November 22, 1963

Until we heard the news, the day Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed US President John F. Kennedy in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, was just like any other day at Patterson Collegiate Institute at Goyeau Ave. and Elliot St. E. in Windsor, Ontario.

I was in Grade 10 in the Fall of 1963. Our class had gym (Phys Ed) after lunch period that day. The boys were playing flag football in the yard behind the school. Our teacher, Mr. Dawson, came out in the middle of the period and waved us all over to him. The boys gathered around. Mr. Dawson was a large man, certainly an athlete when he was younger but now wider at the waistline. His hair was going grey. Mr. Dawson didn’t anger when the guys fooled around, so normally there would be some shenanigans but this time the serious expression on Mr. Dawson’s face caused us all to pay attention. He didn’t preface the news, but just said it straight out.

“The President of the United States has been shot,” he said. “I want you to all go inside, change and go straight home.” Everyone did. There was little discussion. I ran home alone as fast as I could.

Looking north in our school’s neighbourhood, we could see the skyscrapers of Detroit. We knew that the United States and Russia were at odds in the cold war. The Cuban Missile Crisis had had us all worried about war just one year previous. We knew the factories of Detroit would be a main target of Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. I thought those missiles might be in the air and on their way. I thought that my city could be wiped out that day, perhaps that hour, my friends, my parents, my brothers and sisters, my dog, my neighbours, everybody.

I rushed home. My mom was watching the TV, where regular programming had been pre-empted for reports about the hunt for the killer, watching the news footage of the motorcade and the shooting, Jackie reacting, reaching for something that we later learned was a piece of the president’s head, Governor Connolly of Texas also getting shot, the secret service people running from their car and throwing their bodies over the president and his wife, Jackie, shots of the building where the shooter was believed to have been, the report from the hospital. The newscasters were all very upset.

I thought about my grandparents who had recently moved to Windsor from the boonies way up in Waubaushene where they might have been safe from the missiles and atomic bombs but were likely to die with us here. I was thinking, “If the bombs do not get us, we will die slowly from the fallout. Where would we go? Who would be contact? How would we contact them?”

This is why my generation remembers where they were on November 22, 1963. It was a day we thought there was going to be a war and a lot of people were going to die.