President Kennedy shot November 22, 1963

There are certain events in your life that you never forget.  A friend on FaceBook brought this up and we chimed in with our own memories.

I was in college, practicing my bassoon in the music building in college when someone ran down the hall, knocking at everyone's practice room door yelling that President Kennedy had been killed. We didn't believe him. Then another person announced it and another and we slowly came to the realization that it might be true.

This was a few days before Thanksgiving, November 22, 1963. I lived in a house full of girls, not the dorm, so we had to rent a TV set so we could watch the news. For hours we watched. Nobody went to classes. Finally the University simply declared classes closed and said we could all go home early for Thanksgiving.  

At that time I had been knitting a scarf for my current boyfriend and continued to knit it as we watched TV for hours for several days. Yes, we saw Oswald being shot, live, on TV. My knitting became quite tight and after I finished the scarf later, I noticed that the foot length of scarf that I knitted during that time period was tighter making the scarf about an inch narrower at that point.

So many other drastic events happened in the 1960s, so it's no wonder those of us who lived thru them have stark memories of them:

The Cuban missile crisis in October of '62. 

The Birmingham Church bombing in Sept. of '63.

 JFK - November 22 of '63.

 Lee Harvey Oswald killed two days later. 

Martin Luther King in April of '68. Robert Kennedy in June of '68.

 Sharon Tate in August of '69. 

Students at Kent State College in May of '70.

 Underneath all of this rumbled the background news from Viet Nam. 

Many felt that the 60s ended what had been a kind of national euphoria of emerging from WWII. Adults in their 40s in 1960 grew up during the Great Depression. The contrast between how they lived before WWII and the economic boom after the war must have been a constant surprise.