Where Were You Fifty Years Ago Today?

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

There are a very few defining cultural moments that every generation shares. As a rule they almost always include the question: Where were you?........What were you doing?..... Our parents could recall in indelible clarity the events of December 7, 1941. For older Baby Boomers, whose coming of age included Viet Nam and summertime cities in flame, a watershed event was the assasination of JFK. And most everyone of us can tell you where we were and what we were doing when the news came.

TWC had math class immediately after lunch. Mrs Lush's English class. Mrs Lush, who pointed out on the first day of seventh grade that her husband was a trumpet player, not a drunk. The point was lost on me because, unbeknown to Mrs Lush, the term had become archaic when she wasn't looking.

We knew something was very wrong as we filed into the classroom. Her eyes were red and swollen and she got right to it. The president has been killed in Dallas. I was pretty sure she wasn't a Kennedy supporter, being a fundie and all, but the idea that someone had killed the president threw her around. As it did us all. Life was pre-empted for three days.

My good friend, Chuck, was a cinematography major at Long Beach State. Somehow, he got hold of bootleg copy of the Zapruder film, which was illegal to posess in those days. We watched that film, frame by frame, a zillion times in his bedroom. You can't see what, exactly, was happening on the grassy knoll, but something interested Zapruder, and there is just a sense of what it was, almost visible, like a specter and gone.

I am not a conspiracy theory true believer, but the evidence I saw in that film doesn't support a shot from the Texas School Book Depository building, which would have come from above and behind the motorcade. Graphic as it may be, JFK was shot in the head and a piece of his skull flew backwards out of the car. Backwards. Backwards over the trunk, after the car had passed Oswald's sixth floor lair. I'm not an expert on gunshots, but it stands to reason that if JFK was shot from the TBD, that piece of his skull would have flown into the front seat or onto the hood, not the exact opposite direction, onto the trunk of the limo. Backwards. Toward the TBD from which the shot was fired. See for yourself.

As a sidebar: 11-22-63 is a wonderful book, give it a read.

As Always,

TWC

Photo Cred: TWC all rights reserved