Today marks 61 years since President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Every year on this day I go back and read old news accounts of the assassination, and I watch Walter Cronkite's coverage of the event, including his emotional confirmation that the President had died.
It would be six more years before I was even born, so I of course did not experience JFK's death firsthand. But I've heard enough about it from my parents and siblings to get a sense of just how shocked the nation really was.
My brother Mark tells a story of having to play outside by himself later that week because so many families were keeping their kids inside, apparently as part of some unspoken, quiet and respectful mourning process.
Talk to any American who was a child on Friday, November 22, 1963, and they will likely have a story of being in school when the news broke. For many, it was the first and only time they saw their teachers show emotion, let alone cry.
The only point of reference I have as a Gen Xer is September 11, 2001, though I wasn't in school at the time but rather a 31-year-old father of four toiling away at my job in marketing communications at the Cleveland Clinic Children's Hospital for Rehabilitation.
One of the nurses came running down the hall past our office that morning saying, "They bombed the Pentagon!" While that wasn't strictly true, it did get my co-worker Heidi and I to turn on the TV to find out what had happened.
The first of the two World Trade Center towers had already come down, and we watched live as the second one fell, shockingly and unexpectedly.
Then we heard about the plane crashing into the Pentagon. That was quickly followed by rumors that another hijacked plane was flying near or above Cleveland, prompting the Clinic to shut down and send us all home.
That night our family attended a prayer service at church, then we waited in a long line at a Shell gas station amid speculation that the price of gas was going to spike above $5.00 the next day (it never did).
The parallels between JFK's assassination and 9/11 are somewhat obvious. In both cases, if felt like the world had changed forever.
But I get the sense that JFK's death was a bigger collective shock. Kennedy's election had brought a fresh new spirit to the United States. The aura of "Camelot" made him and his family objects of adulation by millions.
There hadn't been a presidential assassination in 62 years, since William McKinley was gunned down in Buffalo in 1901. There was no template for people on how they should react, how they should mourn, how they should speak.
Not that 9/11 wasn't horrifyingly unique in its own right. But we had been dealing with lower-level terrorist attacks for many years, both inside and outside of our borders. It was horrible, but it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility.
Not that it matters either way. Both events are seared into the brains of those who experienced them, and few will ever forget where they were and what they were doing when they got the news.
It's not the kind of thing you ever want to carry with you, but if you were there, there's simply no getting around it.
