‘Letters To Jackie’ Coming To TV

It's been 50 years ago this November. For those of us of a certain age, with our gray hair and wrinkled skin, we remember. We remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news.

I was in grade school that Friday, November 22nd 1963. It was a little 2-room school, closed now for years and years. But open then, vibrant and alive with the laughter of kids, mostly farm kids, playing, running, learning.

We had just come in from our noon recess when Mrs. Gunnink noticed our bus driver Jake outside the window waving at her. She went out to see what he wanted.

When she came back into the room, she was crying. To this day, all these years and decades later, that's what I remember most. Our teacher was crying. Teacher's didn't cry. They taught, they scolded, they hugged, they led. But they didn't cry.

But she cried. The President had been shot in Dallas, Texas. The President had been shot and had died.

I don't remember much of the rest of that day. I was too young to know what it all meant, what the ramifications would be, how it would change the world. But I did know one thing.

Our teacher cried.

Are you old enough to remember that day? Maybe you were one of the thousands of people who wrote letter's to the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. Well, accoding to the Associated Press, those letters are becoming a TV movie.

(AP) - The TLC network is making a movie about some of the 800,000 condolence letters that were sent to the widow of former President John F. Kennedy after his 1963 assassination.

"Letters to Jackie" will air this fall, as the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's killing approaches on Nov. 22.

The film revisits the aftermath of the assassination to examine the former first lady's role in helping the nation through its grief as she suffered through her own.

Twenty celebrities will read the letters, including Zooey Deschanel, Kirsten Dunst, Anne Hathaway, Mark Ruffalo, Betty White and Michelle Williams.