November 22, 2020 – West Bend, WI – Today, Monday, November 22, 2021, is the 58th 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.
On a historical note, Kennedy campaigned in West Bend while he was seeking the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
The Research Center at the Washington County Historical Society provided a photo of Kennedy’s visit to West Bend on February 17, 1960, when he was a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. The picture shows Kennedy walking north on Main Street with Thomas F. O’Meara Jr. on his right.
Remembering November 22, 1963 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy
Darlene Hefter of Allenton said she “Remembered very well. Got married Oct. 19 and back from honeymoon and back to work at Gehl Co. and it was a Friday and a car load of girls (no seat belt yet required) – Dee Dee, Vi, Darleen, Barb the driver and myself went to Dot’s Club for a fish fry at noon and on the way was a special announcement about the shooting of our Pres. Kennedy. We were all so shocked that I can’t remember if we ate fish fry yet or turned around and went back to office – it was quite an emotional time for everyone – later on the news for days.
Owen Robinson – My dad was in college at the time at Texas A&M. He was one of the students responsible for building and burning the mighty Aggie Bonfire. It was always burned the night before the game against Texas when it was played at home, or two days before the game when it was in Austin. When Kennedy was shot in ’63, Texas A&M thought it would be inappropriate to burn their giant bonfire so soon after his death, so they dismantled it instead. My dad groused about it until the day he died. He didn’t like Kennedy to begin with and he didn’t appreciate not being able to burn the bonfire that year!
Mary Lynn Bennett of West Bend lived in Wausaukee in 1963. Here is what I remember of Nov. 22, 1963. The whole week was an emotional blur. We have talked about it, my cousins and I of what it meant to have news commentators broadcasting nonstop for a week, through the funeral.
On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, at 12:30 pm, 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 pm CST.
