Half a century later, it’s still the tears I remember.
There have been two women I have encountered in my life who scared me.
One was my mother. She ruled our house with an iron fist. The other was Mother Marie Charles. She ruled Assumption Blessed Virgin Mary School in West Grove, Pa., with an iron (actually it was brass) ruler, a starched white bib and headpiece, and blue habit. The woman was 5 feet of jagged nails. Every guy in the school was scared to death of her, and with good reason. She did not tolerate tomfoolery. She was all business, and she let those who ran afoul of her rules know it, usually with the business end of that heavy brass ruler. She also was not above grabbing your ear and giving it a healthy twist to emphasize her point.
She was the last person on the face of the Earth I ever expected to see shed a tear.
It was not, however, the most stunning thing I would encounter that fateful day.
Nov. 22, 1963.
My classmates and I had just returned to our desks from lunch recess. As usual, we were rambunctious, jostling, pushing and shoving each other as we returned to our seats.
When Mother Superior appeared at the door to the classroom the third and fourth grades called home (yes, two classes in one room. Remember, it was 50 years ago), we all thought we were about to be upbraided once again for breaking the rules about horseplay inside the building.
This time was different. There were tears in her eyes.
She informed us the president had been shot in Dallas, and that we needed to pray for him. It was at that moment, with tears streaming down onto her starched habit, that I first noticed how small she really was. She appeared to be broken.
You’ve never seen a rammy group of rambunctious kids go dead silent so fast.
It was the same on the bus ride home, just an empty, eerie vacuum.
And I knew the worst was still to come. I knew when I got home I would have to face my mother.
My mother loved JFK. Not in the way she loved my father, at least during the times when they weren’t fighting like cats and dogs, but love is still the correct word.
When he uttered the words, “let the word go out that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century,” he was talking to my mother.
She was a strident Democrat, who had lived through the Great Depression, and saw first-hand what it did to families. She used to regale us with her stories of getting an orange on Christmas morning, and being damn glad to get it.
Of course, she blamed Republicans, and spent the rest of her life voting religiously against them. In her world, there were R’s and D’s. R’s were bad; D’s were good.
Politics was her religion, and in JFK she found her champion. To her, he represented the promise she clung to during those tough times.
He was a Democrat; we were Democrats. He was young, brash and ebullient. No one ever accused my mother of being shy. He was Irish; were were Irish. Very Irish. He was Roman Catholic; we were Roman Catholic. And then there was his looks.
Just a week before that fateful day in Dallas, the president came to Elkton, Md., on Nov. 14 to open another section of I-95. It forms the heart of my mother’s favorite JFK story. She told it a million time, always exactly the same way, and the look in her eyes told you how much it meant to her.
Elkton was about a half-hour from Oxford, where we grew up, and where my mother ran a soda shop/luncheonette down the street from the high school.
On this Friday, her brother stopped in the store as he did most days. He sold insurance and later would become the town’s postmaster. The insurance company rented the other side of our store, which in better times was used as a gathering spots for young people, who would sit in the booths, play 45s on the record machine, and sip cherry Cokes.
The men who worked in the insurance office would often slip in the back way and appear near the grill to place their orders with my mom. Inevitably, they would start talking politics. Needless to say, most of them were not big fans of the president. The sparks would fly almost immediately as mom defended her hero.
On this day my uncle informed her that he was going down to Elkton to see the president. He asked her if she wanted to go. She was out the door before her apron hit the floor.
For years after that day, she would tell her story exactly the same way. She always marveled at how close she got to the president. “He was right there, as far away as that wall,” she would tell anyone who would listen as she sat at her kitchen table. She would proceed to talk about how much younger he appeared in person, younger than she was. She was surprised by how red his hair appeared to be in person.
Just a week later, she was back behind the counter when one of her antagonists again popped in to put in his order.
“Hey, did you hear your boy got shot?”
That’s how my mother heard that her hero had been mortally wounded in Dallas. An hour later he was dead.
The rest of the weekend was a blur.
It’s often been said that’s the day America lost its innocence. Something died that day in Dallas.
I know a little piece of my mom did.
Fifty years later, it feels just as awful.
Philip E. Heron is editor of the Daily Times and DelcoTimes.com. Call him at 610-622-8818. Email him at editor@delcotimes.com. Make sure you check out his blog, The Heron’s Nest, every day at delcoheronsnest.blogspot.com. Follow him on Twitter, @philheron.
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