November 22, 2013 (Friday)
Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. Just like today, it was on a Friday. My family and I were living in Dallas, and I was pastor of the Vickery Baptist Church. We had lived there two and one-half years. David was nine years old, Danny was eight, Debbie was four, and Dianna was only six months old. Dwight was not yet born.
The papers and the local news had been full of information about the president’s visit to Texas, and the route of the motorcade in Dallas was pictured on the front page of the paper. I watched the local channels that morning as the Kennedys were honored at a joyous breakfast in Fort Worth. It was cloudy and rainy early in the day, but a cold front came through making the sky look like a giant hand and arm had swept away the clouds to reveal a beautiful blue cloudless sky, making possible an open car for the parade of dignitaries.
Between the Fort Worth appearances and Air Force One’s arrival at Love Field, I went to a Sterling’s store a couple of blocks from the house and bought some records on sale. One of them was Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, which was played often by radio and television stations over the next few days. I got back home in time to see on TV the crowds lining Lemmon Avenue, Main and Elm Streets in Dallas, and to hear the awful news that a shooting had taken place near the underpass on the way to Stemmons Freeway, which was to take the presidential party to Market Center Trade Mart, where crowds awaited them.
One of the members of my church had a son who was a neurosurgeon at Parkland Hospital, and he later told his father that the wound was fatal and the president was dead upon arrival at the ER.
I was watching and listening to TV when Walter Cronkite made the announcement that “the president is dead.”
The church, normally only partially filled, was full of worshipers Sunday morning, and at the end of the service someone told me that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, had been shot and killed.
There was a heaviness in the air around the world but especially in Dallas, where it seemed to me that everyone hated those of us who lived there. Subsequent assassinations in other cities eventually dispelled that hatred to a degree.
That was my day, November 22, 1963. What kind of a day was it for you?