THE FIRST OF THE REAL SHOCKS

It was a Friday I believe, and my buddies, Ernie ‘Butch’ Mancuso, Benny ‘the Buffer’ Gallenaro and myself were leaving a Chinese restaurant (today it is known as the Dragon Palace) after lunch on South Ocean Avenue in Patchogue early in the afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963. Heading to the parking lot, we cut through the thrift store called John’s Bargain Store on the east side of the street, where we walked through to the parking lot. As we reached the back door to the lot, the radio was playing overhead and certain urgency was emanating from it! The speaker was delivering shocking news:  President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas Texas!

The three of us reached the door in total disbelief, paused with the door slightly ajar and listened to more of the report. I felt bewildered, shocked and in disbelief. A cold shiver overcame me, and wondered if America felt like this when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? This was unheard of in my young life!

Piling into the car, we all wanted to be just near the TV to get the latest news, not believing what we had just heard.

Walking into the house that afternoon, there on the TV I switched on was Walter Cronkite, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K8Q3cqGs7I sitting in a newsroom at his desk and reporting the latest news from the hospital where the President lay dying, the unconfirmed reports that the President was dead and the governor of Texas was wounded, the details scarce. Then suddenly, Cronkite removed his black horn rimmed glasses, facing a clock on the studio wall announced the news with near tears in his eyes: that the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy died at 1:00pm central Standard Time, 2:00pm Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes earlier.

I stood in my mom’s living room, looking at the huge Magnavox TV in total disbelief, no one was around me, just me and that TV and the sound of silence.

This event was but the beginning of my being de-sensitized to the growing problem of violence in America, that the TV was bringing to my doorstep through the medium the report of violence towards others that followed in the immediate years to come, particularly Martin Luther King, Robert F’ Kennedy and others such as Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, and Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin. It was the beginning of my unhappiness with the lack of gun controls and the senselessness of killing.

Up to that point, I was just getting over the burning down of my high school that past March, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiZzZCrtC-M and the year before the Cuban Missile Crises and the fear of total annihilation from nuclear war. In my mid-teens I was beginning to see the real world for all it was worth and what the future might really hold for us all. By the time of the RFK

assassination in June of 1968, it was no longer a shock to me as events like these unfolded, and I recall all the adults being upset with the idea that violence had come to America with such alarming frequency as if the USA was a banana republic.

I guess that began the hard fact that we as a nation were no longer as great as we once thought we were.

That evening I went off to work at Hill’s Supermarket in Patchogue on East Main Street, and remember one of my co-workers, an adult, who was a crusty old guy, unloading a truck, with tears in his eyes, as everyone had very little to say on such a sad day, just the free flowing of tears by total strangers in the store and in the back room and basements where I was and across the country. Camelot was dead!