{"id":13088,"date":"2013-11-22T10:05:38","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T15:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=13088"},"modified":"2013-11-22T10:05:38","modified_gmt":"2013-11-22T15:05:38","slug":"i-grew-up-in-dallas-jfk-was-a-big-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/11\/22\/i-grew-up-in-dallas-jfk-was-a-big-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"I grew up in Dallas. JFK was a big deal."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Kennedy motorcade in Dallas. Photo: Bas van Gaalen<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

I wasn’t around when JFK was shot 50 years ago. But my dad was.\u00a0In 1963 he was a third grader in Dallas, Texas. He lived and went to school about 10 minutes north of Dealey Plaza. Everyone in his class, he says, was keenly aware that the president was visiting Dallas that day. His friend George had even seen him at the airport.<\/p>\n

Someone — may a principal, maybe a teacher — came into their classroom and told them that the president been killed. My dad hazily remembers all the students gathering in the gym, their parents arriving to take them home.<\/p>\n

“We all knew and understood something horrible had happened in our city,” my Dad wrote me in an email a few days ago, “but I am not sure that the other third graders and I immediately understood the enormity of that event. Over the next few days we began to understand. The television coverage was non-stop. And I remember being glued to the television for all of it.”<\/span><\/p>\n

I grew up in Dallas some thirty years later. JFK’s death was just something you knew about. But it wasn’t the sum-total of the city, as a lot of out-of-towners like to think. It wasn’t until I saw a minute-by-minute account<\/a> of JFK’s fateful drive on a middle school field trip to the 6th Floor Museum<\/a>, which commemorates the day and is housed in the old book depository, that I understood just how historic and tragic it was.<\/p>\n

Now, it’s a day for Dallas to grapple<\/a>. \u00a0“The negative image of Dallas,” my Dad writes, “continued and still exists. Living in Dallas today, I am still perplexed and bothered by it. I think many Dallasites hope that the events this week commemorating President Kennedy and his assassination will also be a time for Dallas to heal and to begin to be recognized by the world as more than just the place that President Kennedy was killed.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For people everywhere else, it’s a day to remember. The North Country is far away from Texas, but whenever something big and terrible happens, the day gets burned onto your brain. You remember where you were, what you were doing, and how you found out.<\/p>\n

Share your memories with us below. Are you marking the anniversary of JFK’s death in any way? 50 years later, what does it mean?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wasn’t around when JFK was shot 50 years ago. But my dad was.\u00a0In 1963 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13088"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13099,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13088\/revisions\/13099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}