A law was made a distant moon ago there;
July and August cannot be too hot.
And there’s a legal limit to the snow there.
In Camelot.--Alan Jay Lerner
As a child, I really thought I lived in Camelot, that fanciful kingdom where people could live happily ever after, where even the weather defied cold reality.
But the devastating news of a winter day in 1963 would cause me to begin looking at the world more thoughtfully, without rose-colored glasses.
Fifty years have come and gone since the tragic day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but what happened that November 22, remains forever linked in my heart to the loss of innocence and beginnings of awareness I experienced when the snot-nosed teenager I was just happened to be standing near an AP teletype machine in the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper office, as the news of Kennedy’s death first hit the wires.
I was 15 years old. Like most of my peers, born in the late forties, I had escaped any first-person recollection of World War II. Even during the ensuing Korean conflict, I was too young to understand, let alone worry about, what it meant to be afraid of anything more threatening than the neighborhood bully.
That week, as a sophomore school girl chosen to represent Clearfield High School in a televised current events game show, I had studied headlines on tensions in the United States and Communist encroachment in Viet Nam with adolescent detachment. No one I knew had yet been drafted, and I was naively living in a bubble where life was filled with homework, high school drama, or fun and games.
From my carefree point of view, most people in the world were basically good, and, if you said your prayers and pledged allegiance to the flag, things would be all right. When newsmen used the word Camelot to describe the years of JFK’s sojourn in the White House, I believed.
And so it was I left school, along with five other students, on a blustery Friday in November, to appear on the Salt Lake Tribune-sponsored Inquiring Editor. We were to tape our segment for its broadcast the following Saturday morning, after which we had been promised a guided tour of the Tribune offices.
Of the actual taping, I remember little, except that I vainly worried that the wind had damaged my bouffant hairdo and that Newspaper Columnist Dan Valentine’s name was the answer to one of the game questions I missed.
Even the details of the news office tour have become as cloudy as the funnels of smoke wafting upwards from ashtrays dotting the desks of a few reporters who sat pecking away at their typewriters.
Besides an occasional telephone ring that muffled the drone of our guide’s voice, there wasn’t much going on.
“When something important happens, this office really comes to life,” I remember hearing him say, as I half-heartedly scanned the paper inching beneath rattling teletype keys. I think I yawned about then.
But standing next to me, so close I bumped his elbow, was a handsome boy named Bob who was actually paying attention. I remember being more interested in looking at him than in observing what was coming across the machine. Until I heard someone laugh--a high metallic kind of involuntary staccato. And then Bob’s face was twisting as he pointed to the line of type he had just finished reading. President Kennedy shot in Dallas, perhaps fatally...
Days later, Clearfield High School’s newspaper The Talon recorded what Bob felt, what we all felt, as we read those terrible words:
“I thought there was a mistake in the teletype--no, I thought the conductor of the tour was trying to pull a stunt to make us realize the importance of journalism. I read further and realized that there was no mistake in the report; I shuddered…”
There we had stood, six high school kids who, as the tour guide told us, were among the first people in the state of Utah to learn the tragic news--all of us sobbing.
During our long journey home from Salt Lake City, there was none of the light-hearted banter that had accompanied our trip into town that morning—no one joked about the force of the wind sand-blasting the station wagon we were riding in. No one said a word about the weather or anything else. We just sat there paralyzed with the grim realization that the little bubble of Camelot some of us had been living in had burst. We were so sad and so very afraid.
As we passed post offices, businesses, and schools, turbulent winds whipped home the cold reality of what we had just learned, every flag along the way unfurling at half-staff.
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| I was a snot-nosed high school girl! |
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| All the flags were at half-staff |
This column was edited, updated, and reprinted in the Standard Examiner on November, 22, 2013.
