Fifty-eight years ago today

Class dismissed early 58 years ago today at Midway Elementary.

Word had spread quickly that President John F. Kennedy, the only president most of the second graders could remember, had been murdered.

As we headed to the bus a couple of hours earlier than usual, I remember the conversation. My classmates did not believe it. 

"You can't kill the president" one girl said.

"They killed Abraham Lincoln," I said, having just read a small paperback biography of the 16th president. I knew nothing of the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley.

That weekend my eyes were glued to the small black-and-white television in the living room. I watched as one man, Jack Ruby, murdered another one, presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, on live television- the first time that had ever happened. It was only on one network, but that was the network I happened to be watching.

The Kennedy assassination was the first time that television took over the coverage of an event and dominated the newspapers because of its immediacy. Now it is something we expect.

On the 30-year anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, Nov. 22, 1993, I combed through the third floor archives set up by Marvin VanGilder in the old Carthage Press building and wrote a story about what it was like in Carthage three decades earlier.

The Carthage Press account from the Nov. 23, 1963 issue began, "Carthage today was a city in shock, still unable to comprehend the brutality with which the nation's chief executive was removed from office and from life." 

"Carthaginians repeatedly remarked only, 'It's unbelievable...What a terrible thing! I didn't think it could happen in this country...What happens now?'

Flags on the courthouse lawn, over the post office, before Memorial Hall and elsewhere in the city dangled limply at half-staff, the article said.

"The city mourned the death of a president and mourned with equal fervor a demonstration of hate too awful to comprehend."