The day was November 22. 1963. On the next Friday after my wreck, Perry Newton drove me to the salvage yard, and I exchanged the snow tires for my regular tires which had been stored in the basement. I had just bought snow tires for our new car, and I wanted to get them off before the car was sold for salvage. When we drove up to the salvage yard, the man who ran the place told us that President Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas. Both events were reminders of how fragile life can be.
There’s no way I can describe the emotional impact of that event. Of course it dominated the news for days. Then it seemed like things were spiraling out of control a few days later when we switched on the black and white television set that someone had given us upon arriving in New York. There we saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on national television. To this day people are still debating as to whether Oswald was a lone assassin, if he was the assassin at all, or if there was a conspiracy. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. The Kennedys like to compare their time in the White House as Camelot. Unfortunately Camelot came to an abrupt end, and with it came much of the innocence that we had known throughout our lives.
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