I still remember the tingle of excitement, the inappropriate exhilaration I felt as we three went to fetch Porter’s radio. I didn’t know why then, but it must have been my latent journalistic tendencies bubbling up to the top like a science fiction B movie. I had a feeling this was going to be one of the most important Big Picture days of my life. Fifty years later, I’ve still never experienced anything to match it.
Don’t get me wrong. I was an ardent admirer of John F. Kennedy. Mother said in her senior years that the one thing I never forgave her for what not taking me to see JFK campaign in Bowling Green in the summer of 1960. I loved all things Kennedy, quite a switch from the little boy who proudly proclaimed “I Like Ike” after either primary teacher Ruby Fuqua or Myrtle Linton cast me as General Eisenhower in a debate with whichever classmate portrayed Adlai Stevenson.
How we first got wind of what had happened in Dallas escapes me. Classmate Porter McLean says he was in Chuck Lynch’s mechanical drawing class when he heard that President Kennedy had been shot. I know I wasn’t in that class. After I hadn’t been so inept in Chuck’s eighth grade shop class that my planned end table turned into a miniature footstool, my industrial arts career was as good as done. My memory is of being in Coach Waymond ‘Bogey’ Morris’ study hall in the auditorium of what now is the Russellville Central Office. Coach Morris not only let Porter go get a portable radio from his nearby East Seventh Street home, but he allowed James Douglas Purvis and me to walk with him. We were special; we were seniors.
What else happened the rest of that day at school is something of a blur, but I do remember that my parents and I watched the news throughout the weekend. I also think school was dismissed so that we could watch the funeral the next week. The casket, the riderless horse and little John John saluting his daddy’s coffin are firmly etched in my memory. The East Portico of the White House where special mourners entered still is vivid, even though it was in black and white. We didn’t get color television at our house until I came home from college for Christmas 13 months later.
I also remember being stunned coming home from church two days later to see replays of Jack Ruby’s just having shot Lee Harvey Oswald to death in the Dallas jail. It was the first live murder on television. I wonder if 50 years later it still is the only premeditated, real-life murder seen as it was happening.
We didn’t have wall-to-wall news then. There was no CNN or Fox News or anything else that lasted 24 hours a day, not even ESPN. ABC, CBS and NBC didn’t break into regularly scheduled programming for school shootings and tornados. That weekend, though, every bit of normality in America came to a screeching halt to watch coverage in Dallas, Washington and maybe Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys lived in their compound.
Today there would be live coverage of LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One with Jackie and Lady Bird flanking him. Then it wouldn’t have been possible to send feeds from the air to land-based television studios. I’m sure our family didn’t see Walter Cronkite’s memorable brushing away of tears when he announced that the president was dead, since we were an NBC family. Jud Collins on Channel 4 in Nashville and the Chet Hundley-David Brinkley duo nationally were our regular sources of news with some WRUS and WSM radio thrown in.
Half a year later, the Russellville High School Class of 1963-64 went on our senior trip to Washington and New York. One of the sites we most wanted to see in D.C. was President Kennedy’s grave and the eternal flame. I don’t know whether we did or not. I know I did visit that Eternal Flame on an RHS senior trip. Since the permanent John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame memorial was not completed until 1967, my memory could be from 1970 or 1974 when I was a chaperone on senior trips while on the faculty of my alma mater. That flame, however, still burns brightly in my memory.
I do know that 50 years ago today, the America I had been reared in was gone. Ozzie and Harriett Nelson were to be replaced by Ozzy and Sharon Osborne. Also in my senior year, the Beatles brought in the British Invasion of a different rock and roll than what we had known “At the Hop” while “Rocking Round the Clock.” Vietnam, Watts, Flower Power and LSD took center stage instead of the Mickey Mouse Club, Beach Blanket Bingo and 77 Sunset Strip. Camelot gave way to A Clockwork Orange.
I think our class was on the tail end of the Age of Innocence. When I was in high school, teens hid their beers in their cars while standing around at the Tastee Treet. When I came home four years later to teacher at RHS, the beer cans were out in the open. They were hiding their drugs then.
When I started teaching, girls were still required to wear skirts or dresses to school, no pants. Soon after that, Principal R.D. Reynolds justly ruled they could wear pants. By the early 70s, boys and girls were both wearing denim and tie-dyed tee shirts as their school uniforms.
The biggest social issue of our senior year was arguing with Mr. Reynolds over whether the guys could wear fashionable wheat jeans, loafers and white socks beneath our graduation robes. He said no. We thought we were being persecuted.
When I came back, teens were much more involved in much deeper discussions of Vietnam, racial unrest and free love. On the last day of school before Christmas in 1972, we faculty members almost lost control of the students at RHS as they did a snake dance from Marie Turner’s biology lab on one end of the building to Principal Don Turner’s office at the other end.
I find the 225 college students (including about 50 Franklin-Simpson High School dual credit students) I teach each year now to be thoughtful and respectful. They are much wiser in the ways of the world than we were in Camelot, but the days of rebellion are long gone.
Still the world changed drastically on Nov. 22, 1963. I no longer find excitement in it, but that day still burns as an Eternal Flame in my memory.