I was sitting at my desk in one of the seventh grade classrooms at Hawthorne Intermediate School when the principal interupted our studies with the grave announcement over the innercom system that our beloved president John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot in Dallas Texas. I remember looking over at my friend Sharon Volland and seeing her breakdown into sobs of grief.
Walking home early that day and watching the faces of the adults in the stores along Hawthrone Blvd, I searched for someone to say he was going to be okay even though we had been told that he had died almost instantly. I didn't want to believe it. I was afraid. What would happen to our country now? What would become of his beautiful children?
November 22, 1963 changed everything for me. It changed everything for our country. We lost our innocence that day and the sixties became the decade that revealed all of that anger and loss.
45 years ago today, we stood and cried for all that was lost.
