Kennedy

I was one of the first to read the news headline that proclaimed John Kennedy had been elected President. At the time, my job was delivering the morning newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, so I read the election headline shortly after 4 AM.

I learned of Kennedy’s death in my high school classroom. News of Kennedy’s assassination came over the intercom system. Everything stopped. Teachers stopped talking. Students stopped talking. Some of the girls in class were really upset.

During the three years between Kennedy’s election and his death, a lot of history took place. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis (newspapers showed anti-aircraft missile batteries on Florida’s beaches). The beginning of Project Apollo. The Berlin Wall was built (I remember American and Russian tanks facing each other across the border, guns pointed at each other). Freedom Riders rode into history. The March on Washington drew a quarter million people wanting jobs and freedom. Peter, Paul, and Mary began singing songs about freedom (and would soon also sing about war and peace). Military advisors went to Vietnam. It was a turbulent period in America.

Now it’s 50 years later and what surprises me most, next to still being around, is that all the people I know who remember those things like I do – they’re all old people. Unlike me.  Okay, so I’m on the wrong side of forty. But I’m not actually old. Not yet. So how come I seem to be the only not-old person who remembers all those things? Time is strange. Who would have thought a half century would seem so brief at the end, when it seemed so very long at the beginning.