By Edward Master
I was in junior high band practice, eighth period of the day. Before practice even began, band director John Bender announced that President John Kennedy had been shot. As always, we were at the west end of the gym, a building that no longer exists. There's a house there now. The date was November 22, 1963.
On September 9, 2001, I was living in a small house in Indiana, PA, watching morning TV replay an airplane fly into the World Trade Center. My wife (Eileen) was in graduate school at IUP. Unfortunately, her cousin Buddy and Buddy's brother-in-law Milt (who was married to Buddy's sister Karen) both worked at the Twin Towers. Eileen also had an acquaintance (Bruce Schiller) who worked as a technical director for CBS at the same location. I repeat worked.
Those two dates are my dates that will 'live in infamy' to borrow from FDR. Where were you on 22 November 1963? And 9 September 2001?
My third "special" date is October 13, 1960. In a lighter vain, this involved a fatality, of sort, but only if you were a New York Yankees baseball fan. The Pittsburgh Pirates topped the Yanks 10-9 in the World Series on Bill Mazeroski's home run. The urban legend is that Maz's homer didn't kill anyone, but it did make Mickey Mantle cry.
I remember school being cancelled for at least a day for Kennedy's funeral. I'm going to guess that within a year or so, I bought and read Mark Lane's "Rush to Judgment," the first of many books on Kennedy's assassination (I believe I did a book report on this one for Dorothy Tippery.) I admit to being a Kennedy conspiracy theorist, but as for other con-spriratorial ideas I pass. I think the election was fine.
Over the years I have read several books on the Kennedy plot (or plots). I renewed my interest when Oliver Stone's "JFK" movie came out. I once used that film when teaching "an argument within an argument" for a composition class I was instructing at Camden Co. College (NJ). Jim Garrison's book "On the Trail of the Assassins" was one Stone's references for this film. Stone was arguing the crime should be re-investigated as did Garrison in his book. It turned out to be quite the lesson plan.
I once went to CCC to hear Jim Marrs speak while he plugged his book "Crossfire" which was also one of Stone's sources. I bought his book, got it autographed, and really enjoyed the presentation. Marrs was a newspaper guy in Dallas during the Kennedy trip and shooting.
The 9/11 attack proved to be more than just a "downer." Buddy's friends learned of his fate when he never showed for hockey practice in a hockey league he was in at a rented hockey facility. As for Milt, he just never returned home. Bruce Schiller was eventually located by his wife Irene, in a burn center in Rhode Island over a month later.
In 1960, I was in Gladys McCoy's sixth-grade class in the old Foxburg school on the side of the hill. I got on the bus with my RCA pink-and-white transistor radio in my hands. I held the radio by a bus window to get reception. Hal Smith slammed a two-run homer to put the Bucs up 9-7 before I lost reception. At Turkey City, I ran home to see my mother still ironing clothes with grandpa next to her in an 'easy' chair as she exclaimed "Maz put one over the wall to win it!"
I was living in New Jersey for all the Steelers Super Bowl wins, and they basically started having good teams for a while before the titles. The football titles for some reason never quite held the same meaning as that World Series title from 1960. It's nice to see Jim Leyland get some HOF recognition. I always got the feeling those guys really enjoyed playing for him. I don't see Lily Tomlin getting anything positive from the debacle against Arizona and two-win (?) New England is coming up.