The Curmudgeon's Corner

November 22 is a Special Day For Me

My dad was born on November 22, 1908. He would have been 97 today. He was a special guy. He did a little of everything at some time in his life. Farmer, cowboy, miner, sawmill worker, Fuller Brush man, car salesman -- and many other things, all honest, to support his family. Nearly 20 years after his death, I still miss him.

Then there was that fateful November 22, 1963. The times, they were a-changin’ in the ‘60s. We had a young president with new ideas and vitality. He faced down the Russians off the shores of Cuba. He started Peace Corps, pushed a civil rights agenda, kicked the space race into high gear – who knows what he might have accomplished had his life not been cut short at age 46 by an assassin’s bullets. Like everybody of my generation, I remember well where I was on November 22, 1963. It was my dad’s 55th birthday. I had just finished lunch and had walked into the men’s locker room in the gymnasium at Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Washington. A guy named Paul Garrett asked if I had heard that President Kennedy had been shot. I hadn’t, and considered the idea preposterous – out of the question. A few minutes later, the instructor for the basketball class I was suiting up for, Stan Poppe, came into the locker room with the bad news. President Kennedy had died from gunshot wounds. All classes were cancelled until further notice.

I went to the college lounge where just about all of the students had gathered, watching the news come in over a black and white television. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went and got a haircut. For the next week or so, it was like the whole country had come to a standstill. My mom was watching TV when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. I was just getting out of bed, and I heard her yell that someone had just shot Oswald. I suppose the debate about whether Oswald acted alone, or there was some conspiracy involving others (Fidel Castro? J. Edgar Hoover? The CIA? Organized crime? The Easter Bunny?) will rage on for many more years to come.