
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, November 22, 1993                   TAG: 9311230400
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE DAY JFK DIED

ON NOV. 22, 1963, I had been 13 years old for 10 days. For my 13th birthday celebration, which I'd been allowed to design myself according to what I then considered the demands of highest sophistication, my whole family had dined at the Oasis Restaurant before attending an evening show of ``Breakfast at Tiffany's.''

I wore a small-waisted, wide-skirted dress, real stockings, and a black pillbox hat. I must have looked absurd.

Now, I view that ardent woman-child with an aching sympathy. In addition to my pillbox hat, I owned, at the time, my first tube of lipstick, my first (quite unnecessary) bra, and a cherished book bag printed with a map of the world. I was, like every 13-year-old, ripe, raw, thoroughly ignorant, and completely sure of the rightness of my opinions.

My principal opinion at that time being: God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.

At my school, the announcement of President Kennedy's assassination was withheld until the end of the day. We'd put on our wraps and were waiting for the final bell when our principal came on the loudspeaker.

I can't remember her exact words, but they knocked me down. Stunned, I sat down in my desk. Hard. Everyone else in the room disappeared for me. When the bell finally rang, and it seemed to take a year to do so, I fled the school in such a blind rage that I slammed the building's heavy outside door against the brick. I might have broken it.

I've wondered since if our teachers had to teach that entire afternoon with the weight of knowledge pressing on their chests; if they sought to protect the children for just a few more hours. The next days were, for me as for everyone else, a blur of bathetic, incredible black-and-white TV images.

Years later, I attended a professional conference in Dallas. An old newspaperman in our group proposed a pilgrimage downtown to see the square and the book depository. Why not? I thought. I may never be here again. But I went with vague, limp curiosity. I wasn't really a great admirer of Kennedy's. And anyway, in the meantime, we'd had other assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, the murders at Kent State.

On the way downtown we each told our story. I don't remember anyone else's. I doubt they remember mine. But once there, a silence fell upon us. We sat stunned, or reverent, or bored for a long minute. Then suddenly, unaccountably, I found myself tearfully telling those strangers that my whole life had changed on Nov. 22, 1963.

``What do you mean?'' the grumpy old newspaperman asked.

``What could you trust after that?'' I said. ``Nothing. The whole world blown to hell.''

Well, people will say anything to gain cache in such groups, especially young people unsure of their standing. I don't know if I meant what I said then. I don't even know if I knew what I said.

Now, though, I remember my words and I think they're true: an ardent 13-year-old would have been, indeed was, shattered by her first terrible revelation that all's not right with the world. An ardent 13-year-old would have been enraged by her own powerlessness when faced with the world's wicked ways.

Sooner or later something would have taught me this. It's a necessary lesson and examples abound. However this lesson comes, though, it shapes its pupil. So, shaped as I've been, I'm continually appalled by irrational greed, abuse or power, random violence, political scandal; but I'm never surprised by it. Indeed, I expect it.

And I was hardly the only 13-year-old in class Nov. 22, 1963.

\ Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by CNB