I remember when his father was shot. I was eleven, a sixth grader at Catholic school, and of course all the nuns were just devastated at their handsome Catholic president being shot like that. All the girls in my class (segretated by sex, boys in another class) were crying. We all went to the church and prayed a rosary for his soul and then they let us go home early. My mother didn't have the TV on, and when we got home, we put it on, and that was the first time I remember the TV going on all day and about a news event. In fact, I think it was the first time that TV ever did it, I believe I read that either NBC or CBS did it first and then the others followed. All regular programming was cancelled. Live coverage from Dallas. We all sat and watched it, my mother and us four kids, wondering what was going to happen to us all, because nobody knew for sure what happened or why.
And when my Republican father came home from work, he had some less than complimentary things to say, something about it was probably his mafia buddies or something like that.
And at school, the day of the funeral, we had a splendid funeral mass and processional at church. A lot of our nuns were refugees from Cuba, and the community had taken them in and built a house for them, even though they couldn't teach because they didn't speak much English, and they were very grateful to us. And everyone adored Kennedy, especially the Cuban nuns. It was quite a moving event. |
