Anchor Struck

Fifty years ago today I was waiting for my first afternoon class to start at Fair Park High School in Shreveport, Louisiana.  A classmate hurried in, laughing and saying “they got that sonofabitch in Dallas”.  Fair Park was all-white then, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was widely hated there for advocating civil rights for black people.  That’s how the first Day of Days in my life started.

The historical significance of this tragedy soon sank into my 17-year-old brain.  I sought out my girlfriend and told her that I was going to the Shreveport Times, the city’s morning daily.  I worked there as a copy boy.  I knew that’s where all the action would be.  I’ll never forget walking into the newsroom, a hive of humans buzzing as they bustled around.  The room with the teletype machines was full of reporters and editors tearing off stories as soon as they ended transmitting.  I was standing near one of the machines when it simply spat out “President Kennedy has died.”

I knew to stay out of the way, observing the journalists I aspired to be like.  One of them, upon reading that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested, exclaimed “I bet he has his John Birch Society card on him!”

I left the newsroom about 5 p.m.  My girlfriend and I had a date to see McClintock!, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.  I don’t remember a single scene of it.  I was too distracted.  As we left the downtown theater, we saw several newsboys.  They were actually yelling “Extra!  Extra!  Read All About It!”  That’s the only time I’ve ever seen that, other than in the movies.

It happened on a Friday.  I watched TV all weekend and, like the rest of the nation, was stunned when Jack Ruby killed Oswald.  I also vividly recall JFK’s three-year-old son saluting his father’s coffin as it rolled through the streets of D.C.

About five months later my friend Dennis and I drove to Dallas during Easter break.  Armed only with a Super-8 camera, we wanted to film a documentary about the assassination.  We had no budget, so we spent one night in the concourse of Love Field, the airport Kennedy had flown into.  When we went to the boarding house where Oswald had lived, the landlady said we’d have to pay $20 to film his room.  We ended production at that point and spent our last night in a Fort Worth bar called The Cellar.  Whenever the house band played “One Mint Julep”, one of the waitresses would strip.

The next day, fighting off a head-cleaving hangover, I could only stare at my breakfast as my fried eggs stared back at me.  I was way too naïve to realize that I was starting to collect my stories, tales that would endure for half a century.