34 Replies to “I Amuse Myself”

  2. I remember thinking, every time there’s a young upstart who challenges the money-changers, something like this happens.
    3 bullets, or 3 nails.

  3. this is reminiscent of radio in the sixties from san francisco and baba ram dass.
    “i was so much older then – i’m younger than that now.”

  7. I remember going back to school after lunch, starting to climb the stairs, when a teacher told us that the President of the United States had been shot and killed. Everybody was shocked silent.
    That day now butts up against the fresher memory of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg stating at a Democratic Party convention that Barack Obama is a man like her father. (Where did she get that idea?)

  8. November 20 1963 – Coldest November temperature ever on record in the city of Grande Prairie AB, a bit below -40 degrees.
    November 22 1963 (2 days later, still in grip of unseasonable cold) – main natural gas line into Grande Prairie broken, thousands without heat. Schools cancelled. So sitting at home playing Monopoly with friends, listening to news coming from Dallas.
    They say that if you’re old enough, you always remember where you were when these things happen. I guess you’re just too young, Kate.
    But now fast forward to August 31 1997. Sitting in resort on small scuba diving paradise island in Asia, about 11AM Sunday morning. Little Indonesian girl runs in, “Princess Diane has died!”. So then I thought “Wow, what a great place to remember, much better than Grande Prairie in November.”

  9. anthony from O&A had the very best response of all:
    “I literally shit and pissed myself so bad, my mom had to take care of it for me.”

  10. I’ve seen scant mention of the missing frames from the Zapruder film of Jackie crawling across the trunk of the big ole Lincoln, that revealed she was wearing a white cotton thong, which was pretty avant garde for 1963.

  12. I’m Canadian 55 ( born ’58) and remember a parental tremor and terror; lifelong duck and cover, Black Cloud from those days, dont know if it was this or the Cuban thing or conflated. T’was autumn and I was older and so probability the former.
    JFK WTF.
    Harlem Globetrotters in Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens a few years later and in the middle of the show and it was announced that Eisenhower was dead. Even then I knew which meant more for me. Ike. I was wrong though. Joseph Kennedys’ influence has shaped my world and my peers in ways that cannot be imagined by those of you older. ( when did the rot first infest? the 1880’s?)Some good but a lot malign. A SOB “idolized”, a bought presidency of Narcissus Hamicerica. Another commander of the allies could have won WWII or sent troops to enforce the constitution of you yanks, but Ike at that time and for me was special.
    I suppose that what I am saying is how it is actually difficult to tell salt from froth.
    Robert Albin
    Calgary
    Albrta

  13. I am 56, I don’t remember. I remember the funeral because it was way cool to a six year old boy at the time. I think this is getting to be more and more an old people’s thing.

  14. I came back to my seventh grade class after lunch and the teacher told the class that the President had been shot. I don’t know whether anybody had announced that he was dead, but we certainly weren’t told that he was until an hour or so later.

  15. I had just pulled in to Grafenwohr(?) a few hours earlier, (Except for Berlin, the most forward base in Germany) after being on the Czec border for some time. First hot shower in three months. My RTTY operator was on air picking up basketball scores when the announcement broke in of the president being shot. I, and nobody else, believed him at first, Then had one of my men notify the post commander, while my radio operator tried to notify battalion in Augsburg. The post commander didn’t know, but we were only a few kliks from the Czec border and he alerted the base.
    I will always remember this, not because I had any love for our “Hollywood” president, but because I received a reprimand for not notifying my jerky battalion commander in Augsburg first, so he could be a hero. Stupid me thought being a handful of kilometers from an avowed enemy that outnumbered us 22:1 was more important than enhancing the promotional aspirations of an LtC a hundred klicks from the scene. I still don’t like either one of them.

  18. At that time of the day? Tch, tch.
    Anyhows, four of us fellows were having our noon lunch at Canadian Ohio Brass in Niagara Falls and playing a card game.
    He may have been far to the right of today’s Democrats and even to most of today’s Republicans, but I had not much use for the overblown hype and adoration he received from the media. He was in many ways an equivalent to the hype and adoration Obama receives, and was the The One for the time.

  20. November 22, 1963 was a Friday just like this year. Sick at home from school I watched the live coverage all day on TV. Towards evening a relative phoned to tell us that Mom’s sister had been killed in a car accident that day.

  22. Brother Bobby was the brains behind the Presidency. John F. was just a figurehead.
    Another tidbit. Neither one of them gave a whit about civil rights, save for the faux outrage shown when Bull Connor took his show to town.Negroes voted for him in droves and so he owed lip service to their cause. Remember, MLK was a republican.

  23. The time and day that Kennedy got shot … I was in Rouyn Quebec in a hotel room with a really cute chick named Frankie and we were doing it all day long … I was only 20 and did that sort of thing back then. We came downstairs to the Maroon Lounge for a coffee and a sandwich later that day an got the news in French.
    The feeling I recall was one of insecurity and anger that someone would do such a thing to such a great man and who would stand up to the Cubans and the Russians now. I didn’t know at the time that he was a worse scum bag than Clinton.

  24. Was 14 at the time and was changing rooms at school, was told in the hallway that JFK had been machine-gunned by gangsters. Was a shocking thing at the time, and I remember my first conspiracy thoughts were that he had been killed by Protestants because he was Catholic. Was to find out later, that like many of us, he was a lousy Catholic, at best, – though I still think it odd that there still hasn’t been another Catholic elected to the post. Apparently Muslims, Mormans, and pretty much anything else is acceptable (Garfield, I believe, was Jewish). Of course, Kennedy had to pretty much deny his Catholic beliefs before the nation, especially the Faith’s connection to Rome and the Pope. (Here comes Slater!)

  25. I remember that day very well.
    I was in the Texas Schoolbook depository, having coffee with Lee Oswald,although he was drinking a coke. We heard a few “pops” and he said,”I wonder what that was”. I said,”I dunno,well see you later”,and left.
    Next day I saw all the BS on TV about Lee being the shooter,but I never came forward as I never liked him much anyway.
    Somewhere on the internet someone will take me seriously.
    With seven billion people on the planet,there’s every kind of nutcase, and someone believing every possible theory ever spoken.
    I still don’t believe that Oswald could have fired three shots that accurately with that POS rifle.
    Maybe it was “the Jews”.

  26. Mrs.Coopers grade 4 class. I am 58 born in 55
    I found out from my Mum and raced back to school to tell others
    They already knew, Tommy L said his Mum was crying. We couldn’t figure why
    And we didn’t relate it to the built up of evacuation practices and air raid tests proceeding it in the fall
    Hoping somewhere in Calgary one of those sirens is preserved. Either at heritage park or better yet at the military museums

  28. Grade6 in a Northern Ontario Catholic school. Needless to say that we all got down on our knees to pray. Was at home having brunch on the Sunday Jack Ruby did Oswald in.
    While he had a lot of faults I am glad that Kennedy was president in those days than the likes of Bambam or even Jimmy Carter. I have no doubt that we would be speaking Russian (or glowing in the dark) by now if the kowtow boys were in charge. I joined the air force a decade later and learned a lot that the general public didn’t know.
    I also give Kennedy full marks for getting the west into space and driving the technology boom.
    Also, for the record, if you are going to dilly dally, I figure it better to nail Marlyn Monroe than to use a subordinate as a humidor. My opinion only, eh.

  29. there are ppl who don’t know if their arse is punched, BORED, or pressed
    BTW; when missing the boat make sure yer wearing a bathing suit, the water is always wet:-))))
    bitterclinger…Bobby once confessed t a jurno that he, Bobby, didn’t take civil rights seriously till after Jack was killed, and I’v always felt as you do on that.
    and actually I was at my locker in HS when I heard about it

  30. I was running around the playground at school and some girls were saying that somebody had shot the President. Even at age 6 in Grade 1 we all knew who that was, from television.
    Later I think we had an assembly in the gym, but I don’t remember that. Just the playground.
    Imagine, who would have to get shot these days for a Canadian school to hold an assembly? It’d probably take an alien invasion. Times have surely changed.

  31. My buddy who was in grade 3 at the time asked his Mum what had just happened. Mum replied they just killed the president of the USA. When pressed for why, British born Mum replied “those dumb Americans do that kind of thing”. Buddy didn’t fully understand Mum’s response until later. Buddy’s father was American and he and Mum were having a tiff that day.

  32. Saw a video of Jackie once,giving a tv tour of the White House.
    She was slurring her words, I swear she was on vodka, or valium…
    Elitists and their demons… tsk, tsk.

  33. Heard it from other kids a lunchtime. I was 16, grade 11 and naïve about human nature. At first I refused to believe it because we (the human race) were beyond such things. At least, we in the civilized world had left that behind a hundred years ago. When we were back in class the announcement came over the PA system and I realized just how thin the veneer of civilization is.

  34. You have to understand that the 50th anniversary is an actuarial milestone. It represents the last big hurrah for those aged 30-40 in 1963, the only remaining wedge of the formative demographic of the day.* They’re in their eighties.
    When they’re gone the “Camelot narrative” will be in the hands of those who were teenagers or in their twenties when JFK was shot: a demographic with much less personally invested in the story. They’re in their seventies now.
    The next echelon is the elementary school kids of 1963 (my age group). Other than being able to say where they were the day JFK was shot, they have little narrative to offer at all.
    Behind them is everyone else: those who weren’t even born yet – for whom the assassination is a historical event in Wikipedia or a TV documentary along the lines of Pearl Harbor.
    And that demands a passing interest in history.
    That’s the way it goes: it is as true for JFK as it was for Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley (yes, I know: who were they?)
    * The more influential wedge, the political and cultural leaders who were 50+ in 1963, are obviously already history themselves.

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