I was in 4th grade and our principal came into our classroom, the teacher cried and were were sent home. His happened just a couple of months after my dad passed away and I thought about the how President's kids didn't have a father now either. It made me sad and I cried too.

I recalled all the relatives being glued to the TV and how our major department store downtown had a huge picture of the President in one of their big windows displays and it was draped in black.

People wept openly over this event. Whether a person thought he was a hero or a scoundrel, he was our President and was gunned down in open sight. President or not he was a young man with two little kids and a wife. This frightened people.

When I look back now I see this in the perspective that this was the death of our innocence as a people. Post World War II people were jubliant and full of hope and felt pride at defeating a threat to freedom worldwide. Men were happy to come home and carry on with their lives and building their families.

People became more jaded as time passed and the ensuing assassinations of others that followed soon afterward foreshadowed a very violent period in our history of civil unrest. Life in the USA changed after Kennedy was killed, I'm not saying that is is necessairly because of it, but it was an event of demarcation. There was the world before and then there was the world afterward and the two were very different.