Nov. 22, 1963

I stood in the phone booth just outside my apartment building on Olgastrasse in Stuttgart Germany, calling my husband just to say hi.

He was a trumpet player in the 7th Army band and he was on night duty.

"Haven't you heard?"

"Heard what?"

"On the radio."

"I haven't been listening. Sargent Si came by and took Kimm and me to Robinson Barracks." Shepherd. Sargent Si was a father figure to my husband and me and adored by my German Shepherd, Kimm.

"Kennedy was shot. He's dead. Go listen to the radio."

Not long before my husband and the band had played for Kennedy when he visited Berlin. 

Inside our studio I put on the army radio station. We didn't have a television and 1963 was a long way away from  around the clock coverage anyway.

There was a knock at my door as I was trying to make sense of it. Gunther, the engineering student who lived next door, asked, "Are you all right. Is there anything I can do for you."

Over the next few days, neighbors we knew and people we didn't know expressed their shock and horror at Kennedy's death. They treated us as if he were part of our family. At that period in Germany, there was still enough anti-American feeling from the war that Rick 1 never wore his uniform off base, but the death of Kennedy seemed to override it all.

When I went to buy a paper, the man selling would not take any money as he handed me the Stuttgart Zeitung with the headline about Kennedy's death in huge type across the top of front page and a photo of the president.

When I was out walking the dog, two nights later, I went to the end of the street. As far as I could see were people marching down the hill, the main route into the city. They carried lit candles that flickered like millions, millions and millions of fireflies. The only sound was footsteps.

A week later at the base Jay Hawk movie theater that we saw the news reels of Dallas, the funeral, John-John saluting, and Oswald being shot. Before that we had to rely on the Stars and Stripes and the radio.

What a strange feeling of isolation being outside the U.S. even if there were many U.S. Army bases in the Stuttgart area.

I came from a Republican family. My mother never knew anyone who voted for FDR until she was in her forties. I am not sure which disappointed her more: my elopement to a man she didn't like or my becoming a Democrat.

During a Fourth of July Parade in Wakefield, MA, the next town to Reading, where I lived, the then Senator Kennedy rode by sitting on the back of a convertible. He was one of those people that have a charisma, that shot itself through the crowd. It wasn't that I didn't like Eisenhower. He was worthy of respect, but Nixon held little appeal to me.

My high school graduation president had been a tape recorder and I had taped all the Nixon-Kennedy debates. When I was in Germany, my brother taped over them. Furious is the best word to describe how I felt.

There were all kinds of conspiracy theories and a play called MacBird https://archive.org/stream/nsia-MacBird/nsia-MacBird/MacBird%2005_djvu.txt full text) implied that like Macbeth, Johnson had been responsible. Oliver Stone has done a movie with other ideas. I doubt if we will ever know everything. I won't list all the books and articles.

Almost everyone who was alive the day Kennedy was shot, can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing. It was one of those events I would rather forget.