"The flash, apparently official"

[smu diamond m]

I asked my Dad this question a long time ago: He was in class (one of those elementary school grades) and an announcement came on saying school had been dismissed for the day and everyone was to report straight home.

[Dukie]

I accept and appreciate your moving away from appearing to celebrate the assassination of a president.

That's a little condescending. You don't have to move away or back off of something that somebody else misreads. But I digress, back to the beat Rice talk.

The initial post set up a strawman (that Kennedy was a saint, which no one, JFK fan or not, believes to be true) and, in knocking it down, gave the appearance of approving of segregationist happiness at JFK's demise and strongly implied Dallas Police happiness with it. I am glad that ponyte clarified that ponyte doesn't believe those things, and leave it at that.

Beat Rice.

[ponyte]

I accept and appreciate your moving away from appearing to celebrate the assassination of a president.

That's a little condescending. You don't have to move away or back off of something that somebody else misreads. But I digress, back to the beat Rice talk.

The initial post set up a strawman (that Kennedy was a saint, which no one, JFK fan or not, believes to be true) and, in knocking it down, gave the appearance of approving of segregationist happiness at JFK's demise and strongly implied Dallas Police happiness with it. I am glad that ponyte clarified that ponyte doesn't believe those things, and leave it at that.

Beat Rice.

I disagree with your assumptions. Please have the courtesy to check with me to clarify what I am trying to convey before drawing conclusions based on incomplete information.

As to setting up straw men, I am neither clever nor devious enough to set one up. I do appreciate you giving far greater credit that I am due.

[EastStang]

As an aside, November 22 talk radio in Dallas usually was pretty fascinating because you got people coming in to talk about their newest wacko theory of how the assassination occurred. After a few minutes a caller would call in to state that they were actually standing where the theorist said the killer was standing and so ended another theory. We don't get that here in DC.

[mathman]

I was a sophomore in high school in Dallas. They had let us out for the day if we wanted to go downtown to see the president. A group of us were on a street corner and waved to him as he went by. We left and went to our car and on the way home heard he had been shot. It happened a couple of blocks from where we saw him.

[Water Pony]

On November 22, 1963, I was a Senior in a Fort Lauderdale high school, when I first heard the rumor between classes. For the next four or five days, everyone was glued to the television. It was amazing to virtually share the experience with the entire country, especially the Washington D.C. funeral.

In the spring of 1964, I committed to the SMU Swimming Team and enrolled in the university in September having never been to the State of Texas or seen the school before the first day of class.

The only other antedote were comments from friends on why I would want to go to a city where they killed Presidents. Dallas' reputation nationwide was not good at the time. When the Dallas Cowboys starting winning in the sixties much of that changed when they became America's Team.

I recall the events vividly and thank Coach "Red" Barr for offering the scholarship, despite never having met him or seen the school. My four years were magical, graduating in 1968, another year of turmoil with the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations.

November 23, 1963 and 1968 were amazing bookends for me!

Go Ponies, Beat Rice!

[MrMustang1965]

Sorry I'm a day late in responding to this.

I was in first grade and my parents took me out of school to go see the president. Although my father was a conservative Republican he respected the president for the office he held. And he felt it was important for me to see a president whenever one was close by. Remember: this was a special event in Dallas for that era unlike nowadays when people can see the president quite often on TV and at public functions.

We stood at the corner of Lemmon Ave. and Inwood Road in front of the Friendly Chevrolet automobile dealership. I waved at President Kennedy and the First Lady, as well as Governor Connally and his wife. I felt that President Kennedy looked right at me and waved but that was probably just the excitement a 7-year old felt at seeing the president of the United States for the first time.

After the motorcade drove by, we went back home because we were preparing to leave to go to my grandmother's house in Waco for Thanksgiving. My parents had recently purchased a stereo console which had FM radio on it. My father often listened to WRR-FM and tuned it in. There was nothing there. Dead air. He kept turning the dial and was getting nothing but either static or dead air. Finally he tuned in to the AM band and got KRLD where he heard the announcer say, "President Kennedy has been shot on the streets of downtown Dallas."

My father shouted, "God d*mn it! The b*stards have done it!" He thought this was the Russians starting WWIII. He went down the hallway of our house and punched a hole in the wall! I was confused about what was happening but I knew it was bad.

We postponed our trip to Waco until the next morning. I remember sitting in my grandmother's living room with the rest of my family watching Lee Harvey Oswald being escorted out of the Dallas Police Department. My uncle shouted out "He's got a gun!" when Jack Ruby stepped forward and shot Oswald. All the adults in the room went silent and told all the kids what had just happened.

The next few days were like a dream...a bad dream. I remember watching the funeral on TV and my parents telling me that this was going to be something that my generation would never forget. They called it my generation's Pearl Harbor. Little did they know there would be other events like Apollo 1, Nixon's resignation, the Challenger explosion, the Columbia disaster and 9/11.