An Anniversary

Fifty-nine is not a milestone anniversary. It is not evenly divisible by five or ten. But November 22 is still an anniversary of the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. It was a Friday, and it was before Thanksgiving.

I was in high school, as was my wife. It is one of those days that forever is a 

bookmark in your life. What you were doing when you heard the news? What did you do after? 

It was the 9/11 of 1963; it was Pearl Harbor; it was either of the two armistice days: V-E Day, May 8 1945; V-J Day, August 15,1945. Even November 11, 1918 if you go back far enough, the day my mother was born.

Soon after 2 o'clock an announcement came over the school PA system telling the teachers to dismiss us. No further explanation was added. We had no idea what had transpired. We thought it had something to do with the early morning ruckus that was raised in front of the school as there was an impromptu rally for the Stuyvesant football team that was going to play our arch rival, DeWitt Clinton on Saturday.

For me, getting home was easy. The school was on 15th Street, near First Avenue; the family flower shop was on 18th Street and Third Avenue. Getting there didn't take long. And it wasn't long after I got there that the owner of the hairdressing place two doors down from the flower shop, Larry, came in, shaken, telling us that the president had been shot.

At a high school reunion a few years ago the shared experience of being in school on that fateful day was again shared with classmates. It was almost the first thing we asked of each other: "Were you in school that day?"

The weekend dragged on. Nothing on TV but news of the assassination, and then of the incredible assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald in a parking garage on Saturday morning. My father called me at home and told me what I just missed on television. A live shooting.

Will they play football on Sunday? Yes, and no. Al Davis of the AFL said no; Pete Rozelle of the NFL said yes. College games were played on Saturday. Nothing happens that isn't controversial.

The burial was Monday, November 25. School resumed on Tuesday. I distinctly remember the home room teacher, Mrs. Demas, asking us what words we might have heard over the weekend that might have been new to us: cortege, and caisson were answers I remember.

Assassinations produce frozen moments in history. Yesterday's Final Jeopardy question was under the category of Plays:

The January 12, 1864 Washington Evening Star reported a performance of the "dashing comedy" to a "full and delighted house."

It was the Tournament of Champions, the sixth game, with Amy Schneider and Andrew He each having won two games; Sam Buttrey had one game. You needed three games to win.

The right answer and the right wager was going to win the game. Amy Schneider had both, writing "Our American Cousin," and getting crowned the tournament champion, taking home $250,000, adding more reasons for her to have left her prior employment when she was first a contestant months ago.

The key to the answer was of course not so much the date but the setting of the play. Lincoln was watching a performance of the play on April 15, 1865 when John Wilkes Booth killed him. The play apparently was popular and had opened earlier in New York, years before the 1864 performance in Washington D.C.  I never knew it was a comedy.

I remember after JFK was killed the "prophesies" started: Lincoln was killed in Ford's theater; JFK was killed riding in a Lincoln. It went on like that. 9/11 was like that as well.

Consider how the remembrance of the date can be observed. Clyde Haberman, a retired reporter for the NYT, Tweeted that his parents, who were married on November 22, 1933, no longer celebrated their anniversary on that date after 1963. 

It reminds me of when I found the comedy album, The First Family by Vaughn Meader, at a Vermont flea market years and years ago. In the early '60's, Vaughn made a career of imitating the Kennedy New England accent and cadences of speech in a comedy album that was a huge hit. A second album was produced.

By the standards of comedy in the early '60s, it was funny. I never bought the albums until finding the first one in a dusty LP record bin in a flea market at Kennedy's (consider the coincidence) nostalgia emporium in Vergennes, Vermont. It was maybe $1; maybe $2.

On getting it home I never had the heart to play it, despite still having an LP turntable hooked up. It all just seemed so disrespectful at what could no longer be laughed at. Mr. Meader's comedy career basically ended on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.

Oddly enough, when I tuned on to Turner movies last night it must have been an Angela Lansbury theme, because The Manchurian Candidate" was bring shown, a dynamite 1962 movie starring Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, John McGiver, Janet Leigh, and James Gregory. The plot involves brain washing by the Communist Koreans, and embedded foreign agents who have an assassin ready to pull the trigger with a post-hypnotic suggestion upon seeing the Queen of Diamonds playing card.

It's a terrific cold war movie, notable as much for its plot as it is for NYC scenes. Sinatra's favorite  New York haunt, the bar Jilly's, as is the old Madison Square Garden, decked out for a political convention, are as much a part of the cast as the actors.

Sinatra, being a personal friend and supporter of JFK, for decades exerted influence over the TV showing of the movie. It just plain wasn't shown. Conspiracy theories do not go gentle into the night.

For the last several years my wife and I have been spending nearly a week in Hyannis, Cape Cod, as much to see her cousin as to launch sightseeing trips. The JFK museum on Main Street has a statue of JFK in front in a contemplative pose walking through the grass of Cape Cod dunes, a favorite pastime of his since the family base was centered in Hyannisport.

I've never felt a need to go into the museum. I feel I know enough about JFK. But when we pass the statue I reflect how long ago it was when he did walk through the grass barefoot, and Hyannisport was the summer White House.

You never age when you pass away young.

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