Sixty Years Ago: A Personal Memory Of November 22, 1963

December 7, 1941. November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001.

Those three dates are the ones that, if you were on the planet and old enough to remember, you remember exactly where you were when you heard the news.

Pearl Harbor was bombed. The President was assassinated. The Twin Towers were hit by airliners.

In each instance, the event changed the world.

I was 8 years old on November 22nd, 1963.  Hard as it is to believe these days, I attended a two-room school in a very small town named Leota, Minnesota.  We had just come in from noon recess.  We played pretty much what every kid played 'in those days'...it might have been 'Red Rover Red Rover'.  We may have been on the swings, maybe the Merry-Go-Round.  Perhaps we were throwing a football around, or shooting a few hoops on the outdoor cement basketball court on a cold November day.  If I recall, those hoops needed new nets.

We had come in, taken our desks and Mrs. Gunnink was getting ready to have one of the grades (there were four grades in each room, eight grades in all) come up to the big table when she looked out the window....

Jake was outside waving at her.  Jake was our bus driver, stopping at all the farms around the area picking us kids up and bringing us to school.  He was waving his arms out there on the schoolyard, wanting Mrs. Gunnink to come out.

That was strange.  But out she went to see what Bus Driver Jake needed.  She was gone for, oh, I don't know, a short while.  And when she came back in, I was shocked, shocked like I suppose only an eight year old child can be shocked.

Our teacher was crying.

Teachers teach, praise, scold, smile. But one thing they don't ever do is cry.

But she was.  She was crying.

The President of the United States had been shot.  They said he was dead.

At eight years old I didn't realize this was an historical event, an historical tragic event.

But I did know this.  I knew teacher's didn't cry.  And if they did, something bad had happened.  Something more bad than anything I had ever known.

Beginning that Friday mid-day November 22, 1963 and running through Monday November 25, there were no commercials on TV. None. Zero.

Only coverage of this awful event. The funeral on Monday, a funeral like none of us had ever seen, young or old. And the gravesite, with a flame that burns eternal, an image that still solemnly resonates with all who see it.

But with that being said, the thing that burns in my memory the most:

My teacher cried.