JFK -- 50 years on
I’m currently laboring away on a novel entitled “The Missive in the Margins.” With luck, it will be published in about a year or so.
The main character is a bristly old college professor named Edgar Stroud who is writing a tome about his life. This is how he remembers the dreadful events of late November 1963:
“I started my higher studies at Brixham University in that star-crossed year of 1963. Try as I might to disregard the din of the outside world, distressingly little barbs would often found their way into my thick hide.
Civil rights issues mainly in the south and particularly in Birmingham, Alabama simmered with vile rhetoric and finally boiled over into riots and murders. College campuses were generally awash with Folk singers and activists decrying every imaginable injustice. The Cold War continued with nearly everyone expecting to be blown to smithereens should world leaders lose their tenuous grip on sanity.
I recall that it was a year for astonishing speeches: Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, John Kennedy’s “Civil Rights Address” and “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots,” and Alabama Governor George Wallace’s startlingly racist inaugural oration.
But the most traumatic event of the year happened less than a week before Thanksgiving: President John Kennedy was murdered.
If you did not happen to live through that wrenching few weeks, it is very difficult to fully understand the shock and uncertainty that unraveled from of the string of events. The President was gunned down just after noon and pronounced dead at around one. I was just sitting down in my Introduction to English Lit class when the professor was interrupted by a teary colleague. The secretary from the Department of English wired the national news through to the classroom loudspeakers. For hours we listened in stunned shock to the reports.
Vice President Johnson was sworn-in later in the day.
Classes were canceled until the second of December at Brixham University.
The next day was a Saturday and people milled around the campus and the surrounding town in a horrid gray stupor: our President had been assassinated, something that might happen in the Third World but never in the mighty USA.
There was plenty of speculation that others besides the petty punk who’d been arrested were involved in the murder.
The next day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead while in police custody by a distraught nightclub owner. The messiness and closure of a trial would never occur.
A day later President Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.
Several days later I spent a particularly somber Thanksgiving with a few acquaintances from the School of Sciences in one of the dining halls.
Normal life did not return for most Americans until perhaps mid-December.
I had largely ignored current events up until then. As a kid, the shenanigans and duplicity of the wider world seemed abstract and unimportant. The assassination of President Kennedy brought into focus the need to keep an eye out for broader problems that might affect me.
Thereafter I found myself glancing nervously around with great regularity. One never knows what disaster will happen next.”
© Copyright 2013, S F Chapman. All Rights Reserved.
The main character is a bristly old college professor named Edgar Stroud who is writing a tome about his life. This is how he remembers the dreadful events of late November 1963:
“I started my higher studies at Brixham University in that star-crossed year of 1963. Try as I might to disregard the din of the outside world, distressingly little barbs would often found their way into my thick hide.
Civil rights issues mainly in the south and particularly in Birmingham, Alabama simmered with vile rhetoric and finally boiled over into riots and murders. College campuses were generally awash with Folk singers and activists decrying every imaginable injustice. The Cold War continued with nearly everyone expecting to be blown to smithereens should world leaders lose their tenuous grip on sanity.
I recall that it was a year for astonishing speeches: Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, John Kennedy’s “Civil Rights Address” and “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots,” and Alabama Governor George Wallace’s startlingly racist inaugural oration.
But the most traumatic event of the year happened less than a week before Thanksgiving: President John Kennedy was murdered.
If you did not happen to live through that wrenching few weeks, it is very difficult to fully understand the shock and uncertainty that unraveled from of the string of events. The President was gunned down just after noon and pronounced dead at around one. I was just sitting down in my Introduction to English Lit class when the professor was interrupted by a teary colleague. The secretary from the Department of English wired the national news through to the classroom loudspeakers. For hours we listened in stunned shock to the reports.
Vice President Johnson was sworn-in later in the day.
Classes were canceled until the second of December at Brixham University.
The next day was a Saturday and people milled around the campus and the surrounding town in a horrid gray stupor: our President had been assassinated, something that might happen in the Third World but never in the mighty USA.
There was plenty of speculation that others besides the petty punk who’d been arrested were involved in the murder.
The next day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead while in police custody by a distraught nightclub owner. The messiness and closure of a trial would never occur.
A day later President Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.
Several days later I spent a particularly somber Thanksgiving with a few acquaintances from the School of Sciences in one of the dining halls.
Normal life did not return for most Americans until perhaps mid-December.
I had largely ignored current events up until then. As a kid, the shenanigans and duplicity of the wider world seemed abstract and unimportant. The assassination of President Kennedy brought into focus the need to keep an eye out for broader problems that might affect me.
Thereafter I found myself glancing nervously around with great regularity. One never knows what disaster will happen next.”
© Copyright 2013, S F Chapman. All Rights Reserved.
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