We were the 8th grade class at St. Pius X in November 1963. I can't remember too much about that day we heard about the assassination…just a few snippets. Sr. Mary Leonard being called out of the classroom (very unusual) and then returning in a very unfamiliar state. There was a wait time, it must have been after we had some word, when we were alone in the classroom and the banter was about the Russians…..those were the days of atomic bomb fears…..Soon after we were let out (early?) and we walked home to what would be a period of national mourning which put a veil over the Thanksgiving weekend.
All we did was watch the news and the ceremonies of the funeral. I was watching TV alone (was it Thanksgiving Day?…it seems like everyone else were eating a meal in the dining room) when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald live on the screen. How crazy the world had suddenly become. How out of whack!
And all this shaping us. We were just discovering girls and independence….thinking about high school as the next big step. Hanging out after school as long as we possibly could before returning home. Looking for places we could hang out out of the sight of adults. And now we were learning that the world…already known to be dangerous after growing up with talk of bomb shelters, the missile crisis and end of the world scenarios….was less predictable than our exceptionally regular, peaceful life in Chili had shown us.
We have a lot in common, all of us who went through all that together. It characterizes us in a way that is a little different from all others. This commonality cannot be re-generated because all the living we've done in the last 50 years has separated us as we've lived out our divergent lives. But here's a toast to our commonality despite later differences.
