Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 started out as just another ordinary school day with high-spirited hallway camaraderie alternating with the boredom of classroom regimentation. 

I was 16, a junior at the Smethport Area Junior-Senior High School. The thing we most looked forward to that Friday was Saturday. Before the final bell, it would become that day, that one single day in a lifetime, the one where something so crucial, so momentous, so violent, shocking and historic occurred that it stands apart from all other days, that day when everything changed forever.

We began our fifth period gym class with the usual calisthenics. Dan Nichols surreptitiously slipped out into the hallway to drink from a fountain. Rushing back in, he resumed his pushups and exclaimed “They’ve shot Kennedy!”

“Who?” came the incredulous group rejoinder.

“The commies!” he replied.

The Cuban Missile crisis a year earlier was fresh in our memory. We went to school one morning not knowing if civilization would still exist by the lunch bell. John Kennedy got us through it. If anyone shot him, it must have been “the commies.”

Derided by some, Dan was anxiously questioned by others. An unspeakable idea was forming in my mind. I dismissed it immediately as if it were an “impure thought,” the kind that could lead to a mortal sin (the nuns constantly cautioned us about such things). Mr. Alfieri separated us into groups and for the rest of the period we half-heartedly played skins-and-shirts hoops, preoccupied with thoughts about JFK.

Rumors flew in the halls between classes. Kennedy was shot. Kennedy was dead. The Russians did it. Jackie had been shot too. There would be war with Russia. Jackie was dead. Kennedy and Governor Connally were both dead. The word “vibe” was not yet in the national lexicon, but the vibe in those halls was electric, apprehensive and edging toward panic. We were desperate for more information.

I thought, hoped really, to myself, “If the President has been shot, he’s probably just wounded. He’ll be OK, JFK will be fine.”

Sixth period American History was the last class of the day. We were anxiously trying to sort out the rumors when the principal’s voice came over the PA saying “For those of you who have not heard … the president … is dead.”

We sat in stunned silence. Some of the girls quietly sobbed, dabbing their eyes with tissues, boys silently looked at the floor so no one could see our eyes welling up. After what was I think the longest moment in my life, Mr. Gates led us in the Lord’s Prayer violating the Supreme Court decision only months earlier forbidding prayer in school. Were we praying for John Kennedy? Were we praying for America? Or were we praying for ourselves, for some understanding of this unforeseen, unimagined and brutal event?

At the last bell we filed out the doors in silence, a few hushed conversations here and there. Students boarding the buses were unusually subdued. The autumn chill and somber grayness in the hills reflected our mood. John Kennedy was dead, taken from us by an assassin.

We loved JFK and his family. He was young and engaging and charmed the press. He challenged us to make America a better nation and the world a better place. We could identify with him. It was easy to think he was a personal friend.

That this man we so loved and trusted would be publicly murdered was unthinkable. I felt the emotional whirlygig of desperate denial alternating with the gut-wrenching panic accompanying the realization of the awful event. While I now know this as what comes with facing a personal loss, it was new to me at the time.

On Sunday my family and I saw Lee Harvey Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby on live television. This was reality TV decades before its time, complete with real bullets, blood and death.

The very first international satellite TV broadcast was on Nov. 25, 1963. It was John Kennedy’s funeral. There was no school that day. I watched the funeral on TV.

A drummer in the school band, the relentless cadence and solemn timbre of the muffled parade drums, beating out their unrelenting tattoo seared itself so deeply into me that I can pick up a pair of drumsticks today and play it. Life resumed on Tuesday.

Exactly as 50 years ago, November 22nd comes on a Friday this year.  John Kennedy’s death was the moment where the decade was transformed from sparkling brand-new, brighter, more modern and full of promise into a nightmare of assassination, alienation, war, and civil unrest. This day was a harbinger, a gentle hint as it were, of what was coming. At that moment we all became hostage to the 1960s.

Fully two generations have come of age since that day. Doubts about JFK’s assassination still linger. The Warren Commission in 1964 determined that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. In 1978 The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there may have been or probably were others involved in the assassination, a belief presently held by 70 percent of Americans.

John Kennedy’s assassination has become a thriving industry cranking out countless theories, books and movies. Donald Sutherland’s character in Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” referenced the assassination with the term “coup d’etat,” a view sometimes quietly whispered but rarely spoken aloud.

John Kennedy, our president for just over a thousand days, was not with us long enough for us to really know what kind of a president he was. I remember him fondly. Raised a Catholic, in 1960 the nuns told us to pray that JFK would be elected. We did and he was.

While unflattering personal revelations about John Kennedy have surfaced in the last half century, he charmed us and we loved him for it. He was so brutally torn from us. We all know exactly where we were when we heard the news on that day, Nov. 22, 1963, the day John Fitzgerald Kennedy died in Dallas.

A retired telecommunications professional, Gene Johnson resides in Hazel Hurst with his wife and daughter. He graduated from Smethport Area High School in 1965, and worked as a musician and as a building contractor. He completed a degree at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford in 1989 and worked in media ad sales, customer service and database programming. He describes himself as “a social, political and spiritual product of the American 1960s.”