The one-roomed schoolhouse was like a small beehive that windy, chilly Friday in late November. Teacher had already begun calling the students up front by their particular grades to take their places around the long low table by the slate chalkboard. Teacher then taught them their lessons for each particular subject. This was how it was done in those days at First School.
The morning recess had come and gone with no one venturing outside. At noon hour, most of the students leisurely ate their lunches at their desks, cheerfully chatting about the coming Thanksgiving holiday. Dale First and Johnny Schilling who lived just across Black Lake Road went home for their dinners. When Johnny returned, he had a package he received in the mail that was a kit to sell Christmas cards door to door. He was trying to decide whether to keep it or send it back when Teacher asked Mike to pull the bell rope at one o’clock. Everyone soon settled down to a quiet, uneventful afternoon of classes and study.
Sometime after 2:00 in the afternoon, as the room stood in its lazy silence, the front door burst open and slammed hard. Perhaps the wind had caught it away, but it was Mrs. Jarvis, Richard’s mother, who came puffing into the room to speak with Teacher.
“The President has been shot!” she blurted out frantically.
The class looked up from their books with mouths wide open. The teacher, Mrs. Rosenberg, caught off guard and not knowing how to respond, frowned and said, “I don’t think that is funny!” Mrs. Jarvis assured her that it was true and not some bad joke.
Teacher hurried over to the old black radio on her desk and turned it on. It buzzed and growled with static as its tubes glowed and heated up. She turned the dial around, but on every channel the news was the same—the president had indeed been shot!
The boys sat stunned and some of the older girls began to weep.
“How could this happen in this day and age?” Mary Wolf said angrily!
Then the news finally came. The man on the radio had confirmed it—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, was dead!
Everyone sat quietly for a while, attempting to make sense of it all. Mrs. Rosenberg spoke with them and tried to comfort them but she was in need of comforting herself.
School was dismissed early and that night, Mike’s dad said that they should all pray for Mrs. Kennedy and her children. Mike kneeled to pray and asked the Lord to comfort her and be with her during this terrible time. He thought that the whole nation needed God’s comfort and wondered what this would all mean. The television said that the vice-president, Mr. Johnson, had been sworn in as the new President and Mike prayed for him too.
Mike remembered how another president, Abraham Lincoln, had also been slain almost one hundred years before. He wondered what would become of a nation where evil men thought it was a fine thing to kill their leaders.
(from a pending work © 2018 by Michael Leonard Jewell)
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