If memory serves I was sitting in sociology class, just after lunch, on this day forty-four years ago, when the loud speaker at the front of the class crackled. I leaned forward to the girl sitting in front of me, Patty Brennan, and whispered, "They’ve shot the president!"
She turned to me with a puzzled look and said, "What did you say?"
Just then the dean of boys, Mr. Dawson, a kindly gentleman, announced over the loud speaker that John F. Kennedy, the President of the United States, was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas.
That rather memorable weekend I pretty much stayed in front of the T.V. watching CBS news reports. I think I saw Jack Ruby gut shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV, but it may have been a tape, I’m not sure. What I do remember quite well is that Lee Harvey Oswald seemed exceptionally calm in a perfectly chaotic situation. I remember he referred to himself as a "patsy" and said that he " . . . hadn’t been charged with that (Kennedy’s murder)."
A few days ago PBS, the People’s Broadcasting Service, replayed those tapes and for a few brief moments I was seventeen again and starring at my parents twenty-one inch, black and white, RCA television, which was made in America, believe it or not.
I don’t know who killed Jack Kennedy, don’t have a clue, but I have never believed it was Oswald and I never believed that Oswald was the moron the authorities wanted us to believe he was.
I lost my political innocence, such as it was, on that day and I’ve never put my faith in government or the elite that operate the levers of power. I never experienced another paranormal event.
Patty Brennan, a lovely girl, was killed two years later in an auto accident on the Wellsville Road. I was going to school in Chicago and could not attend her funeral, but I have never forgotten Patty Brennan.
