Thursday, November 22, 2012

Forty-nine years ago today

...the day started off so well.


7 comments:

  1. So sad.
    Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family

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  2. i until now hadn't focused on how close to thanksgiving that disaster occured><><i am thankful that i can appreciate his work with us here in america before his untimely death

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  3. Of course, President Kennedy was a Democrat too.

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  4. I just knew it was in November. That day will always be more vivid for me than 9/11 because I was only 14 and hadn't realized that such things really do happen, and happen right in front of the entire world too. Lincoln, yes, but that was too far back to seem real compared to seeing Jackie Kennedy at that hospital with blood on her dress, or Johnson being sworn in or an airplane, or Lee Harvey Oswald being shot face-on not more five feet from the camera. So many painful images, yet most of the white people of my state, Mississippi, either rejoiced openly or kept their mouths shut.

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  5. Putzy-Wutzy (your term, not mine), it was the Friday before Thanksgiving in 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby on Sunday, November 24th, and President Kennedy's funeral was held on Monday, November 25th. Thursday, November 28th, was Thanksgiving. Most untimely that year.

    Yorkshire Pudding, I must say I don't understand what you mean by "too"...our other three assassinated U.S. presidents -- Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901) -- were all Republicans. Unless I am mistaken, Osama bin Laden was not a Democrat. By "too" do you mean "and therefore deserving in the minds of the great unwashed, stupid, hate-filled American public of being killed" -- in which case, I couldn't disagree more. Lee Harvey Oswald was an equal-opportunity assassin. According to the Warren Commission, he also attempted to assassinate the ultra-conservative Major General Edwin Walker on April 10, 1963.

    Snowbrush, I grew up in a suburb of Fort Worth, but when I left home in 1961 I began telling people I was from Dallas because it seemed so much more sophisticated. After the president was assassinated, I never said it again. I remember reading that some schoolchildren in Dallas cheered upon hearing the news.

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  6. "I remember reading that some schoolchildren in Dallas cheered upon hearing the news."

    I'm sure they did in Mississippi too, but I played hooky that day. I was in college when MLK and Robert Kennedy were killed, and people did indeed cheer.

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<b>My new favorite poem</b>

...is the following one, purportedly by Billy Collins: Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House The neighbors'...