Question of the Day!

I was in the second grade at Starkey Elementary in Largo, Florida. It was shortly after lunch; we were back in class about to start that day's science project when Principal Samahol came over the intercom and announced President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. Back then, there were no TVs in the school. Mr. Samahol next announced that school was dismissing early, ( by an hour and a half)

My best friend Danny and our two brothers ran the entire mile to our homes. Danny and Eddy went to their house across the street, and my brother and I entered ours.

The house was dead silent. My mother worked the second shift and had not gotten up yet. She panicked when I shook her awake.

I tried to explain we were home early, but those first few seconds of her mental haze were hard to cut through, more so once I added my understanding of the news that the President had been shot.

Mom's reaction to my words made her face scrunch as she struggled to understand the noises falling out of my mouth. These brief few seconds were deathly frightening to me. My mother, a nuclear engineer who worked for the US Government's top-secret atomic weapons plant, hidden in north Pinellas Park, could not understand what I was saying. Ten seconds later, I recognized the light coming on in my mother's brain. She leaped from the bed, ran to the living room, and turned on our 19-inch, black & white "Admiral" television console.

Walter Cronkite was on Channel 10 (our CBS). They had already announced Kenedy's death, and coverage had moved to everyone trying to ask who was in charge and where Vice President Johnson was. Two neighboring moms had made their way over, as we had the newest and biggest TV on the street.

Our three moms stood between us and the TV while we five kids watched the mid-twenties women and tried to gauge how serious the situation was. This is one of the most potent memories of that day. No one was sitting down. Everyone stood as if waiting for someone to tell them where and when to run.

That memory may be the first time I understood the concept of genuine fear bordering on panic. It was the first time I ever witnessed the adults in my life suffer the grips of uncertainty. So it was at my house until my father got home several hours later.

His actions and comments after getting over a house full of neighbors... reassured me. Dad went to the back porch, pulled a beer mug out of the freezer, and filled it from his homemade Kegerator. Buster, my friend Danny's father from across the street, followed, and Dad poured him a beer too.

Buster asked Dad, "What do you think? You don't seem all that worried."

Dad said, "I didn't like the Pretty Boy ... Son of a Bitch, anyway, and Johnson's an idiot. Nothing is going to change for us. We are still going to be working our asses off, and they are still going to keep figuring out how to raise taxes for stuff we don't want or need!"

At that point in the day, I finally knew everything would be okay. My dad had said so, and no one in our neighborhood was brave enough to contradict him! His lack of fear made me feel fearless, too!

I have faced many close calls and frights in my life, but the only one that comes close to the emotions of that day was Sept. 11, 2001. Oh yes, there were other extreme occasions I stood shoulder to shoulder with the Reaper of Souls. But with them, I had a semblance of control over the outcome; November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001, were well outside anyone's perceptions of reality.