It was a day that started like any normal day for me. Dad was out of town in Texas attending a conference and I was in the second floor classroom with the rest of Mrs. Seavers’ fifth grade class. Afternoon recess was over and we just returned to the room. Our teacher was very serious. She spoke up and told us that President Kennedy had been shot and that’s all she knew at the time. After a few minutes she came back into the class crying. She managed to say that he had died. That someone had shot him. She didn’t have any other information. The rest of the day we didn’t have lessons, we just waited it out. When they let us out early and I got home, Mom was doing something she rarely did, she was glued to the television set. Brad and Kent were there too, watching something that was incomprehensible. My personal tie to Kennedy at school was, because I had just moved from Massachusetts, I could do a pretty good New England accent, like Kennedy’s. The number one album at the time was a comedy skit record called The First Family by Vaughn Meador. He and his troupe mimicked the entire Kennedy clan, from Jack to Jackie. It was really funny. So my classmates sometimes called me “Kennedy,” and then I would do the accent. When he died some students actually went up to me that day and said how sorry they were about the whole thing, like he was good friend of mine. I found out later that Dad was in Dallas that day and was supposed to see JFK speak at the Trade Mart, but decided to fly home early instead. His flight was delayed at Love Field while JFK landed. They finally took off after the motorcade went on its way. By the time he landed in Newark, the pilot informed them of the assassination. The Saturday after he died, Life Magazine was delivered to my house so I brought it to school. Mrs. Seavers had never seen the cover so she asked is she could use it to make a bulletin board memorializing the man. It was the only time Life was printed with a black field instead of a red. That Sunday when Mom and the rest of us kids returned home from church, Dad shouted to us “They shot Oswald. I can’t believe someone shot Oswald, just now on live TV.” It seemed that America had gone off the rails.