“Our Ugly Pink Radio”
I was 16 years old and lived in the Steel City of Gary, Indiana. It was your typical blue-collar city with the quintessential Midwest mentality. It was boring but I didn’t know that yet. Gary was a place where we accepted iceberg as the only kind of lettuce in our supermarket. Our “rebels with or without a cause” were not yet hippies but rather designated as hoodlums. This was my reality.
As a sophomore at Horace Mann High School, I was popular, but ever so naïve and insecure about my looks and my personality. I didn’t stand for anything. Living through the horrors of being a teenager was enough for me. Making sure that my angora sweater matched my sewn-down pleated skirt was clearly more important than any world events. Having Jim Fulton notice me was my greatest world ambition. You could say that banality formed my life so that when I heard about the Kennedy assassination, it certainly didn’t have the effect of being a threat to my world order. I didn’t lament that society had gone wrong. My naiveté and teenage life didn’t allow me to reflect for a moment on the world we lived in. But what I knew was that I was shaken, and I was saddened beyond anything I had yet to know in my young life.
Whenever I take myself back to that day, the first image that appears in my mind screen is something bizarre about that time in history. An intense déjà vu jumps to our ugly 50’s style pink radio in the kitchen on the Formica counter. I remember frantically tuning the dial back and forth searching through static for news. “Is it true what I heard in school? Why can’t I find a news station? It can’t be true what they are saying in school.”
“Did you hear?” everyone buzzed, as we wandered the halls to our lockers. “I heard that President Kennedy was shot.” “No way?” said my friend, Margaret. We were all thinking, “No way”. I raced home the six blocks from school for lunch, I was hoping and praying that this wasn’t true.
Tragically, the rumor I heard at school that day was confirmed while listening to that ugly pink radio. “President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas today while his motorcade was making its way toward Dealey Plaza….” “He was rushed to Parkland hospital where they are reporting that he is dead.” Recalling that moment, my reality was shattered.
God, I was devastated. My mind couldn’t digest why anyone would want to kill President John Kennedy. Nothing in my young life had yet to rock my reality like this violent act of shooting my President. I suppose I was not aware of it at the time, but President Kennedy’s election was the seed of my coming of age politically. His campaign was the first that I was truly aware of and followed with an intensity that was a new phenomenon for me.
He, his wife and family were so young and full of life and promise. When he spoke, his accent, his elegance and charisma captured my attention. I just wanted to listen to his every word. Everyone was referring to him as “Camelot”. For me, he had become my “rock idol”. He was my “movie star”.
After the assassination, I was thinking, “Must I look and listen to this new President?” President Lyndon Baines Johnson…I didn’t even like the sound of his name. He was a complete antithesis of JFK. I wanted to embrace Camelot for as long as I could. But he was gone. Now what I saw was this tall, lanky, ugly Texan who spoke with a drawl…. yuck.
The helplessness I felt at the time of Kennedy’s death could only be occupied by absorbing as much televised news as I could take in a 24-hour day. My family seemed to stop functioning. Our house had a blanket of darkness hanging over it or so it seemed. My parents didn’t go to work. There was no school for me. Mealtimes were Swanson’s frozen dinners on TV tables, with our sad eyes glued to the TV. Watching the news unfold was so shattering and unbelievable that none of us could even speak for long periods of time. We sobbed watching Jacqueline, draped in black, kneeling in front of her husband’s casket in the Capitol rotunda. We wept watching little John-John salute his father’s passing.
Never in my young life had I felt such sadness and grief for someone I didn’t really know. That sadness continued for years to come. It will be felt again and again when Robert Kennedy died, when Jacqueline latter died and again when JFK, Jr. was tragically killed in an airplane accident. So much promise, never to be seen or fulfilled.
Upon reflection of those days, what has endured is a lingering mix of heartbreak, and nostalgia. Even now, as I write this, my heart is full, and my eyes have a little mist. Time has brought forward a lot of unflattering information about JFK, and yet, for me, only the larger than life images have remained in my mind and heart. The images of Camelot and the Kennedy mystique have endured. He was a new kind of President. I think that was because he was the metaphor for my youth and the future of my generation of baby-boomers.
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