Sixty years gone: Bakersfield remembers the assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Nov. 22—The 11-year-old student at Our Lady of Guadalupe School had never seen a nun cry.

It was late Friday morning, Nov. 22, 1963, and young Armando Soliz watched as Sister Mary Paul began weeping in front of her sixth-grade class after learning that President John F. Kennedy had been shot by an assassin in Dallas.

The east Bakersfield boy was dumbstruck.

"The nuns were normally stoic, professional, calm," he remembered Wednesday, on the 60th anniversary of the murder of America's commander in chief.

Later, the entire student body gathered in the church that still stands adjacent to the Catholic school. When the announcement came that Kennedy was dead, all the nuns in their black and white habits were in tears, including School Principal Sister Mary Timothia.

"The priest, I can't remember his name, sat on the steps, placed his face in his hands and wept.

"That day has affected my entire life," said Soliz, a U.S. Air Force veteran, now 71 and retired.

A lifetime of years have passed since that shocking, unbelievable news tore open a hole in the soul of the nation.

Millions of Americans still remember exactly where they were when they heard the news, and many watched the national television coverage in shocked silence in the days that followed.

Bakersfield residents like Mike McCoy and his parents were no different.

"I was walking out of the playground at Highland Elementary after school," McCoy remembered of that day.

He was only 8 years old, a third-grader.

"A kindergartner told me 'Kennedy's been shot,'" McCoy remembered. "That 5-year-old was Erik Warnock, now known as the 99 Cent Comedian."

When he got home, his mother was sobbing.

"I carved the date in the seat of a new dining room chair with a pen knife," recalled McCoy, now 68 and the executive director of the Kern County Museum.

"When we sold the dining room set at my folks' estate sale, you could still read the date," he said. "It was an absolutely awful time. I have since visited the grave at Arlington and the site in Dallas. I have also visited the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis where MLK Jr. was assassinated.

"Tragedies on a transcendent scale," he said.

Like so many who remember those dark times, Bakersfield resident Marcia Hirst was still a child when the images of those days in 1963 were etched in her memory.

On Wednesday, the former freelance reporter and contract copywriter posted her thoughts on Facebook. They were short, concise and to the point.

"November 22, 1963. Sixty years ago today," she wrote, "I learned a new word, assassination. And my innocent, 10-year-old world view was shattered."

Others on her page also shared their memories. An emerging theme seemed to be the loss of innocence, not only experienced by Americans like Hirst, but by the nation itself.

Longtime Bakersfield trial attorney Randall Dickow was entering adulthood when Lee Harvey Oswald fired his rifle that day in Dallas.

"I was 18 and had been here in Bakersfield exactly one year to the day," Dickow recalled.

"I was washing my car when the news broke on the radio," he said. "I don't know if it changed me, but I know I was upset for a number of days."

Stephen Montgomery was also 18 on that fateful day, which had earlier seemed like "a most ordinary day," Montgomery said in an email.

"I was in history class in a lecture auditorium in Warren Hall at Bakersfield High. Our teacher was Mr. Sid Sheffield," remembered Montgomery, who would later become a railroad man, and later still a local historian.

Because the class at BHS was quite large, a proctor came in and took roll, then left.

A while later, the proctor came back in and whispered something to Sheffield, who turned and announced to the class that the president had been shot.

"He had been lecturing on 18th century American history, but now started discussing the constitutional succession of power when the president dies or is disabled," Montgomery said.

"A while later the proctor returned and whispered something to Mr. Sheffield, who now appeared visibly shaken as he announced to the class that the president had died."

Montgomery said the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and others have left him with "a special sense of anger and disgust" for those who use a gun to make political decisions for him and other Americans, "and I detest the perps who insult civilization and the constitutional rule of law by acts of violence."

Reporter Steven Mayer can be reached at 661-395-7353.