Nov 23, 2020
NOVEMBER 1963 — Changed World
It was said back then you would always remember where you were when you heard John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. I certainly do.
I was on the way home to the Beaches from my Jacksonville job as newspaper copy boy. One of the last stories I pulled off the AP A-Wire was the President’s Dallas speech. The traffic light by the Seventh Day Adventist Academy on Atlantic Boulevard had just turned green, and I released the clutch of my 1952 Chevrolet and rolled through as the dashboard radio made the announcement.
It was a surreal moment. When my shift ended, Air Force One had been reported on the tarmac in Texas, a motorcade forming up. There was an “explainer” piece about the politics of the visit. Kennedy wasn’t getting on all that well with his vice-president, a Texan of gigantic if fragile ego, supposedly still sulking because the boy wonder from Boston had beaten him out for the nomination. The Texas visit was alleged to be a peace offering. LBJ supposedly had invited JFK to go deer-hunting on his ranch next day, Saturday, for good-ole-boy bonding. Made sense to me because deer season was open in Florida too and that’s what I was going to do Saturday. Kennedy, as a Senator, had been credited with pushing through a removal of import restrictions on foreign military surplus firearms so ordinary working stiffs could afford a deer rifle.(Mine was a brand-new Remington, a graduation gift from my father, but I knew men who could only afford the imports.)
I didn’t believe the radio.
Hadn’t I just read his speech, scheduled for about right now? Guess I missed the part that it was an advance copy, embargoed until delivered. By the time I got home, my grandmother’s soap operas had been interrupted by news bulletins from Dallas. (It would be much later I saw an irony: a surplus Italian military rifle, ordered by mail, as the alleged murder weapon. Maybe one imported after Kennedy intervened.)
There were only two TV channels then. And the radio. Zero “social media.” When the news became repetitious we shut off the TV and went to bed. I had to be up early to go deer hunting. Novembers were always for hunting, no matter what happened in the wide world. My hunting log from that Saturday:
November 23, 1963 — Deer hunting Osceola and Lake Butler. Ray, Earl and me. Hunted near our stands, saw nothing. Heard hounds, reconnoitered, found cows. Crossed Expressway on the woods-road overpass in driving rain. When the rain stopped all we found were blood-thirsty mosquitoes. We stopped at the Olustee store for a nice reunion with the old gal who remembers every hunter….
Not a word about Friday’s events. I vaguely recall us saying it seemed a shame to get killed on the way to go deer hunting. The weather and the mosquitoes discouraged our Sunday return. So I was in front of the TV November 24 when images were broadcast of Lee Harvey Oswald being gunned down, surrounded by cops. Wasn’t long before conspiracy theories began to circulate, and became almost a new indoor sport. The world had changed beyond recognition in November 1963.
