JFK

You might have heard that Saturday was the anniversary of JFK assassination. I grew up in Dallas. I moved there with my family in 1972, nine years after the fact. Dallas was in the process of undergoing explosive growth and my family was only one of the thousands that were deluging the area with new people. New people who weren’t there then and were too busy to think about what happened less then a decade before. It was a city on the move, Growing and growing and building literally before your eyes. The crain was the official city bird for many years.

I have no memory of field trips to the Kennedy Memorial as a child; Old City Park, trips to museums at Fair Park. If we went by it, we went by it quickly – “And on our right is thekennedymemorial, Okay, over that way is Thanksgiving Square, isn't it pretty? It must have been pointed out to us but I don’t think they sent a lot of school kids to check it out. The school book depository, Deally Plaza, the Triple Underpass and Love field were just there. When I was really little Love Field, for a time was not even an airport. It had a skating rink.

Somewhere along the line I knew roughly when the assassination happened. I thought it was sometime around Thanksgiving or on Thanksgiving or something like that. We didn’t go downtown often or ever. No reason to go there what with all that construction, it was a nightmare. It was only after college when I had a job downtown that I first started to think about the Assassination. I think it was also due in part to the opening of the school book depository building as a museum to the assassination. It was there for a number of years before I had a chance to go. It is extremely moving, people were crying, I was crying, and for the most part the museum is just pictures. Pictures of people from all over the world mourning our president. You can look out the window and see how easy it was.


The Dallas city fathers did a dance of joy when Dallas went on the air. Now, for the first time in decades when people asked about Dallas “Hey, isn’t that where JFK was Killed?”, they asked “Hey, isn’t that where J.R. lives?”. Yes! Yes it Is!

I was working at a theatre near downtown and we had many actors from out of state. That year was on of the big anniversaries, The 30th maybe? And there were made for TV movies being aired and reporters in town and more crazies then usual down at the triple underpass with their metal detectors and the drum beat was everywhere. The actors wanted to see it. They wanted to know where it was. They were in Dallas damn it and they wanted to go where it happened. I didn’t have to take them. I didn’t want to hear about it, I didn’t want to talk about it, I wanted it to go away. Why now? Why with all these people in town did they have to be making such a big deal about it? It was embarrassing. “Why yes, welcome to Dallas, The City that Hates! Glad to See you!”.

I lived there for at that point, 20 years and never heard a word about it. It was in the past. Dallas does not do the past. It builds, it is about the future. What happened in the past is finished, it isn’t about The Now. We didn’t talk about it.

True, I was very young, but. Here I was the next generation and I was learn about it like it happened somewhere else in another time to other people.