50 years since JFK assassination and my 4th-grade track awakening

JFK was known more for touch football than track and field, but masters feel a kinship.

I was 9 years old when I heard the news — at lunchtime at Centralia Elementary School in Anaheim, California — that President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. I recall watching TV with my mother that long dreadful weekend. But while pondering who I was in 1963, a skinny fourth-grader recently moved from Michigan, I realize that the nation’s grief-stricken moment came the same year I discovered my speed. Absolutely nothing had to do with the other. But it means I can mark my track age as 50. I learned I was fast the usual way — in a footrace. It wasn’t on a track. It was a grassy stretch, perhaps 100 meters out and back. My class raced to a fence and returned to the blacktop, and only a scrawny kid named Claire beat me. (Wish I knew how his career played out!)

Wow! I thought. I’m fast!

I also was a key member of the zone dodgeball team that beat the Centralia sixth-graders, owing to my quickness and jumping ability. That upset goes down in history alongside the Miracle Mets and Billy Mills.

I eventually ran track at Kraemer Intermediate School, Valencia High School, Harry A. Burke Sr. High School and KU (and for nearly 20 years as a geezer trackster).

I didn’t know much about JFK. (In fact, in 1960 I voted for Nixon in a first-grade straw poll, taking a cue from my dad but not the overwhelming hands-up from my Democratic classmates in Oak Park, Michigan.)

But somehow I feel JFK and I were running mates of a sort. His brother Bobby became the inspiration for my son’s name. A half-century later, I’m still testing my speed — and thinking of a great man.

What did JFK mean to you, and what are your memories of Nov. 22, 1963?

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November 22, 2013

3 Responses

  1. Jeff Davison - November 22, 2013

    JFK was loved no doubt.

    In 6 th grade I was the second fastest in elementary school.
    Just one school competed. I think we ran a 40 or 50 yard
    dash. Street clothes and standing start. We were given no
    instruction how to stand or how to run. I forget if it was
    grass or black top. Who knows why I even remember
    that much of the story. Probably felt more like recess
    than a competition.

  2. Rob Jerome - November 22, 2013

    I remember being in 7th grade and hearing the announcement of the assassination on the school PA system and seeing my teacher collapse against the blackboard.

    Decades later I was at a function in NYC attended by Jacqueline Onassis only a few years before her own death. Somehow I still saw her as Jackie in the pink dress and pillbox hat on that terrible day in Dallas.

  3. David and Linda - November 23, 2013

    I was in San Diego and heard it over the radio. I didn’t have a tv at the time but a neighbor friend did, so she invited me over to watch her black and white tv for the entire time from the first news through the funeral in Washington. I was shocked that this had happened. At the time of Kennedy’s inauguration I was teaching 5th grade in Arizona and brought a tv into the classroom so my students could watch Kennedy’s address. I wonder if my former students ever remembered any of that famous address.

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