V 1 N. 29 A Canadian-American Family in Beijing 1988-89

 

A Canadian-American Family in Beijing

                           1988-89

This piece was written more than thirty years ago when we had returned to North America after living for almost a year in Beijing, China during one of that county’s  most tumultuous times in its long history.  Our base was Beijing Normal University in the northwest portion of that city.  It was a thirty minute bicycle ride to Tiananmen Square, and we made that trip often, especially in the Spring of 1989 when the Tiananmen Student Movement was blossoming in the city.  But we also saw other parts of China in that year.  During the Lunar New Year celebrations in February of ’89 when the country all but shuts down and people go on holiday, we travelled south then southwest and finally very far west to Tibet to see that part of  China.  Then we returned to Beijing and unexpectedly became witnesses to those world shaking events in April, May, and June.  The Tiananmen events themselves will be covered in another chapter of this blog.

 

March 6, 1989

It is a sunny day in Beijing, but the industrial haze almost obscures the mountains just west of the city. After six months in the Chinese capitol, we've learned to use that parameter to judge the quality of the air and  weather, when we look out from our fourth floor apartment. Winters with additional coal dust from heating and Spring dust storms carrying soil from Mongolia also affect the visibility.

It is almost a year since Marie-Andrée was notified that she had been selected from amongst five hundred applicants to teach English at the Canada China Language Center in Beijing. Our two children Dominique, seventeen, and Jacques, sixteen, were eager to go, but at the same time a bit reluctant to start a new life. They had been through this before when we had taught for three years in Zimbabwe and had endured several moves between Canada and the States. Selling our house and furniture in Montreal and selecting what items to take to China and what to store for our eventual return to North America occupied much of the Spring of 1988. Studies of Putonghua, the official Chinese language, also filled many of our hours. Jacques and I probably saw more Montreal Expos games than normal knowing we would not see baseball for a year.

The house sold in April and we had to vacate immediately. We moved into a 2 bedroom apartment subleasing until the end of June. We looked on it as a preparation for the much smaller apartments in China. A third move to another temporary home in July prepared us in case we joined a group of nomads in China. My father's serious illness in May made our decision to leave more difficult but my mother gave us her blessing to make this trip and in exchange we promised to return to the States to live near her at the end of the year.

Leaving a scorching North American summer in August 1988, we arrived in a scorching Beijing summer. The latitude of Beijing and Dayton, Ohio where my parents live is almost identical.

What hits the North American visitor first about China is the number of people. The density of people in the cities is unbelievable. Stores are constantly jammed with shoppers, streets packed with vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, and horse drawn carts. I had to return to the States at Christmas and at the peak of the American holiday shopping season, the stores seemed deserted after the Chinese experience.

But despite these crowds the city of Beijing is amazingly clean. Garbage trucks come through our neighborhood several times a week. The streets are swept everyday. People rarely litter the streets with paper.

In China there is very little home or apartment hunting. The unit you work for is responsible for accommodations. Where does a family of four settle? We were given a two bedroom apartment in the Foreign Experts building of Beijing Normal University. It is a 2 year old building that looks much older. The apartment was furnished and we managed to rearrange wardrobes in one of the bedrooms to serve as room dividers and give Jacques and Dominique some privacy from each other. There is a small kitchen with a gas stove and fridge, luxuries the ordinary city family has only recently begun to realize. We have a color TV, English news broadcast at 10:00 p.m. on weekdays. Education is free. We enrolled the children in full time study of Chinese at the university. This was one of the decisions we knew we would have to make before leaving N. America for China. At our arrival there were no high school level classes available for foreigners in Beijing.  It was fairly much accepted that kids would probably lose a year of high school while in China but we felt the experience actually gained living in China would more than compensate their loss. Beijing Normal University, a teacher training facility, has a special foreign student department that has several hundred foreign students studying Chinese. Most of Dominique and Jacques' classmates were Japanese who had a lot of experience with characters which are quite similar to Chinese Characters. The teacher failed to appreciate this distinction between Eastern and Western students and taught his class assuming everyone could read characters, thus leaving our children in the dust. But by Christmas time their Conversational Chinese was showing great progress. After Christmas we pulled them from the language courses and enrolled them in high school correspondence courses offered through Indiana University. My daughter, whose high school experience has been in French Canadian schools, is now struggling with  printed English letters.

I arrived without a job but found that virtually any foreigner is considered an expert at least in the teaching of English. A number of untrained Americans were busy teaching English at university level and I was quickly drafted into teaching two courses of composition and a course in newspaper reading.  My pay was somewhat less than what I had earned in the 1960’s while serving in the Peace Corps. 

I've taught in six other countries but I found the Chinese university students to be the most polite and eager students I've ever worked with. Lessons are done and handed in on time. Long hours of study are evident. The toughest thing to deal with—the biggest difference between them and other students I have met—is their unwillingness to question a teacher. The authority of a teacher in the classroom is conceded by the student. It took several weeks to alter some of their entrenched habits to meet some of my expectations in the classroom. I gave them a lot more freedom than they were accustomed to having, but also explained that they now had responsibilities that they would have to learn to deal with. One of the reasons I decided to teach this way was not to introduce North American ways just for the fun of it, but because many of these students planned to go to work in the private sector of the new Chinese economy. Only a few years ago all students were assigned to jobs for life by the university or obtained these lifetime positions by connections or "guanxi" so commonly used in China to obtain the unobtainable. When the Chinese government allowed the formation of privately owned businesses a few years ago, many new jobs opened in this sector. However, nothing was guaranteed for life and a number of social benefits would be lost. The lure was higher pay. Professional people's salaries in China are abysmally low. A street corner fruit seller can do better than a teacher or a doctor. Most of my students were planning for careers outside of the teaching profession, so my classes were geared to prepare them for a bit more independence and self-reliance. Brainstorming, where the students set their own tasks and planned their work, were used. Group work rather than individual work was emphasized, preparing them for teamwork on the job site. I emphasized that what went on in my classes would probably best be kept there for the moment. It would be too much of a change if they were to request such teaching from their more tradition-bound Chinese professors. They said they wouldn't dare make such demands.

After two months with these wonderful students I learned of my father's death and returned home to be with my mother through the Christmas holidays. By the time I returned it was too late in the semester to continue the classes. Classes did not stop for Christmas. But hopefully some seeds were planted that will help these students to survive in the new Chinese economy. Because of my extended absence for my father’s funeral and some medical treatment while home,  the university decided to cancel my classes. 

When I returned to Beijing in January I received a request to teach American Studies at an adult night school for several weeks. My degree in exercise physiology was again not going to serve me very well. After meeting the students the first night and learning that there were many professional people in the class, I decided to make a class of comparative lifestyles, contrasting what I had seen so far in China. I taught them about credit, costs of operating a car, finance companies. Their response was that Americans must have a lot of worries about payments and taxes that the Chinese do not yet have to deal with. They were interested in courtship, marriage, divorce, school systems, and costs of college. They pay almost nothing for university education, but the chances of getting accepted into a college in China are very slim and almost nil for a rural peasant.

During my Christmas absence, Marie-Andrée and the kids decided they wanted to experience some real Quebec-like weather, and took the train 24 hours north to Harbin where they got everything they hoped for and more. Harbin, one of the northernmost cities in Heilongjiang province, once called Manchuria, is famous for their ice sculpture festival and construction was going on full throttle. It was cold too and fur hats and winter boots had to be purchased.

On my return in January the children were able to get themselves out to the airport on public transportation at 1:00 p.m. and negotiate minibus transport back to our apartment. Their increased self-confidence was quite evident in the way they were now taking care of their father.

By February, Marie-Andrée had completed her first term of teaching and we had a month free to travel through China! Many of our colleagues were heading out of the country either home for their vacation or south to the beaches, but since this would be our only chance to get around China we decided to remain in-country. We rode the trains for two days south to the city of Guilin where exists some of the most famous scenery of China—the small sharply pointed limestone mountains, almost a forest of hills. It was only a few degrees warmer than Beijing but so much greener, a big change from the greys of the capital. We spent several days in a smaller village called Yangshuo, well on its way to becoming a backpackers' haven/stopping point on the Li River. From there we visited surrounding villages by bicycle. From Guilin we flew to Kunming, one of the main landing points for the Hump pilots of World War II. Kunming is famous for its year-round springtime weather and we were warmly treated not just by the weather but by the friendly peoples of Yunnan Province. Had we more time to spend, Yunnan would have been a place to explore more intensively. Many colorfully costumed minority groups lived in the area! However, the main goal of our three-week trip was to visit the autonomous region of Tibet.

To arrive in Tibet meant travelling another day by train north from Kunming to the capital of Szechuan province, Chengdu, a bleak industrial town once inhabited by long dynasties, poets and philosophers. Rain and cold gave us few pleasant memories of Szechuan. We secured tickets for Tibet and flew in to Lhasa on February 22. Travel stipulations required that we spend 2 nights in the Lhasa Holiday Inn at $120 per night compared to the $15 average we had been spending up to that time. We managed to get the requirement cut to one night and gladly moved into the less luxurious but friendlier, more vibrant Yak Hotel for $8.00 a night. The Yak was right in the middle of town where a steady stream of prostrating pilgrims circled the Jokhang Temple, weaving between the stalls of merchants of religious objects, prayer flags, juniper for burning in the stupas, antiques, and Coca-Cola. Sights and sounds of Lhasa were magnificent. The 12,000-foot altitude provided freezing nights and skin-scorching days. Costumes of various Tibetan tribes reminded us of Amerindian groups who are certainly not distantly related! Our clothes absorbed the smell of burning yak butter lamps found in every temple. Dentists with foot-cranked drills were busy drilling and capping front teeth for sixty cents bottom price to $2.50 top. Dogs were everywhere in Lhasa—so noticeably absent in Beijing. They are thought to be the incarnation of lamas who didn't quite make it into a better life. They are well fed and fairly friendly, though we didn't approach them intentionally, not knowing whether a rabies situation existed.

The Potala (the Dalai Lama's residence) was a major effort to climb up to see at the 12,000-foot altitude. Jacques and I had both been quite sick our first night because of the lower oxygen pressure! In the week we spent in Lhasa we visited several monasteries outside of town and walked, climbed, and scrambled up some of the minor hills around the city, getting up to 15,000 feet, but coming back down each day. We still felt dwarfed by the 20,000-foot mountains surrounding the city.

The Yak Hotel proved to be a good meeting ground for backpackers, which we were essentially. The backpackers have all the latest information on costs, places to stay, people to be aware of—that even the best guidebooks cannot possibly contain. At the time we were there most of the backpackers were waiting for the road from Lhasa to Kathmandu to open. It was still blocked by knee-deep snows and required a dangerous 125-mile walk to get to the Nepalese border.

In addition, at the time of our visit the Tibetans were disturbed by the curtailment of Tibetan New Year celebrations by the Chinese authorities. The day of our arrival Marie-Andrée and I, in a high-altitude stupor, walked into the middle of a demonstration against that decision. As we approached the main square in front of the Jokhang Temple (Lamaism/Buddhism's holiest shrine), we saw a contingent of policemen or soldiers jogging in file into the crowd in front of the Jokhang Temple. Shortly afterward about ten women came running out of the crowd screaming. We continued into the square, not certain what was happening, but did see a few other Western tourists milling about. A couple of Frenchmen who spoke Tibetan said that several nuns had been putting on a 'manif'—the French slang for manifestation—against the New Year decision by the Chinese.   One Tibetan young man came up to us and quietly said in English, “We are fighting for our freedom.”   I was carrying a video camera, and concerned that the film might be confiscated or I might be arrested,  I shot from the hip, not letting on that I was filming the scene.   We stayed in town for about three days before flying out directly to Beijing. 

Security on the plane was bizarre.  The stewards asked all the Tibetan men to hand over their swords after they got on the plane.   Most Tibetan males carry a short sword about a foot long.  But before we landed, the stewards re-armed those passengers.   This of course was before the   9-11 attack on New York and Washington.  We landed safely in Beijing and returned to our campus not knowing that the next chapter in Chinese history was about to unfold.

 

George Brose  (below a few scenes from South China and Tibet)

Upper Left outside the Jokang Temple,  Lower Left Dominique and Marie

Upper Right  George and Dominique in Gulin, Right Center,  Jacques lounging at the Yak Hotel,  Lower

Right, street near the Jokang Temple

Comments:   What a marvelous experience for all four of you.  You say Dominique and Jacques were eager to go.  Having raised four children, I was stunned.  They were 17 and 16, in the full throes of teenage angst.  They had the best friends anyone ever had, perhaps a boyfriend or girlfriend, a school they enjoyed, etc.  China?  I had trouble getting my son to move off the couch.  Much as I love my kids, had this move been suggested, they would have slit my throat as I slept.  Granted Dominique and Jacques were not normal teenagers, but there is only so far I, who suffered through his kids' high school years, can stretch my imagination.  You and Marie- Andree did a good job.  Roy Mason, Ukiah, CA

Roy,  If you recall, we visited you on our way to China and immediately when we got back to the US.   George

V 1 N. 28 The Tracks of Memory

 

The Tracks of Memory

By George Brose

An Essay on Trains, Family, and Growing Up in Ohio

My first memory of trains was watching from two blocks distant at the corner nearest to my maternal grandmother's house in Northeast Dayton. I wasn't allowed to go beyond that corner, but from there I could make out the cars as they rolled between foundries and factories on their way north, maybe to Toledo or perhaps Detroit.   Trains going directly east would have required taking the tracks running parallel to Third Street. Yes, I'm sure those trains were headed north. I could stand on that corner formed by Chapel St. and Milburn Ave. and look as long as I liked, but there was a crack in the sidewalk I dared not pass alone. That was in 1947, and I was four years old, conscious that there was a greater world beyond that crack, but not explorer enough to risk the penalties of transgressing that line in the concrete.

Halfway down Chapel St. to the tracks sat Falb's Cafe, a working man's bar where my father took his afternoon beer on hot summer days. He often brought me along with him and sat me at a table in the back room, the afternoon sun roasting the windows on the west wall and filtering the tubes of light that worked their way through the darkened room. I could see the cigarette smoke soaring from the tables up through those light rays and returning downward in cloud-like patterns over my arms, and I could touch them and disturb them and feel the difference in temperatures between the smoke-filled rays and the sheltered darkness of the room. We shared a waxed paper bag of potato chips. My father had his bottle of beer, I had a Tru-Ade orange drink. He drank a ratio of two to my one. We both drank straight from the bottle, my hands holding steady on the raised bumps of the bottle covered with the cold wet moisture condensing on it. We contested every day who would find the biggest chip in the bag. Somehow, even when he found it, I would get to eat it. We never stayed for more than two beers and one orange, then it was back to the house where supper would be ready by five.

My father worked in those factories although his was across town. He left home early each morning driving one of several cars that seemed to pass through the family. The one I remember distinctly was Josephine, a 1937 Dodge Coupé, black, with running boards on the sides, a two-seater with a high wobbly gear shift between the two passengers. There was a recess in the gear shift knob with a place for a picture to be attached. Patrick, one of my father's hunting dogs from between the wars, could be seen on that knob. My place in that car was the shelf in front of the rear window. I could stretch out comfortably on it and see out all the windows. I could sleep if we were returning from somewhere late at night. I don't recall ever riding on the passenger seat, because sitting there, I could not see where we were going. A unique feature in Josephine was a crank on the dashboard that when turned would allow the windshield to open slightly on the bottom edge, giving better ventilation in summer. We opened it occasionally but the windshield always leaked afterwards in wet weather.

We took that car occasionally to visit my paternal grandparents and drove a seemingly endless fifty miles north of Dayton on the major north-south artery running from Detroit to Florida, Route 25, a two-lane thoroughfare that crossed Route 40, the old National Road in Vandalia, Ohio, making it one of the true crossroads of America. We travelled up through the farmlands passing through Troy, Piqua, switching to Route 66 and carrying on through Houston (pronounced House-tun), then Fort Loramie (I dreamed of a great rampart to protect the settlers from Indian attacks), Minster, and then the family homestead on West Monroe St. in New Bremen where people who were born there still spoke German and had strange-sounding names like Fledderjohan,  Landfersich, Meisenbrink, Dietrich and Dammeyer. The names around us in Dayton had been more of an East European nature and the accents of my grandmother, a Dombrowski from Lithuania, more indecipherable when I heard them spoken with Mrs. Andretchik when they visited in each other's homes.

The common tie between these two places were the trains. A small rural line connecting a few of the farm towns in West Central Ohio provided a daily freight service. I was lucky beyond belief. The railroad ran right beside my grandmother's house and I could stand in the vacant lot between her house and the tracks and see the trains so closely that the engineer quickly became a familiar face to me. He must have been a man who liked children, because each day as he passed slowly going south he would throw candies or lollipops to the two or three kids who stood by the line. Just across the road was a dairy where the train turned off on a spur to deliver equipment or pick up milk, and on one occasion the engineer brought us ice cream from the plant. Twice we were given rides with my father and aunt in the caboose down to Minster and back, a round trip of four miles, but an adventure that seemed a lifetime in duration to me. On one run back to New Bremen, they brought us into the cab of the locomotive, a steam engine that probably finished its active days on that country line that ran from Lima each day to Minster.

                                             Patrick (1931)

George Brose on the running board of

Josephine (note the Dodge Ram hood ornament)

                           Falbs' Cafe, 77 years later and still going strong.   Now I drink the beer.

COMMENTS FROM READERS

"Your aptitude in painting a picture has put me there, seeing the 4 year old George watching his dad knock off a beer or two, seeing you riding below the back window in a time when seat belts were unknown and marveling at the magnificence of trains, experiences my own sheltered childhood didn't allow.  Thank you for laying this out for us."  Roy

________________________________________________

Being raised in Christian Science, my childhood was deprived of experiencing coffee drinking, let alone the consumption of alcohol.  The first time I saw a beer being drunk was 1953 when, at the age of 14, I sat at the next table to that occupied by Hank Sauer, the 1952 National League most valuable player (led the league in HRs and RBI with 37 and 121) whose baseball card was in my collection.  Long story short, 10-12 years before my mother had been the private tutor to the children of the Wrigley family which owned the island of Catalina where the family lived Nov - March before returning to Chicago.  As Bill Wrigley owned the Chicago Cubs, the town of Avalon is where the team spent it's spring training.  Mom was reliving memories of living there and treating me to the joy of spring training.  All the players lived in the Avalon Hotel and ate in its dining room.  There was Sauer, the epitome of a man's man, eating a steak and drinking a beer, unconcerned that it's consumption would cause him to burn in hell forever.    Roy (again)

V 1 N. 27 Where Were You When President Kennedy Was Shot? November 22, 1963

 

Where Were You When President Kennedy Was Shot?

November  22, 1963

 

            To fellow readers and writers,  I sent out this query  November 22, 2024 on the 61^st anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.  The question was inspired by George Cummins a former member of the US Peace Corps who had contacted his Peace Corps group  Tanzania 5,  about their memories of that day.  So I followed up with a similar question to my former Peace Corps team Tanzania 10, who went to that country at the end of 1965,  already two years after the assassination.  We have travelled on many different paths since 1963 and we’ve been molded and shaped by many events in our lives.    I realize that you have to be about 71 years of age to  answer the question.   On the other end of that spectrum, at about 85 years, our memories though fading still have some indelible marks and interesting tales to tell.  Some only responded to say where they were on the map at the time, but others were  more willing to share memories, thoughts, and opinions.  Volunteers responding also represent Morocco and Sierra Leone, and Colombia.    One respondent  sent the front page story from their college newspaper (Bowling Green State) which I’ve attached at the end of this.  In checking out the papers of that date, I learned of another tragedy on that day that has been  long forgotten,  a nursing home fire in Norwalk,  Ohio where 63 residents died, many held in their beds by restraints.  It reminds me that these things are happening everyday somewhere on the planet.  In refugee camps, in The Congo, the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Israel, the Sudan, Mynamar,  Kurdistan, Syria, and many, many other places.  We become immune to terrible news in many instances, but the big events such as JFK,  9-11,  the Challenger, and a very few others tend to be those that link us to shock and sadness.   I hope that if you read some or all of these accounts you will be moved to a few moments of reflection and be able to show a good side of humanity to someone who  needs and deserves it,  maybe even to someone who doesn’t.  It may be one of the few paths on which people and nations can heal.    Thank you so much for sharing your stories. 

 

All names and identities have been removed from the accounts.  

 

George Brose

Vancouver Island, British Columbia

 

1.         Doing my college part-time  job - washing test tubes for the School of Applied Medicine

at UPenn with the radio on - shared the dreadful news with students in a nearby classroom.

 

Last night, I was washing up after some pre-Thanksgiving prep and realised it was 

that fateful day 22 November and had no one nearby to "remember".

2.         I was just leaving class at UC Berkeley and walking back to my apartment at Channing and Shattuck.  Soon after I got in the door, my sister called, and I remember her words, “What are we going to do now?”  She told me JFK had been shot and killed.

Like nearly everyone in the country I spent the next two weeks glued to the TV as the saga unfolded.

3.         I was in my final semester of college (I finished in the fall semester) at Alfred University.  Myers Hall had the chemistry department and modern languages, among other departments at that time.  I was walking out of the building to go to the student union when I saw an elderly lady, a faculty member from modern languages, sobbing while sitting on the steps to the second floor.  Between sobs she reported that President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Texas.  I was shocked and very sad, as one who saw Kennedy as “my President,” rather than the "national grandfather” as we saw Eisenhower in those days.  I was in mourning for quite some time after that, and actually visited the White House that winter.  Later I have visited the Kennedy grave site in Arlington National Cemetery several times.  The event remains seared in my memory, and later I was in the same hallway, then as a member of the faculty, when I learned of the Challenger explosion.  Those two memories will remain with me as long as I am alive.

4.         On JFK's assassination date I was a junior in school at U. of Oklahoma.  There were mixed feelings on campus about his death.  I heard one coaching staff member say, “Well, they shot Santa Claus in Dallas”.   I spent the afternoon at the student union watching the only color tv on campus.   One of our tennis players Paul Gregory knew Lee Harvey Oswald,  from his association with the Russian emigre community in Dallas.  He made the mistake of mentioning that and was picked up by some federal agency within hours for questioning.  

 

There have been lots of theories about the assassination.  One of the best I ever heard was by someone who spoke on campus a year or so later from the Bertrand Russell Foundation, but I can't remember his name or tell you what his theory was.  I do remember the hall was packed and he spoke for several hours.  No one left the room believing anything the Warren Commission had proposed after listening to the speaker.

 

5.         I distinctly remember when JFK was shot.  I was in a stall in the

 Michigan State University veterinary large-animal clinic holding a thermometer in the anus of a cow.  

A colleague student yelled down the hallway that "John Kennedy has been shot!!"

For some reason that I do not understand, my thought was that it was "John-John", the son. 

 I guess that my brain automatically shut off the enormity of it actually being the President.

What a horrendous and tragic loss to our country. 

 

6.         I was on my way home from Peace Corps assignment in India. Staying at a Youth hostel in West Berlin eating breakfast with some Americans. A German girl stood at our table and said President Kennedy was killed. We did not react.  Kept on talking and eating. She stood and said what is wrong with you Americans? Don’t you care about your president? She repeated that he was Killed. We really did not comprehend what she first said. We apologized her and realized what she said. Of course our lives were changed that day  

 

7.         When I got to Tanzania, with the Peace Corps ,I was sent to Mwanza by myself. Eventually they gave me a Danish volunteer as a roommate. His take on JFK's death was completely different than mine. After reading that famous (Warren) report our government published, I thought the "lone gun man theory" was correct-yes I was naive. He said that most Europeans thought the report was a coverup. He was shocked that Americans were so easily taken in. Do you think we'll ever know what happened?

8.       Northwestern University campus sitting in the library getting ready for afternoon seminar, suddenly hearing a low murmur of voices all around me in a space usually dead quiet in the morning.

 

9.       At St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England, for a concert (age 16).

 

10.     I was on my way home from Peace Corps assignment in India. Staying at a. Youth hostel in West Berlin eating breakfast with some Americans. A German girl stood at our table and said President Kennedy was killed. We did not react.Kept on talking and eating. She stood and said what is wrong with you Americans? Don’t you care about your president? She repeated that he was. Killed. We really did not comprehend what she first said. We apologized her and realized what she said. Of course our lives were changed that day  

11.       I was walking to class at the University of Arizona when I heard people talking about Kennedy being shot . I couldn’t believe this was true.  As  I was rushing to my dorm so I could watch the news, I heard someone say, “I wonder what this will do to Goldwater’s chances.”  I was shocked by the news and angry about the reaction I had heard. The world suddenly felt less safe and the partisan response made it much worse. Looking back, it was a preview of today’s world.

 

 

12.       We were both in our senior year in high school. I was in Detroit Michigan sitting at a desk in my classroom at Benedictine High School when there was an announcement over the overhead speaker. 

B. said all the classes were sent  back to their homerooms at Chaminade high in Dayton Ohio and an announcement was made over the speaker.  

Hard to believe - 61 years ago   

 

13.     I was in bed in my Bachelors' Offices Quarters (BOQ) room in Okinawa.  I heard it on the radio.  I was an ROTC lieutenant in the Military Police.

 

14.     I was still in my first few months in the Peace Corps in Casablanca, Morocco. My roommate and I were returning to our apartment late in the evening after a long day when one of our young neighbours stopped us on the street, saying, "Your president has been shot." My roommate & I looked at each other and asked, "What is he talking about?" The young man touched his chest  and said, "I am sorry,' before walking away. Neither of us understood what he meant. There were no computers, mobile phones, etc. at that time. We had no quick contacts from home. We left our apartment the next morning, giving no thought about what the kid told us, only to find a long line of our neighbors waiting to shake our hands to express their sorrow for us. We were totally stunned and bewildered, But we were given several newspapers confirming the current details. The rest of the day, at work and our other activities continued the like that. The memory of that day has stayed with me forever.

 

 

15.     Stanford University.

 

16.     I was in a class at college when someone ran through the halls telling each class what had happened.  Everyone immediately scattered back to their dorms.  The whole dorm spent the next few days clued to the TV in the living room.  Our campus had a small lake and when people took a break from the TV, they walked around that lake.  I had met Kennedy over a year before and intended to go into the Peace Corps.  It was hard to think that all that hope was gone.

 

 

17.      I was in my junior year at Washington & Lee in Lexington, VA. I believe I was playing handball about the time JFK was shot so was a little behind in hearing about it.

I don't recall any great sorrow, more just a numbness. I can't remember if I was a real fan of JFK. Although my dad was a a union man and described himself as a "yellow-dog" democrat I may have been partial to Nixon in 1960 since that was the choice of many friends and JFK was a Catholic and suspect to my Baptist faith.

I had just returned from a summer in East Africa where I worked in a Baptist Secondary School in Mombasa and also visited Zanibar for a few hours, Dar for a week where I had to preach in a "revival" and also climbed Kilimanjaro from the Marangu Hotel with a group of Brit school boys and two parents. (The mother parent and I were only ones to suceed in getting to Gilman's Point.)

That summer's experience was still being processed but had a definite liberalizing impact

In any event I was a dorm counselor in the freshman dorm that year and  one of my charges was a kid from Staunton, only about thirty miles away. He decided to get a car from his home and invited me to drive up to Washington for the funeral on Tuesday. It must  have been a three hour drive since I just checked Google maps and DC is 190 miles way  from Lexington.

We must have gotten there in early moring and proceeded to park the car and look for a place to see the procession from the Capitol to the Church. I don't remember exactly what we saw. It passed very quickly. I don't remember seeing anyone I recognized in the large group of family, but I do remember picking out Haile Selassi, Prince Philip and maybe Charles DeGaulle from the large group of world leaders who attended and walked. We left afterwards since attendees of the burial in Arlington Cemetary were taken there by car.

I gradually became much more political at W&L espousing Democratic leaders. Students at W&L were incredibly conservative at this time.  All men and all white, plus heavily fraternity. All worshiped Lee. It wasn't enough to be a member of the Young Republicans; there was also a Conservative Society. We liberals were vastly outnumbered but managed to hold on to the student newspaper and make voices heard. In the 1964 election the student body favored Goldwater by about 4 to 1 but faculty was 80% for Johnson. We liberals managed to keep Johnson posters up. Students were generally shocked by Johnson's massacre of Goldwater.  

I had an especially interesting experience at a Conservative Society lecture. A Vice-Counsul or something similar. from South Africa was invited to speak and he gave a glowing report on the South African apartheid goverment. During the question & answer period I asked him why Albert Luthuli, a Nobel Peace Prize winner was imprisoned on an off shore island without any hope of release. He said he was a criminal and besides we all knew from Martin Luther King's award that a Nobel Peace Prize meant nothing. Loud applause. 

Btw I was in Dar during my third year when word came that Robert Kennedy had been shot. A bunch of Americans gathered around a teletype machine in the Kilimanjaro Hotel late into the night until word came that he was dead. One of the persons there was an American black who was a sort of well known refugee from the USA. He was interesting to talk with. No memory of his name.

 

 

18.     I was a college student at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green Ohio.

I was shopping in downtown Bowling Green when the news hit and spread like wildfire.

Walter Cronkite reported that evening near tears. It was a shocking nightmare.

 

I saved the college newspaper, the B-G News when it next came out on Tuesday, Nov. 26, 1963 and have attached it. I hope you can read it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those not too exhausted,  here is the front page of the Norwalk Reflector Herald  in Ohio about that nursing home fire story.   Probably the only newspaper in the country with a headline above the assassination. 

 

 

 

 

 George,

I was walking across campus at Capital University when I heard he had been shot.  Later that night, several of my fraternity brothers and I decided to go to the funeral.  One of my frat brothers was Richard Nye whose father was Senator Gerald Nye.  Senator Nye took us over to the Capitol building and took us on a senator-only elevator up to the rotunda where his casket was.  The guards stopped the line that was hours long so we could go in and walk by the casket.  The next day we stood along the road and watched the parade to Arlington.

It was a very memorable experience.

Chuck H

 George,

I was in 9th Grade English Class at Campbell Hall in North Hollywood, California when I heard about President Kennedy's assassination.  Our English teacher, Mrs Senter, broke the news to us just as we were beginning class.  Most of us were speechless, although one of the girls broke down at the news.  As you might imagine, not much got done that afternoon.  After I got home and watched the news with my parents, I recall my dad observing how convenient it was for Lyndon Johnson, whom he disliked.

Campbell Hall was a private school connected with St. David's Episcopal Church, also in North Hollywood.  Alec Campbell, the church rector, and his brother Richard "Dick" Campbell, a banker, were the principal factors.  They were Canadians who had emigrated to the United States from British Columbia and had become US citizens.  Dick had served in the Canadian Army during World War II and was also the head scoutmaster for BSA Troop 139, attached to St. David's Parish.  He and I shared an interest in history, so we often had detailed discussions about the two world wars and British Empire history.  I began my athletic career in 8th Grade at Campbell Hall as a soccer halfback of modest ability.   My ball control was average but I had good endurance and a fair turn of speed.  In the spring of 1963 the school held an intramural track and field meet.  The track was a 220-yard oval chalked out on the school's athletic field.  I won the 600-yard run in 1:23.0 and the 440-yard dash in 57.5 and so discovered my athletic calling.  At the time, the 600-yard run was part of President Kennedy's national youth fitness program.  

Jim

 Nice

Ned

 

I was in grade 6 and while walking to school, I heard the news. Because people were so shocked, I knew that this was a really big deal. I can still remember the feeling in my stomach the news gave me.   Laurel