On Nov. 23 it will be 60 years since the Kennedy assassination.  Ten years ago I was living in Seattle and sent a message similar to the one below to a Heights 1968 classmate, Claire Levine, who was in Portland, OR.  No sooner than I sent it she emailed back, "I was just going to send you a message about that day."

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Sixty years ago on Friday Nov. 22, 1963 we had just gone into the after-lunch period about 1 p.m. at Roosevelt Junior High School in Cleveland Heights, OH.   I was in Mr. Stephens’ science class and he had some administrative matter, so he sent a girl from the third floor classroom down to the office.

She came back in tears: “The president’s been shot.”

Mr. Stephens said, “Oh nonsense.”  Then he disappeared into the hallway with other teachers until almost 2 p.m. when the seventh period class would be over.  That’s when the public address system announced that Pres. John F. Kennedy was dead in Dallas.

Eighth period that day was also a waste, as teachers and students just sat and waited for more news.  I don’t even remember what class I had for that last period.  The school released us just a few minutes early that Friday afternoon, sometime after 3 p.m.

Most of us went home to black-and-white television sets that would play out the drama that weekend with newscasts from Walter Cronkite or Huntley & Brinkley.  Professional football was cancelled on Sunday.  That was a big deal because the Cleveland Browns were good in 1963 and would win the NFL championship the following year, beating Baltimore.

Having the normal weekend schedule disrupted didn’t lower the drama because on Sunday morning the television networks showed Lee Harvey Oswald being transported to the county jail when Jack Ruby jumped out of the crowd and killed Oswald with a single shot from a .38 caliber revolver.

It was probably the beginning of political awareness for a lot of 13-year olds.  Just a year earlier we’d lived through the drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation with the Soviet Union.  The assassination looked like payback.  Little did we suspect that it wouldn’t be the last political assassination of our teenage years.

Thanksgiving was the following Thursday.