, my mother woke me to tell me ) as would Martin Luther king Jr. ( Hawks and Bruins hockey game preempted).
Fifty years ago the world changed for this young kid in a way I never would have thought possible.
Other children experienced a far worse life altering event back in 1914 when an certain Austrian prince was shot off an horse leading to the start of the first world war.
But that was the event for my young times.
Do you remember what you were doing on that fateful day?