Fifty Years Ago Today

With all the coverage this week of today's 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, one can’t help but spend some time within one’s own mind contemplating how that single event, by an insignificant individual who many would say was just another loser, may have changed the history of the world.  I say may, because we don’t know what significant on the world stage would have changed.  For those of you “of a certain age”, so to speak, like me, it was a day that would “live in infamy” as Pearl Harbor would for my parents.  I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news and the person who relayed the information.  I was in 7^th grade in Patricia Kale’s world history class.  There was a knock at the old wooden classroom door of that old junior high school building and she stepped out.  She came back in looking much different.  Almost like the blood had drained from her face.  She told us that the president had been shot.  Everyone was stunned.  I can’t speak for others, but I didn’t know how to act.  I was just silent and started thinking.  Nothing like that had ever happened in my lifetime.  Before the class ended, another knock came later and that is when we learned he was dead.  The reaction among us was silence and disbelief.  Being a 7^th grader, I remember a cloak of fear falling around me wondering what would happen to our country and were we being attacked.  I was afraid it was the beginning of a war with the Soviet Union, especially since for years it had been drilled into our heads about nuclear war with our arch enemy.  It was a terrible fear.

The events that followed on “live” TV for the rest of the weekend, especially seeing Lee Harvey Oswald killed on live TV, was another first for me.  I very clearly remember being mesmerized by what I watched.  I still remember seeing the funeral procession, the riderless horse with the upside down boots, and the deceased president’s casket lying in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building.  Events such as these are the ones that shapes one life as evident by my vivid memory.  What was even more incredible was how everything just stopped in this country.  The entire country was paralyzed and in mourning by this event.  If it didn’t change any tangible events in world history, it changed the psychology of America and its people instantly.  I pray it never happens again.  The question still remains for many, “What is the truth of the assassination?”

The last time I was in Dallas in 2009, I went to the museum on the 6^th floor of the Texas Book Depository.  The museum is well worth visiting.  You get an excellent perspective as to how everything came together for such an historic even.  You can see size, distance and perspective.  Additionally, you can almost stand in the spot Oswald did when he fired those fatal shots.  They have it glassed off so one cannot stand exactly at the spot, but one can stand at the next window.  What struck me the most was how easy a shot it would have been.  That is a terrible thing to say, but for years, I had heard reports that the shot would have been too hard for an average marksman.  Not so.  There were no photos allowed, but the place held so much meaning to me, that I violated the rules and sneaked one image with a little pocket sized point-and-shoot camera.  Here it is.  You can see the corner window and the boxes Oswald used as cover.  As I said, it is an event that has had a profound effect on many lives.

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook


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