JFK assassination left its imprint on a generation

Nov. 22—For Pat Conway, Nov. 22, 1963, was shaping up as a pretty good day.

School was out for the afternoon, so he made plans to play tennis with a neighbor at the Noyes Courts in St. Joseph.

"He opened up the screen door and says, 'Hold on a second. I don't think we're going to go right away because there's some news coming over the television about President Kennedy,'" said Conway, a junior at Christian Brothers at the time. "That was the beginning of a 48- or 72-hour period of time when you were seeking more and more information on what had happened."

Conway wasn't alone. Every generation has its seismic news event when everything changes and everyone remembers where they were when it happened. For those of a certain age, that event was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

Jim Summers was taking a history class at the University of Missouri-Columbia when the professor got on stage and said the president had been shot.

"It was just complete shock," said Summers, who went into the real-estate business in St. Joseph after receiving a history degree. "Everyone just left their blue books on the stage and left. I'll never forget it."

Both Summers and Conway recall a time when information was harder to get and people gathered around radios and televisions looking for news on what had happened in Dallas. Conway, who went into Democratic politics as a county clerk and a state representative, recalls the somber funeral footage and the shock of seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television.

"You didn't really know what to think," Conway said. "It was surreal. Even the commentators were really befuddled at what was really happening during this period of time."

One constant for a confused nation was Walter Cronkite, a St. Joseph native who was the anchor of CBS Evening News. It was Cronkite who broke the news to many Americans when he read a bulletin that the president was dead on the afternoon of Nov. 22.

Gary Chilcote, director of the Patee House Museum in St. Joseph, recalls talking to Cronkite about that moment after the broadcaster retired and visited his hometown.

"He took off his glasses and you could tell that he was trying to avoid breaking down," Chilcote said of Cronkite's memorable report. "But he was a professional and he did a good job with it."

Chilcote worked as a reporter for the St. Joseph Gazette on the day of the assassination. He recalls a judge crying and telling him that "we've lost our good Catholic president."

"In those days, most of the people elected to the courthouse were Democrats and they were in shock," Chilcote said.

Sixty years to the day, Conway said it's not a cliché to view the assassination of Kennedy as a turning point and a prelude to the turmoil of the 1960s

For Conway, who received a draft notice toward the end of the decade and spent a tour in Vietnam, something was lost on that day.

"To a certain extent, I think we just got to a point where we didn't know what to expect next," he said. "You saw all of these tragedies that popped up in your life, day after day."

Greg Kozol can be reached at greg.kozol@newspressnow.com. Follow him on Twitter: @NPNowKozol.