November 18, 2020 – West Bend, WI – This Sunday, November 22 will be the 57th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy.
The 35th President of the United States was assassinated in 1963 while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
As a junior U.S. Senator JFK visited West Bend on February 17, 1960. Jeff Wolf, a teacher at Slinger High School, has a newspaper picture of Kennedy with his mother Rosie Wolf.
“I believe it was taken the same day as the West Bend visit,” said Wolf. “Kennedy was also in Port Washington at the Ozaukee Press where my mother worked. This picture hung in our house for decades after the assassination.
“She didn’t talk about the experience much. Only that he was a beautiful soul and when he died she cried and still did every anniversary of the assassination until Alzheimer’s took those memories away,” said Jeff Wolf.
Rosie Wolf died in 2010 after a five year battle with the disease.
Mary Lynn Bennett of West Bend lived in Wausaukee in 1963. She wrote, “Here is what I remember of Nov. 22, 1963. The whole week was an emotional blur.
On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 at 12:30 p.m., I was in Sister Mary Ellen’s shared sixth-eighth grade classroom, on the third floor, at St. Augustine Catholic School in Wausaukee, WI, about 60 miles north of Green Bay. I lived in a small rural farming community of less than 600. There were 16 in my 8th grade class.
It was after recess and we kids were tired of the “New Math” and the Pier Ghent Suite classical music Sister loved. We had practiced how to survive the pending nuclear bomb attack under our school desks, with the “Duck and Cover” Drill.
We were probably wondering if Sister really had any hair under her stiff habit coif that left an embedded crease on her forehead. Did she realize her rosary always jingled, warning us before she entered the classroom? Did we remember to cross ourselves with holy water before we entered her classroom, to keep us safely blessed? Who would get the first deer on Saturday morning’s hunt? All typical important thoughts for a Wausaukee kid in 1963.
My cousin Darlene was home with the mumps, watching the Kennedys’ Dallas motorcade on TV. Shots then blur.
My Aunt Kate frantically called the school. Sister Mary Ellen immediately had us out of our desks and on our knees on the hardwood floors, praying the rosary, petitioning God. There was not even time for two rosaries to be said before we were told JFK was dead.
We continued to pray, crying, terrified but of what we didn’t know. Just very very afraid and so very sad. Then we were sent home, to be with our parents, who were already seated around the TVs.
What I felt from the adults on that Friday afternoon was a shift away from feeling safe in my town.
It would be years before I recognized what was taken from all of us, but especially from us kids, by three shots on a grassy knoll, by Lee Harvey Oswald.
That afternoon, what we saw streaming through our TV screens was not “Leave It to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best.” It wasn’t even Paladin delivering justice with a gun, to a bad guy who fell bloodless off his horse and died, away from the camera.
It was instead a woman who wore a blood-stained pink suit, standing alongside LBJ, hand raised on a Bible, on Air Force One. It was the death of a young father, a husband, a Catholic like my dad and my uncles, rerunning over and over again.
In 1963, Wausaukee was a safe place to be a kid. McNeilley’s Drug Store had swivel stools and a soda fountain. Our freezer in the basement was full of our garden vegetables and meat wrapped in white butcher paper by Mom and me. Every adult in Wausaukee knew whose “kid” you were.
It all changed that day, when Walter Cronkite, took off his dark framed glasses on CBS News, and said President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. CST.
Photo courtesy Jeff Wolf.
