There’s a difference between a “Where were you when …?” question and one that asks: “Do you remember when …?” A person can be asked: “Do you remember when the Challenger exploded?” or “Do you remember when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon?” The inquiry may be about a disaster or a great event in history, but they differ from the one which asks, “Where were you when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center?” Or the one about our first modern-day crisis: “Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? In these “where-were-you-when” questions, there is a double focus: one on the crisis, itself, and a second on your own bodily reaction to the event; how the event impacted your own life more directly than you would have thought could be the case.
Where was I when JFK was killed?
I was working in the lab at Oregon State in Corvallis, a town a thousand miles from Dallas. Background music was playing on the small radio on a shelf in the lab. The news crackled forth and the lives of millions who heard the announcement at the same moment were dramatically changed. Was this another Orson Wells fantasy? Halloween had passed several weeks ago; thoughts now involved Thanksgiving, occurring within in a few days. Today was Friday, November 22, 1963, it was about 10:30 a.m. on the Pacific coast.
Other faculty, staff, and students wandering by were called into the lab to listen. To hear the impossible. To reject it and then, with extreme reluctance, to accept the possible truth of it. We whispered to one another. There were few tears; they came later. No one could stay and listen further. We each had to go home to loved ones.
I closed off what I was doing and, leaving the lab, got on my bike to pedal the half mile to my house. Had Karen heard the news? There were no others along the streets. No cars, no bikes, no pedestrians. Yet I wanted to shout to someone, anyone, “Have you heard?” But there were none to hear. When the two of us met, all we could do was hold on to one another as deeply as possible.
For the next week, we listened and watched events as they appeared on the recently established television networks of the country. Within 90 minutes, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in Dallas. Within 48 hours the accused assassin was, himself, shot in the Dallas Police Station. We began to hear about the “grassy knoll conspiracy” as we watched John-John salute his father’s casket and Jacqueline lead the Nation in its mourning of her murdered husband.
I do not recall the death of any other incumbent President. There was no other benchmark upon which to pin my observations and feelings. FDR had died in office, but, in 1945, I was only ten years old, probably in the fourth or fifth grade. That was so long ago, even in 1963, when the towers of Camelot came crumbling down.
I had admired JFK for many reasons. He and Jackie were a young couple, one whose family-life seemed as ideal as those who had, according to other legends, lived in that other magical kingdom of knights, where Arthur reigned, and Merlin advised. It was only later that the John-Jackie legend became tarnished by real-life peccadillos. In that terrible November, I thought more about how he had prevented a nuclear war than about his botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs. He had been the first, and until 2020, the only, Catholic elected President. His widespread intelligence was favorably compared with Jefferson’s. Then again, our third President’s life has undergone revisions by modern historians, as have those of all the others!
In that November, we watched the riderless horse and worried greatly about the future of our nation. We firmly believed no matter what had happened that this nation would survive. Little did anyone recognize what dramatic events would occur in the coming decades to impact on such thoughts.
At the time, I did not realize how the events happening in Washington, D.C. would affect my own life and career development. “Where was I when?” led directly, over time, to “where am I now?”