To the best of my recollection, the year was 1959. I was only 2. When I try to think back to my earliest memory, it always starts there: I see my mother ironing and my grandmother walking into our apartment to watch my older brother and me so my mother could go off to her job in Downtown Rochester, New York. My grandmother, we called her Gammy affectionately, had taken the bus to get to our apartment. She was a champion bus rider. She knew all about tokens and transfers and the various lines.
The Today Show was on our small black-and-white TV. I recall seeing these two old white-haired balding guys on the news a lot. They looked so similar to me, and I often confused them, but one was slender, and the other shorter and kind of heavy. I knew one was the good guy and the fat one was the bad guy: Eisenhower and Khrushchev it turns out. Whenever the heavier one was on TV I could somehow sense my mother getting nervous and that made me sad, hence how I sensed he was the bad guy. As I got several years older I would look back on those mornings and understand why Krushchev made her so nervous.
Our apartment was tiny. It was a part of what was called The Rochester Plan. It was built in 1947 and was considered a model for other cities by the Federal Housing Administration. It was considered a post-WWII housing solution for veterans and their families. It was the embodiment of “the principles of the Garden City Movement of the early 20thCentury, where small two-story apartment buildings were arranged in small clusters in landscaped settings, providing private entrances for individual apartments, pedestrian walkways that were separate from vehicular roads, and green space for recreational activities.”
Our apartment was what my parents could afford. My father, just out of the Air Force honorably discharged as an enlisted man serving stateside during the Korean War, was a mailman. It was a job in later years he told me, that he loved more than any other. My mother was a legal secretary, a position that she attained after working as a civilian Judge Advocate General (JAG) secretary for the Air Force at Sampson Air Force Base in Geneva, New York, during the Korean War. She had met my father through a friend who was dating one of my dad’s friends from back in Kentucky, who had also enlisted in the Air Force and was also stationed at Sampson. My brother was born in the base hospital. The apartment was just a two-bedroom with a small living room, a galley kitchen, a bathroom with a tub (no shower) with one sink, and two small bedrooms. Our parents were on the side of the building facing West, while my brother and I shared the bedroom across the narrow hallway. We didn’t realize of course as little kids that we were a working-class family. We assumed everyone was like us. We didn’t know much about the world yet.
One day in 1963 the moving truck showed up and started carting all of our furniture and belongings out of the apartment. It was exciting. My dad let me ride in the cab of the moving truck with him and the driver. We were going to a suburb of Rochester called the Town of Greece, which my brother and I (and everyone else who hears it for the first time) thought was the strangest-sounding place we’d ever heard of. Greece? Like the country? And we’re going to live there? Why? It turns out the Town of Greece was originally called Northampton and was changed to Greece when it was incorporated in 1822 and was named in sympathy for the Greeks who were fighting for their independence from Turkish rule. Still, it felt like a strange place to move to.
I was the new kid in First Grade in the fall of 1963 at West Ridge Elementary School in Greece. It’s funny the things you recall vividly from such a long time ago, but I remember going through the lunch line there thinking the kids were stupid because they pronounced Sherbet as SherbERt. In that same lunch line kids were talking about President Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon and all the kids were saying that they wanted to keep President Kennedy as President because they had heard that Nixon wanted kids to go to school on Saturdays. I was horrified. I loved President Kennedy, and the thought of him not being our president was something I couldn’t imagine. I did not like Richard Nixon at all. He always seemed off to my young mind. Like a villain from Saturday morning cartoons.
Two months later I was sitting at my school desk in Mrs. Sala’s class and Mrs. Ferguson’s voice came over the loudspeaker unexpectedly. I looked up at the speaker and saw the logo for Stromberg-Carlson printed on it and I stared at those words as Mrs. Ferguson spoke hers. She said, “I am sorry to announce that President Kennedy has been shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. The dismissal buses are here and walkers will be released to go home immediately.” I continued to stare at the loudspeaker and its logo on the wall, staring at it feeling like time had stopped, processing the words that had just passed through it.
I just remember the stunned silence of everyone as we gathered our things and left the building. My house was less than a quarter-mile away and when I walked into our side door, through the kitchen, and into the living room, my grandmother was sitting on the edge of her chair crying loudly and was visibly mad. “They killed him!” she screamed with an anger in her voice I had never heard before. “They killed our president!” With that, I dropped to the couch and started crying myself. Soon my brother was home and he too joined in the hysterics. It was too much for any of us to bear. The rest of the day we just stared at the TV in drained emotion. When my mother got home from work, she cried and screamed too. It was as if someone had murdered a member of our family.
If the trauma of this news wasn’t enough, when I came home two days later, my grandmother was again screaming and crying at the television. She had just witnessed on a live news broadcast Jack Ruby stepping in front of the cameras and shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the abdomen. I know that my grandmother took one of her sedatives to get her through that day. In the days that followed many tears flowed from my grandmother. I think the sight of little John-John saluting his father’s coffin as it went by just about killed her. The sense of hope and happiness in our household and seemingly the rest of the country, felt like it was buried with President Kennedy on that hillside with the eternal flame in Arlington National Cemetary. Everything changed.
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