We lost JFK 39 years ago today. It was the end of an era... literally, the end of the innocence.

I was in Junior High School at the time, and remember being called into Assembly just after lunchtime. The announcement was made over the loudspeakers, and many of us just started to cry. We thought that the Russians were going to invade. My Dad was active in Civil Defense at the time, and we were used to having air raid drills (Into the hallways, face in toward the lockers, crouch down, cover your head). I didn't know what it really meant, being only 12 years old, but I knew it meant the world was changing.

Yes... the world has changed...
But has it really????

Wyld, we were in the same place in different states...or in the same state in different places...whatever. Most of the details are identical except I was a year older. The world didn't work that way for us, until that moment. It has ever since. Even the Cuban Missle Crisis hadn't had such an effect on us, though it was scary, too. Talk about a coming of age experience; that pretty much was it.

I too was so afraid, If you remember the TV Show 12 O'Clock High, then you will have an idea of what my mind was thinking each time I heard a airplane at night, I just knew that they were there to bomb us....We had to drop and duck under our desks, I remember seeing so much chewing gum under the desk and wondering if it could still be chewed.

JFK and Jackie were Our President and First Lady, they were like family, and then someone with ties to Russia having killed, remember Kurchev (sp) banginf his shoe on the desk saying "We will bury you". I think every detail of those events are burnt into our souls that we will never forget any of it.

We have never had another President nor First Lady, like those two, I am sad for the loss, not only for me but for the world at large....I think we were out of school for Thankgiving at the time, anyway I was at home when I heard the news and everyone seemed to be glue to the TV for the next several days, Walter Cronkite, who so comforting and he too seemed like family.

I was 6 and one half years old, and in the first grade...Mrs. Gooden's class. I cried when they shot my president too.Presidents were heros to six year olds in 1963. I also remember being very disapointed because so many news reports over the next few day pre-empted my favorite cartoons.I also remember that my father took his 8mm home movie camera and filmed JFK's funeral procession off of the tv.

I was 9 in 1963 and I, too, remember coming in from lunch and being ushered into the auditorium. There we watched the TV, Walter Cronkite, announce in his sad, somber voice.. the president... died... with the times (eastern and whatever Dallas is)... the rest is sort of a blur, teachers running out of classrooms crying, pure mayhem, they had to send us all home early... no one could handle being in front of a classroom full of 9 year olds trying to explain what it all meant.

I remember the walk home that day.. no cars, no one outside. Just like Sept 11 last year, no one wanted to leave their TV sets, as if the longer we watched, the less it might not be real. Maybe after the next commercial, they'll come back and tell us it was all a mistake. Of course, there were no commercials until after the funeral.

According to my history professor, there was really nothing exceptional about Kennedy or anything he accomplished, simply because he didn't accomplish much. He was elected in a very close vote, so much so that he had no mandate, no support from Congress... and basically didn't DO anything during his term. He says that what made Kennedy "so great" was that he was murdered... and in death became a martyr.

For me, June, 1968 was much worse.. that was Bobby and I adored him. That time of year gets to me every year.

Like BuffaloGal, I remember us all being sent home from school. No one questioned us; it was just assumed everyone had a mom waiting at home. Can you imagine the trouble if they did that now? There would be lawsuits. Some things have changed, Wyldflower, and that's one.

I remember where I was and never thought I'd be living in Dallas.

It's very strange to now know what & where Parkland Hospital is.

It's funny/sad to me that the people I know who are in their 20s/early 30s just roll their eyes when the JFK assasination is mentioned, because we 'older folks' all do what we're doing here--each telling exactly where we were and what we were doing. I think it's not that the world changed at all, but more like our collective perception of the world changed profoundly in the instant we heard the news. The younger ones grew up in the new peception, and so they don't 'get' the effect it had on us. And I think for the most part, the changes have been for the better, if less comfortable, as far as our being less naive. But sometimes, don't you want to wake up to just one day of that remembered innocence and relative simplicity?

Wow!
I was in 6th grade, and I was going home with a friend that day to spend the night at her house. Kathy was one of my best friends, and her parents were like my second parents. I was always comfortable at her house, but that night I remember waking up in the dark and thinking I saw a gun pointing out of the closet.
I think it's unnerving for a child to see the grownups also feeling so helpless. They were supposed to be able to make everything OK.

I remember my teacher, Mrs. Lieberman, having the radio brought in to the classroom so we could listen (maybe it was a TV) But do you all remember those huge black radios that took 2 students to carry around? That was our communication in elementary school, and I remember listening to John Glenn go into space on one of those old monstrosities.

As far as First Ladies go, I think Barbara Bush and Laura Bush are right up there, too. Certainly not as glamorous as Jackie, but wonderful women nonetheless.

Edited to add more memories.

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I was the same age as Ceashel..so we're probably still the same age. Was in math class. It was definitely a coming of age for those of us fifties kids who believed that the good guys always win and things turn out all right in the end. Kennedy was a remarkable president, regardless of what the record shows. He and Jackie both generated tremendous excitement. He was only running for office when he came to do a speech in our town. It was a madhouse, and this was a very Republican area then, but people were so psyched just to see him. His administration was dubbed Camelot long before the assassination. It's hard to explain. Maybe Reagan was a little like that, but it his charms were so lost on me it's hard to tell.

Hey, any guy married to a Jackie can't be all bad, ya know what I'm sayin'?

As far as the younger than us ones that roll their eyes when we speak of where we were and what we were doing when JFK was shot, they will all be able to do the same thing with regards to 9/11.

Hmmm ... I was 6, going on 7. I remember that day and then when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed ... and wondering, asking my grandmother, "Is this going to go on forever?" It was a weird Thanksgiving time ...