On November 22, 1963, I was four and a half years old. The Kennedy assassination is about the first historical event I can remember experiencing in real time. Memory is tricky, though, so I'm sure I'll be corrected by my mother and sisters if this is wrong, but I remember that my grandfather was getting married that weekend for the second time (my grandmother having died a couple of years earlier). Maybe it was the family circumstances or maybe it was the assassination, but I remember that there was a weird vibe that weekend. (Of course, at 4 and a half I wouldn't have used the phrase "weird vibe.")
I do remember watching the funeral, the horse-drawn, flag-draped coffin in particular, a couple of days later, on a flickering black-and-white television that got three or four channels and had a hard time with the vertical hold. (Does anyone remember vertical hold?)
A few years later I have clearer memories of Martin Luther King's assassination, because the news broke while I was at school in fourth grade.
RIP.
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