Health Editor’s Note: On my birthday, 55 years ago, we experienced the travesty of JFK’s assassination. What would have been a day of birthday celebration for me in 1963, turned into a horrible experience for our nation and for me. I do not remember poetry so much as watching events surrounding the day leading up to the assassination, the proclaimed death of JFK, and his funeral. My opinion is that if he had not been killed, we would be living in a far greater place. Another thing that has happened is that people do not forget my birthday because there is always a reminder of what day it was and what happened to our nation on that day..Carol
How Poetry Soothed a Nation in Mourning for John F. Kennedy
by Alice George/Smithsonian.com
On that unsettling day 55 years ago this month, the nation began a pageant of tears. President John F. Kennedy was dead of an assassin’s bullet.
Schoolchildren were stunned to see strict and intimidating teachers weeping in the hallways. A Greenwich, Connecticut, mail carrier reported meeting a long line of sobbing housewives as he made his way from house to house. People lined up in front of appliance store windows to watch the latest news on a row of televisions. Before the four-day weekend had ended, more than a million had taken an active role in saying farewell to the president, and millions more had formed an invisible community as television linked living room to living room and brought almost every American within a big tent infused with unsettling questions.
Dazed citizens struggled to regain their equilibrium. Within minutes after gunfire stopped echoing in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, this murder sent millions reeling, drawing them into a monumental event that would send a shock wave through the nation and create a commonwealth of grief.
In the wake of Kennedy’s death, many newspapers published poetry tied to that weekend. Subsequently, editors Erwin A. Glikes and Paul Schwaber solicited poems about the assassination.
Carol graduated from Riverside White Cross School of Nursing in Columbus, Ohio and received her diploma as a registered nurse. She attended Bowling Green State University where she received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History and Literature. She attended the University of Toledo, College of Nursing, and received a Master’s of Nursing Science Degree as an Educator.
She has traveled extensively, is a photographer, and writes on medical issues. Carol has three children RJ, Katherine, and Stephen – one daughter-in-law; Katie – two granddaughters; Isabella Marianna and Zoe Olivia – and one grandson, Alexander Paul. She also shares her life with her husband Gordon Duff, many cats, and two rescues.
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At the time of the assassination, I was 7 days of my 13th bd, my father used to interrupt the children’s radio programs in the week end, to listen to the BBC, this was 8am sat morning, I was so affected that I went around our very small community knocking on doors, and Im still lost till this day.
As John Barbour has said many times, the truth won’t set you free, only action will set you free.
I have JFK 63 personal plates on my car. Another thought, my son was born on June 8, (USS Liberty)
In a speech. JFK gave a strong warning of the dark forces who were making evil plans against the entire world and was taking steps to counter some of the demons and their allies. There are some who are still in denial over the events in Dallas although the mountains of overwhelming evidence point to one conclusion. The Kennedy family never had doubts about what had happened and John’s son, JFK Jr., was entering the political arena to right the wrong.
Best Birthday wishes to you Carol on this important day of remembrance. Appreciate the esoteric topics you share here. The Killing if a King “33”. “When the human race learns to read the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall before the eyes of men.”
VooDoo, Thanks!
For the POB It was imperative that he be done away with, but the effect of the act was beyond their wildest expectations. They had found a way to paralyze an entire country in hours. They never forgot, and the same effect worked on 911. I was in the church of a catholic school when the prinicpal (a nun) rushed into the back of the church saying the President had been shot. This was even worse than all the air-raid drills and the long lines of tanks and missle launchers I watched head south on US1 not so long earlier.
We were sent home early from Holy Trinity School, the Nuns were Crying. At home I was sent to the front yard to rake leaves and I remember Mom coming outside weeping to tell me that our President had died. I was seven years old. Camelot had died but I was too young to realize it. My eyes tear up writing this; it was important. We are not recovered. On your birthaday, best to you Carol, love your work.
Harry, Thank you. 🙂
I remember the day vividly as well, as an eighth grader in Catholic school in Boston. The news came over the PA system and we assembled in the chapel to pray for his recovery: and then the prayer turned into “may he rest in peace”, which still sends chills down my spine to remember.
I along with so many other locals had been overjoyed at his election – now, finally, “one of us” was going to straighten out this strangely contradictory WASP nation our ancestors had adopted as their own. But it was not to be.
There are questions, many questions, about what happened in Dallas that have simply not been adequately explained. The number of coincidences and unlikely explanations certainly falls within the realm of possibility, the same way that if you flip a coin often enough it will eventually come up heads a hundred times in a row, but in real experience they are infinitely improbable.
The stakes were enormously high in 1963 – control of the most powerful nation on earth, at a time when powerful hardliners within government passionately believed its survival was being imperiled by a young, inexperienced President. And the reality is that governmental change by political murder is the rule, not the exception, in the long sorry tale of human history.
For me the most moving lyric tribute to JFK is the Byrds’ song “He Was a Friend of Mine”, which was released two years after his death. Incidentally, Bertrand Russell and C.S. Lewis also died that same day.
Apha the Highlander, Thank you for the birthday wishes.
Quote from 2017 USA Today article:
“The Assassination Records Collection Act, passed in the wake of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded film JFK, required the release of all records of the assassination investigation by the 25th anniversary of the bill’s signing — Oct. 26, 2017 – unless the president decides there is a reason to withhold them. “Agencies who would like their information withheld for longer, need to file a formal appeal with the President,” the National Archives said on its website ahead of the release.” In other words all records will not be released. National Security is given as the “reason” for not fully releasing all records. Why is releasing them a risk to National Security? Just redacting a few words can totally alter the meaning of a sentence or phrase. So hiding some information can not lead to truth but even more confusion. This is wrong. It is time all records are released no matter whose Ox is gored. All Americans must demand the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from their government. Don’t we receive enough lies every day as it is?
Compared to the Kennedy murder and your birthday, this is rather insignificant, but 56 years ago on the day of the murder, William Clay Ford bought the Detroit Lions football team. For Lions fans this is considered a local disaster because since then the Lions have been the laughing stock of the NFL, winning only one playoff game in all that time.
Mike, Interesting….:)
How far the nation has fallen since he left us is almost unfathomable. Wish he was sitting in the White House right now
Happy Birthday, Carol Duff! I greatly enjoy and appreciate your contributions on a wide divergence of topics for consideration.
Edward, Thanks!
Very respected Man and a Head of the State, in my country. RIP.
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