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. 

Life in the 1950s

Usually our evening meal was meat and potatoes and a vegetable. Sometimes a salad. Dessert was canned fruit and two cookies. Also - we were skinny/ thin. Very few children were fat. We went outside to play and told we could stay out until the streetlights came on. (or we got too cold in the wintertime and wanted to come in to warm up.)  We were thin, but strong because of all this activity. 

We did have ONE TV, but we watched what the parents wanted to watch or what they allowed us to watch. (cartoons on Saturday mornings, of course) 

We all took a bag lunch to school in elementary school. No cafeteria for us - we ate in our classroom. No school cafeteria, no school library, no auditorium. We listened to adventure stories on the radio. And variety shows. The car didn't have a radio. When we went on a car trip, we packed lunch and/or snacks and ate while we were riding in it. (sometimes we read comic books on long trips, ignoring our parent's warnings that reading in the car would ruin our eyes. Because of the bumpiness of the ride.)

As soon as any vaccine was available, my mother made sure we got it.  I still have my smallpox vaccine scar.  We got the first polio vaccines. (for many years everyone collected dimes to donate toward that research.  Dimes because our president in the 1940s, Franklin D. Roosevelt had had polio and the scientific community was determined to eliminate it. 

Life in the early 1950s

 There were NO ticks in the Pennsylvania mountains where I roamed. Mom would put a peanut butter sandwich in a bag and I'd walk up the mountain through woods and pastures until the sun was overhead. Which meant that I usually ate my lunch sitting on a rock in the middle of a sheep pasture. I also knew that sun-overhead meant that I had to turn around and hike back down the hill in order to get home in time for dinner. 

(I never made it up to the top of that hill.) 

I was in second or third grade and we lived in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, and I went to a two-room school one block away. 

But nowadays children aren't allowed to roam like that and there are ticks all up and down the east coast and have spread to the rest of the country.