The Day the Music Died
I was ten. November 22, 1963
Time stopped in the far west at 10:30 am and then again at 11:00 that morning.
Though we had only two television channels in our small desert town, the nuns wheeled in sets and tuned in to Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley and John Chancellor tell my fifth-grade school mates that John Kennedy had been shot and had died in Dallas. Soon, they had caught the guy they decided had done the shooting, in a feat of miraculous police work. Somehow, this evil genius who masterminded this assassination plot was also so stupid as to go to the movies and wait to be busted.
My immediate and extended family are Irish Catholics and revering the Kennedys was doctrinal. Surely John and Caroline were my siblings. I may have thought that through a certain ancestral lineage we were all kin back in Cork or Galway or Ulster, if I’d known where those places were. Many families had an image of John Kennedy on a wall in their homes. We knew our PE programs and the emphasis on education and reading were due to Kennedy, and we appreciated it even when we had to climb that fat rope, hand over hand, or memorize a poem or diagram a sentence. We went out to Hanford, earlier that year, a rare visit to the top-secret nuclear site, to see Kennedy speak in the dusty desert. He may as well have been Elvis.
Life in 1963 was perfect until that day. We had the Beatles, the iconic Yankees, and Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap. I could not have understood all the machinations leading up to and following the assassination of Kennedy, and “conspiracy” may not have been in my vocabulary. It did begin to cohere three years later when, at 13 or 14, I read Mark Lane’s superb Rush to Judgment. But even on that dark November day and in the days to follow, when the Dallas cops allowed Ruby to walk right up and cap Oswald, something felt hinky. I don’t indulge in any wacko conspiracies, but I’ve never believed Oswald did this alone. This remains the biggest unanswered question in my life. We even know now who killed Tupac.
As a precocious kid, before that day I felt the government was good and had my best interests at heart. After all, I grew up under the massive Bonneville dam-building project on the Columbia River and the nuclear power generation left behind by the Manhattan Project. My dad worked in reactors. Most everyone’s dad did too, and some moms. Mine taught school. Leslie Groves’ guys built the town I was born in. But the shadow side of that government seemed to reveal itself that day and things were never the same again. Maybe it’s like the first time you steal a piece of Double Bubble from the corner store. “Look what I’m capable of.” It feels a bit dirty.
Some suggest, as I have, that the sixties died when Manson and his ghouls went on a killing spree on Cielo Drive, or when Sonny Barger’s Oakland Hells Angels killed Meredith Hunter at Altamont. Those were pivotal, but my first loss of innocence was on this day, sixty years ago, and I’ve never been the same since.
I understand my pre-pubescent heartthrob, Hayley Mills, is still with us at 77 and looks pretty good. Slim solace, but I’ll take it.
Really appreciate your capture of that moment and the timeframe of your world at that time juxtaposed with the backdrop of the Manhattan Project and other forces lurking not far beneath the surface.