EP 7 November 1963
Manage episode 326018853 series 3321570
Of course, it was a cold Friday night; it was November in Chillicothe. The town where we knew almost everybody in town.
I and a couple of friends were walking … heading north on Sixth Street. The street was silent. The town was silent. This was a night we were supposed to be dancing at the Sugar Shack. The music was supposed to be blaring … I was to be rejoicing and celebrating our youthful age.
Since graduating from high school the past May, I had landed a great job at Caterpillar Tractor Company in Peoria, Illinois and I was working the third shift … the overnight shift. However, on this cold Friday night, Caterpillar had shut down for the weekend. That was really an anomaly.
But earlier that day, I had been sleeping in my upstairs bedroom when I heard a strange voice call out to me. It was my eighty-seven-year-old Grandmother. She had lived with our family for several years as she and my grandfather had grown older and weren’t able to keep their house. She was always a great encouragement to me. Relaying those great stories how she had lived from the ‘horse and buggy’ to seeing rockets heading for the moon.
“Lawrence,” she cried out. “I think you need to turn the TV on,’ she said. Now this was strange. Why would she be trying to wake me at 1:30 in the early afternoon? Didn’t she know I needed my sleep to work the overnight shift?
“Lawrence, the President has been shot!” That got my attention. Even back then I was a News Junkie. I clamored out of bed and turned to my trusted news source CBS NEWS. It was 1:35 PM Central Time and Walter Cronkite took off his black horn-rimmed glasses and delivered that cold chilling News FLASH to the world. “From Dallas, Texas … the Flash … it’s apparently official President Kennedy died at One PM Standard Central Time.”
That Eerie and Bitter Cold November Friday night of 1963 still lingers with me as we walked north on Sixth Street in Chillicothe.
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