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My parents were big JFK supporters, so, consequently, I thought of him as one of my first heroes. In this day and age, when the President is on the TV addressing the nation, most people say, “yeah, big deal, what ELSE is on?” In the early 60s, though, a Presidential address on TV meant EVERYTHING STOPPED. Guess it was just the nature of things then, with the Cold War, anxiety left over from the Cuban Missle Crisis, etc. I was in the third grade on 11/22/63, in Virginia. We came off the playground, and the normal procedure was to take a rest room break and then finish the afternoon in the clbumroom. This day, however, our teacher made us sit down. Mrs. Stone told us that a terrible thing had happened….President Kennedy had gone to Dallas to make a speech, and had been shot (I remember immediately having a visual image of the man actually giving a speech at a podium and suddenly collapsing mid sentence). She said that there was a radio on in the principal’s office (funny, I can still remember what that radio sounded like down the hall), that we did not know yet what his condition was, we would have to wait and see, hope for the best, etc. We took our rest room break, and I was standing in the doorway of our clbumroom with our teacher. A first grade teacher (oddly enough, my wife’s first grade teacher….she was two years younger, and we did not meet until high school) walked up and simply said, “He’s dead.” I remember the rest of the day being sort of upside down. My dad and I had planned on going to the local YMCA to do some swimming in their indoor pool, and we followed through on that plan immediately after school. Great big pool, and there were only three people there…..me, my dad, and the lifeguard. Swimming in dead silence with only the sound of a little bit of splashing, no conversation, just a feeling of being stunned. Went to bed that night scared….it seemed like everything was wrong. My dad was a minister, so we were always the last people to leave the church on Sundays. Consequently, two days later, my mom and I were upstairs changing out of our Sunday clothes when my dad came charging up the steps yelling “they shot Oswald! They shot Oswald!” I am the only person I know who was alive then and did not see it live. A quick side story. When I was getting my Masters, I had an bumociate professor who was in the Army at that time, stationed in Korea. Because of the time difference, it was breakfast time over there. In the US, we had no idea, of course, that we had just ramped up to the highest possible military alert immediately after JFK had been shot (could have been an invasion, or God knows what). He said they were going through the chow line, getting their oatmeal, in FULL BATTLE GEAR, with rifles, bayonets attached and unsheathed, in their hands. They were ready to go.