'It was stunningly sad.' Oklahomans remember John F. Kennedy on 60th anniversary of his assassination
Oklahoma City attorney and author Bob Burke was 15 years old, hanging out at the local drugstore with friends on a Friday because school was closed for a teachers’ meeting.
That’s where he heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.
“The pharmacist D.L. Hewitt always had the radio on back in the area where he filled prescriptions and he ran yelling out of there, ‘President Kennedy has been shot! President Kennedy has been shot!’
“Everybody huddled around the radio back in the back of the drugstore, and we listened to everything on the radio for about an hour. Mr. Hewitt was so shaken that he closed the store.”
Other stores in the small southeastern Oklahoma town of Broken Bow also closed after the news broke, Burke said.
“Everything shut down,” Burke said. “The town was devastated.”
It has been 60 years since Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullets on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. Like most Americans, Oklahomans who are old enough to remember that day do so like it was yesterday.
OKC felt like a ‘funeral service’ after JFK assassination
William G. Paul, who would later serve terms as president of the Oklahoma Bar Association and American Bar Association, was a 32-year-old attorney in Oklahoma City having lunch at The Petroleum Club when it was announced the president had been shot.
The rest of the day in Oklahoma City felt like “a national funeral service,” he said. “It was very somber. It’s all people did talk about for two or three days.
“I thought Jack Kennedy was a fine president, and I admired him. It was a big loss for the country. A terrible loss.”
Kennedy’s funeral was held on Monday. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, declared a day of mourning. All state and city offices were closed. Schools and universities closed for part if not all of that day. A memorial service was held at Oklahoma City University.
Many churches held memorial services. The Oklahoman reported that workers began to string Christmas lights on Main Street on the day of Kennedy’s funeral, “but it was not a festive scene… Doors were closed on Main Street and throughout the city.”
For former AG Drew Edmondson, JFK's assassination was like losing a president and friend
Former Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson was a senior at Muskogee High School when the principal announced over the intercom the news about the shooting of the president.
At the time, Edmondson’s father, Ed, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. His uncle, J. Howard, was a U.S. senator filling out the rest of Sen. Robert S. Kerr’s term and the former governor of Oklahoma.
A young Drew Edmondson immediately left the classroom and went to the principal’s office to telephone his mother to see if she was aware of the news.
“When I got her on the phone, she was already crying,” he said. “What I remember vividly, because it was not like me, I just went out and got in my car and drove home. I didn’t cut school very much but I did on that occasion.”
Edmondson’s family had not just lost their president, but a colleague and a friend.
Even though Kennedy was gone, Johnson was able to carry out much of Kennedy’s vision for America, Edmondson said.
“A lot got accomplished in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination that probably would not have happened had he lived,” he said. “Johnson was a master politician and Kennedy had all the charisma in the world, but he was not a child of Congress like Johnson was.”
Former Gov. Frank Keating a witness to history in days after JFK assassination
Former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating was a 19-year-old student at Georgetown University in November 1963. He was an eyewitness to some of the most indelible images in U.S. history after Kennedy's body was returned to Washington, D.C., for a funeral and burial.
Keating and friends from Georgetown paid their respects that Sunday as Kennedy’s flag-draped casket lay in state at the Capitol rotunda.
The next day, he was one of an estimated 1 million people who lined up on the funeral procession route, watching as world leaders such as French President Charles de Gaulle and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie followed the Kennedy family in the march from the Capitol to Arlington National Cemetery.
Keating followed the procession, and then the next day went to the cemetery to see Kennedy’s grave guarded by soldiers.
“We saw it all,” Keating said. “It was stunningly sad.”
More: JFK remembered in photos
Several weeks later, Keating and a friend were walking to a bar in Georgetown when they noticed Robert Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy heading toward them, engaged in an earnest conversation.
“They were walking by themselves,” Keating said. “We stepped out of the way. We didn’t say a word, but it was shortly after she became a widow. It was so very, very sad. Today, you would never see that. There would be too many concerns for personal safety.”
Former Oklahoma Gov. George Nigh, 96, saw firsthand that the Kennedy assassination was not just an American tragedy, but a world tragedy.
He learned the news from a cab driver in Tel Aviv, Israel, where he had traveled to attend an international meeting of Junior Chamber International, also known as the Jaycees. Nigh, before he was the governor, attended to formally invite the Jaycees to their 1964 convention in Oklahoma City.
More: Flashback: Remembering John F. Kennedy's legacy nearly 60 years after his assassination
At the hotel in Tel Aviv, he pulled the Jaycees from the United States aside and shared the news that Kennedy had been slain. Soon after, all the Jaycees from 70 different countries knew what had happened.
“People from all over the world were crying,” Nigh said.
A few days later, Nigh went to Paris where the downtown sidewalks were covered with chalk-written messages of condolences.
“I was told that happened all over the world,” he said.
One of JFK's Oklahoma appearances was at the OU-Army game
U.S. District Judge Tim Leonard, of Oklahoma City, was a sophomore track athlete at the University of Oklahoma in 1959 when he sold football game programs to earn money.
Army visited Norman that fall to play the Sooners, and Leonard was astonished when then Sen. John F. Kennedy, from Massachusetts, walked into the stadium and asked him for a game program.
Kennedy apparently had been invited to Oklahoma by Gov. J. Howard Edmondson, a staunch Kennedy supporter, to attend the game and campaign, Leonard said.
“He visited awhile,“ Leonard said. “He wanted to know what I was doing in school and where I was from. And he wanted to know how I thought he would do in Oklahoma (in the presidential election), particularly among the students. He was friendly and down to earth and couldn’t have been nicer.”
Richard Nixon carried Oklahoma in the 1960 presidential election, but Kennedy won the presidency.
Four years later, Leonard was an OU law school student when Kennedy was assassinated. Campuswide, students seemed numbed by the event, he said.
“Nothing had happened like that in our lifetime,” he said.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahomans remember JFK after assassination 60 years ago
