The Day Kennedy was Shot

On Friday, November 22, 2019, I had lunch with my friend Lenny Felder.  He reminded me that was the day when Jack Kennedy was shot in Dallas 56 years ago.

With the caveat that the memories of this old man should be taken with a grain of salt…..

It's 1963, and Leslie and I took a trip East to visit family and friends.  We got to New York on that Thursday, Nov 21.  We visited Ed and Liz Burns who were living at that time in a 4th floor Manhattan apartment, with no elevator.  That’s OK when you are still under 30, which we all were.

The next day, Friday the 22nd, Leslie spent the day with her good friend from Smith, Mandy Loutrel, and I spent the day with Ed.  He took me to the gallery of the NYSE and explained what was going on there.  It looked like total chaos, but I guess that’s what unbridled capitalism can be.  Then we went to lunch, and then headed back to his office.

As we entered his office building and got into an elevator, another man said: “Did you hear that the President has been shot.”  Strangely, at first I thought it was the opening line to a joke about Kennedy.  (We were all Republicans then.)  But of course, it was not.

One of the highlights of our trip was to be the Dartmouth/Princeton game the next day at Palmer Stadium, Princeton.  Of course, that did not come off that day.  So the four of us went to the Palm Court at the Plaza, where we were joined by Walt Fogarty and spent the day drinking and schmoozing...and bemoaning the fact that the game had been postponed.  (The game was played a week later, the Saturday after that Thanksgiving.  Dartmouth won, 22-21.)

The next day, Leslie and I left New York and drove the the Philadelphia area, where we stopped in to visit the parents of some good friends from Pasadena, Barbara and Ken Shutt.  As we entered their parents' house, the television was replaying the scene of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas jail.  It felt like we were living in some kind of unbelievable dream.  (It feels like we are living in another bad dream today.)

(As a side note, Leslie’s parents were approached by a Kennedy agent about renting out their Pasadena house to Kennedy for his stay during the 1960 Democratic convention, which was in LA. Being Republican loyalists, they declined.)