What do you remember about Friday 22 November 1963

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20. I was in 9 1/2, in 4th grade. We had an hour for lunch and I had walked home, ate, and walked back to school.

We didn’t have the TV on for lunch, and only turned the radio on if there were sirens, so I was unaware of what happened. I briefly watched a kickball game which was incongruously going on in Iowa in late November.

My classmate, David Grundemeir, told me the President had been shot. This was probably within 15 minutes of the shooting. It was the age of TV westerns, so i asked, “Where did he get it, the arm?” Realty was about to obliterate fantasy when it came to gunshot wounds.

The bell rang soon after, and we trooped into the classroom. Mrs. Sogard had been teaching for nearly 40 years. She was too experienced, and too empathetic, to try to return to her lesson plan. There was one TV in the school. The 6th graders used it to watch a weekly show on Iowa history. It was kept in the principal’s office, and he was using it to monitor the situation.

I don’t know, for sure, but I think when he got the news from Walter Cronkite at 1:38 PM, he informed the 6th grade classroom, walked through it to the 5th grade room, and then around the corner and down the hall to tell my class, at 1:41 PM, that the President was dead.

Most of the next few minutes are lost to my memory, but school was dismissed at about 2 PM. I walked home with Pat Barrett and Joan Nelson. I recall that there was a dusting of snow on the ground, which hadn’t been there when we came in from lunch.

The next three days were a TV marathon culminating in the funeral. My little sister was not yet three, but she says she remembers that weekend clearly.