The Assassination of John F. Kennedy – Sixty Years On

A Brief Remembrance by Doug Draper, reporter/publisher, Niagara At Large

Posted November 21st, 2023

“I am sure that almost everyone will always remember where they were when they heard the news,” said one American broadcaster at the time.

The when was Friday, November 22^nd, 1963 and the news was the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

As for the where, I was a 12-year-old kid living in the west end of Welland, Ontario and was just becoming politically aware enough to know who the then-Prime Minister of Canada and then U.S. President were.

It was a crisp, sunny Friday afternoon and my fellow classmates and I had just come back back from lunch and taken our seats at Fitch Street Elementary School when the school’s Vice Principal and gym teacher came to the door. Although he was a pretty tough guy, his eyes were wet and his voice was shaking when he told us; “President Kennedy has been shot and killed. The school day is over and we want you to go home.”

As unbelievable as it may seem now with so much recent turbulence between the leaders of our two countries , many everday Canadians outside of government, including this one, embraced Kennedy and all of the dynamo around him as if he was our own.

So I went home from school that day and the mourning in my home and in homes across the country began. Outside the windows of our home, and for the next three days, there was hardly a person on the street.

For the first time in the then relatively short history of television, there was around the clock live coverage of Kennedy’s casket loaded on Air Force One for the flight back to Washington, D.C., of a new president being sworn in as Kennedy’s widow (Jackie as so many called her) stood by in her blood-stained pink suit, and of the funeral. We even witnessed the shooting of Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald as it was taking place – the first time a homicide was taking place on live TV.

To this day, there are still many who wonder if Oswald acted alone or there was a second shooter at Dallas’s Dealey Plaza that day. Some of the evidence collected in the wake of the assassination remains under lock and key and we may never know.

But for people who were alive and old enough to be politically aware at the time, it certainly was one of those times when most of us will never forget where we were when we heard the news.

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

A few years after the assassination, a folk rock group called The Byrds recorded a song about it. You can click on the screen below to hear it-

To read a related story, click on – John F. Kennedy’s turbulent relationship with Canada – Macleans.ca

I you are old enough to have been around in 1963, where were you when you heard the news about the assassination of JFK?

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