Fifty Years Ago Today...

I honestly have no immediate memories of this Friday, 50 years ago today.  I was seven years old, a student in second grade in Mrs. Baxter's class at Lake Forest Elementary School in Gainesville, Florida.  I don't have a class photo from that year, but I think that Carolyn Davis, Jane Bergadine, Bonnie Hall, Richard Shuler, Alan Rogers, and Riley Dean were in my class.  The school was seven blocks from the house I grew up in, and my Mother usually met me after school and walked home with me from the playground until I was in fourth grade.
   The only things that I can definitely say about my memories of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy are that they revolve around my family.  It was the first time I saw my Father cry - and that made a huge impression, since I was a "Daddy's girl."  I can remember watching the TV with Walter Cronkite broadcasting, and seeing him wipe away a few tears - and seeing Mom, Dad, and Kathy doing frequent group hugs and crying.  I was too young to grasp what had happened - to the President, or to the country.
  Embarrassingly, I do remember being angry about the television coverage of the President's funeral; I wanted to see my usual programs - Sky King, Fury of Broken Wheel Ranch and Hopalong Cassidy.  I was very upset when we had hours of coverage of people I didn't know in uniforms and civilian clothes - it was boring.  I remember that Dad tried to get me interested in the black cavalry horse with boots reversed in the stirrups - but I wanted my cowboys and adventure.
  I do remember a sob coming from the other three members of my family when the cameras showed the little boy saluting the horse-drawn casket.  I was amazed, and, at the same time, frightened.  My parents and my elder sister were upset, crying and frightened.  My world seemed to be coming apart - nothing was right.
   Looking back, I feel as if I was living under a balanced rock for the next five years - between LBJ and the Viet Nam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis (which was, I admit a bit earlier) and the antagonism against the Civil Rights Movement - I don't think that I ever really felt safe.  I know I was shocked and grieved when the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in April of 1968.  I was watching the news when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of 1968.  I remember my sister, then 18, hugging me and crying, and saying, rather wildly, "Oh, my God, Betty - They are killing all of the good men!"
   Who were "they?" People we held in esteem were being murdered and we, the American people, were helpless.  I think that I lost my innocence fifty years ago today.  I lost my trust in my fellow humans, I lost my trust in society, and I lost someone who might have changed history, had he not been killed...