It's one of those do-you-remember-where-you-were events, and although it happened 44 years ago I still remember it vividly: Nov. 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated.
I was an 11-year-old sixth-grader at Dornacker School in rural Nebraska, one of 11 pupils ranging from 6-year-old first-graders to 13-year-old eighth-graders. All of us were under the tutelage of Anita Holstein, a middle-aged cattleman's wife with a talent for stimulating the brains behind the freckled brows of farm children.
Since it had only one classroom, it was called a one-room school, but there were several other rooms, including an alcove-size library, cloak room and basement. The basement was our foul-weather play area and a month before we converted it into a deliciously dark "haunted house" to celebrate Halloween.
There were also two bathrooms — relatively late editions to the white wooden structure built in the late 19thcentury, as the two wooden outhouses 40 yards behind the school bore witness. Although relics of the past, the privies were still kept up and painted, and occasionally used at recess by boys in need of a quick "pit stop."
Everybody brought their lunch, generally simple fare such as summer-sausage sandwiches, potato chips, carrot sticks and the like, but the school also had its own "hot lunch program." It consisted of a pot of water and a hotplate, which the older girls used to heat up the glass jars of soup or leftover casserole our metal lunchboxes sometimes contained.
It wasn't long after eating, as we were starting back on our lessons, that the school's collective attention was instantly diverted in a startling way: The telephone rang. Nobody called the school during classes, and the ring was an event in itself.
Although just as startled by the ring as the rest of us, Mrs. Holstein shrugged it off, calmly walking over to the phone in the library while we students waited in silent anticipation. Answering the phone with a simple "hello," she listened for a few moments, then blurted out the words, "For pity's sake." She then stuck her head out of the library, announced that "Kennedy's been shot," and instructed the eighth grade — two muscular farm boys, one destined to become a high school football star — to get the radio running.
Mrs. Holstein quickly finished the phone call — it was from the mother of the seventh-grade girl — and then recited the little information she had: The president had been shot in a parade in Dallas and was seriously hurt.
More information came from the old tube radio, including the big and stunning announcement that President Kennedy was dead.
I'd like to say we were all immediately saddened by the president's death, but aside from Mrs. Holstein and perhaps a girl or two, our eyes were dry. Mostly I remember a feeling of exhilaration stemming from the realization that I was a witness to such a historic moment. (Other emotions — sadness, outrage and anger — would come later.)
Mrs. Holstein compared the event to President Lincoln's assassination and also the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
But those events were ancient history to me: Lincoln had been dead nearly a century, and Pearl Harbor had occurred 22 years before — twice my lifetime. Here was a real momentous occasion that I was witnessing myself.
I didn't tell anybody what I was feeling, though. Although psychologists would probably say it was a natural reaction for an 11-year-old, at the time it didn't seem right to me.
The president of the United States was dead, and I was what they now call "living the moment."
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