November 22, 1963—the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Thirteen years old that October, I was a student at Nyack New York public school, Hilltop Junior High. “Hilltop Junior High, hats off to thee!” The school was housed in a modern building attached to a beautiful old mansion, high on a hill overlooking the town of Nyack and the widest part of the Hudson River.
I was in science class, taught by Mr. Murray, a tall, depressed man in late middle age, who wore bow ties and had horrendously bad breath.
The principal announced the shooting of President Kennedy over the PA system. November 22, 1963, a Friday.
Waiting for the bus to pull up in front of the school, a girl in my class came over to me and told me how sorry she was, even though her family were Republicans, because she knew we were Democrats.
The rest of the afternoon is a blur, but I do remember that I was wearing five eyelet brown oxfords (the loafers I yearned for would have ruined my feet, apparently), because while this girl was apologizing for JFK’s shooting—we did not know he was dead yet—I was looking at my feet, having no idea how to respond to her or the event.
The orange Bluebird school bus delivered me to the top of the 100+ steps down from Route 9W, Grand View, N.Y. to our house, where I lived with my parents, our dog Butch (called Mr. Baby) and our red tom cat, Harry Lyme, a roving fellow, soon to disappear for good.
We rented a turn of the 20th century almost Mansard house, clinging to the side of a steep hill overlooking the river. Built by a ship’s captain, the house contained more than 50 single-paned windows without storms, and a boiler the size of the Queen Mary’s that lost the battle with all that draft. That house had the most gorgeous views from all the back windows, looking down on the ever-changing Hudson River. On a clear day, we could see Washington Irving’s house, Sunnyside, across the river in the hills of Westchester County. The weekend after JFK’s assassination, we were rooted in our freezing living room, glued to the TV for days, although there must have been time spent on the phone with my Irish, Kennedy-loving grandparents. My father and I watched nightclub owner Jack Ruby shoot the charged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, live on television. My mother was in the kitchen and missed it, since it was all over in a second but our shouting for her to hurry back to the living room (given the timing of the shooting, she was probably making Sunday breakfast).
We continued in that mode through Sunday and into Monday, watching all the stages of John Kennedy’s funeral and burial, many of which stay with me: the backwards-facing boots in the stirrups of the magnificent Blackjack’s saddle; little John-John (long dead now too, and the subject of Q Anon fantasies) saluting the caisson carrying his father’s casket; Charles de Gaulle sticking up over the rows of foreign dignitaries assembled.
Such a defining set of events for so many years, and not a mention in the newspapers this morning, not a whisper in The Boston Globe or The Irish Times, two publications with strong ties to John Kennedy during his life. It’s as though the waters have closed over such an important man, such an important event and moment, as they have over all but one who lived that day in the cold house with the spectacular view.