November 22, 2013

• My Dad & the Kennedy Assassination

  In honor of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, here is an excerpt from a blog I wrote about my Dad in 2007, a few weeks before he passed away.

  A combination of his love of learning, his story-telling and his seven-year-old son got Dad in the biggest trouble of his life. He used to bring bags of pennies home from Woolco and let us go through them looking for additions to our penny books. I suspect this is how he got started talking about the Lincoln Monument and his trip to Washington D.C. several years earlier. He told us about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the search for John Wilkes Booth and how the barn where he was hiding was set ablaze and Booth shot. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention that this had happened 100 years previously.

  

   This conversation occurred on Wednesday, November 20, 1963. The next morning, my brother went to school and announced during show and tell, "The President is dead. He was shot in the head and they shot the man who did it. My daddy has been to Washington D.C. and he knows all about it." The following day, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and on Sunday, November 24, the entire nation witnessed Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby. On Monday morning, a very frightened teacher went to the school principal who called the police, and on Tuesday morning an agent of the United States Secret Service showed up at both the elementary school and the Woolco store. My brother was pulled out of his second grade classroom, taken to the school library which had been emptied of all staff and students, and in return for a bag of hard candy he told Agent William Strahan anything he wanted to hear. Dad had a lot of explaining to do and it took him awhile to figure out what the heck was going on. My brother, throughout both his military and government careers, has had a continual struggle obtaining security clearances.

  

  Sometime after the dust had settled from that misunderstanding, Daddy read a magazine article about the USS Thresher which had sunk in the Atlantic Ocean in April, 1963. At breakfast one morning, Dad told us all about how the submarine was built and what had gone wrong and why it had sunk. Thoroughly awed by his impressive knowledge, one of us asked, "How do you know so much about it?" to which he gleefully and unthinkingly replied, "Who do you think sunk it?" My poor, exasperated mother threw her plate at his head. "Tom, will you NEVER learn?"

  Dad never did learn, thank heavens. He always had that love of learning, that enthusiasm for story-telling, and that cheeky attitude that I'm sure would have landed him in more hot water if he'd lived long enough to embrace social networking.

  • 12:18 pm
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