I WAS HERE 50 YEARS AGO WHEN OUR PRESIDENT WAS ASSASSINATED ……. NOVEMBER 22ND 1963

I know it’s not the 22nd until Friday but I thought I would post a photo for Throwback Thursday that had a lot of meaning. I have posted this photo before as this was my favorite teacher Uncle Roger. He was my art teacher in High School and this was our art classroom. I spent so much time in this room since I took mostly art classes from painting to pottery making OH and mechanical drawing.

That day in November there was a German language class being held while I was working on an art project in the back of the room. The art room was often used for other subjects if needed and that day it was. It was in the afternoon when someone from the office came in and asked the German teacher to come with him. At first nothing was thought to be strange but for him to leave the class was a bit odd. He never came back but another teacher came in to be with the kids. Then that horrible message came over the loud speaker that our President was dead and that we were to go home to be with our families. The German teacher did not come back to class because he was a personal friend of JFK and he left to go to Washington DC …

It was a very sad and strange time nothing had ever happened like this before in our lifetime. We did not go back to school until after the public funeral for JFK. For days we did nothing but sit in front of our TV’S to watch the updates. And we all saw Lee Harvey Oswald [the suspected assassin] killed live right there on our TV’s on Sunday morning as he was being moved from the jail he was in. I remember that time so well I was 16 at the time and it changed our lives so much like it just happened yesterday. The following years brought us into the Vietnam War even deeper under our new President Lyndon Johnson. That war would go on until 1972 after 535,000 troops were deployed and 58,000 of our soliders were killed. Would our young vibrant President John F Kennedy commited us to a war that we could never win ?

To this day I don’t think he would have and I don’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin : (

I miss Uncle Roger he was so amazing : )