Happy Thursday! I took this image a few weeks ago while visiting the 16th Street Basin. It is one of my favorite places to go for watching wildlife. There are a lot of power lines around so it is not very accommodating for shooting wildlife in flight but what I like about it is I can get reasonably close to them without really disturbing them.
Depending on when you were born, each generation seems to have a focal point in history that we can all remember vividly throughout our lives. For my generation it was the assassination of President Kennedy. I was a Sophomore in high school and when I heard the news we were in typing class taking a speed test. The teacher was Charles McBride (one of my favorites) and I can remember typing feverishly trying to better my score. I was a very fast typist, the only problem was there were a lot of words that you couldn’t read. So I got points for the number of words on the page but when he subtracted all the mistakes I had, I usually ended up with a negative number. 🙂
Anyway, I digress. The Superintendent came to the door and said something to Mr. McBride and his face went featureless. It was amazing. Then he told us that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas Texas. The noise in the room is something I’ll always remember because it went from the sound of hundreds of typewriter keys being feverishly pressed to only a few keys then to none as the information he gave us begin to sink in.
Then for what seemed like a long time we all just sat there with our hands in our laps. Mr. McBride told us to forget this typing test and that we would do it another time. It wasn’t long before we were all called into the study hall (the largest room in the school) and given the news that President Kennedy was dead. School was dismissed early and we all went home. I can remember so much about the whole event from watching it all on TV and the Jack Ruby incident to the funeral and that solemn drum cadence being played over and over again during the long funeral procession.
Fifty years ago tomorrow. Wow, that seems impossible. Quite a remarkable time in our history. Over the years I’ve watched a lot of “documentaries” on the assassination and all the conspiracy theories. It is hard to know what really happened that day. I suspect, like anytime the government is involved in anything, there is more to the story then has been told, but I’d like to think what happened so many years ago in Dallas was as it seems.
Didn’t mean to write about this today. I hadn’t even thought about it until I heard one of the newscasters say this morning that tomorrow will mark the 50th anniversary. That’s how my feeble mind works, the last thing it hears is what dominates. 🙂
Thanks for stopping by the blog. Enjoy your day and as always be careful.
