In 1963 my mother was 19 and living in San Francisco’s Ashbury Heights, working as some kind of secretary for The Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council. She was always flirting with the counter-culture in the Bay area, you dig, and in March of that year she was celebrating with some beatnik types around Chinatown. They were all high because Alcatraz had just been closed. At least one in that group celebrating was on their way to Alabama to lend a hand to the SCLC volunteers who were kicking off their Birmingham campaign against segregation with a sit-in. My mother thought that was beautiful and ran away with them. She described it as “…the point the rest of my life began.”
Around September 63 she found herself in the tiny enclave of Henrietta, Texas being a secretary for a local rancher and civic leader Mrs. Ellen Body. Mrs. Body was an important member of The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Important stuff, right! I mean, President Kennedy had personally formed this committee, so my mother probably typed up some very important documents for Mrs. Body.
It was no accident that on Friday November 22 1963 my mother was in Dallas, Texas standing on Main Street with some cats around 300 yards down from Houston Street. She smiled and waved madly as The President and the First Lady drove by smiling back in the warm Texas sun. She watched and waved until the motorcade turned right into Houston Street and disappeared. She was elated, like in orbit. Everyone was. Well, almost everyone. Pretty soon she and her friends tuned into some distant sirens and shortly after that, this weird feeling of distress kind-of rippled down Main Street and washed over them. Everyone around seemed to move instinctively towards Houston Street. My mother’s group moved with them. At the corner, they looked over Dealey Plaza and it was clear some serious shit had gone down. The panic was clear as day. People were moving round kind-of directionless. Some were running like nowhere. A few stood fixed looking dazed and confused. Their group moved towards Elm Street. Everyone on the sidewalk was chattering. They could hear - “Something happened, didn’t it?” - “It just took off…” – “What did you hear?” – “I did see that…” – “They were going someplace in a hurry…” – “Then a cop went running up over there…”
My mother asked a tall man in a gabardine suit, “Sir, what’s happening?”
He looked down at her, distracted. “What?…I…I’m not sure young lady. Something over there.” He pointed along Elm Street. “The President’s car sped up and the police sirens went on and…I…I don’t know…”
Someone in the group suggested going to a diner, but no one moved. They stood there waiting on Houston Street as if for instructions on their next move. Lots of fuzz began milling around. Many minutes went by before they heard something about a gun shot. The presence of the fuzz was now becoming conspicuous. Still more time passed and then my mother noticed a woman sobbing, “They shot him…I see’d it…”
“We need a radio,” said my mother.
One of my mother’s friends worked in an office a short walk up Elm Street: “Someone there will know what’s going on.”
As they hurried along they noticed a group packed around a parked car. The owner was sitting in the driver’s seat, radio blaring. They walked over and joined the group. Someone looked at my mother and said, “They fired shots at the President.”
Someone said, “Who’s they?” Someone else added, “Three shots.”
Someone else went SHHHHHHHHH and in a heart-beat all the noise was sucked out of the world until the only sound anywhere on the planet seemed to be the radio announcing: “President Kennedy has been wounded…”
My mother stayed huddled with that group around the parked car listening until the radio announced: “The President is dead” -
Many years after the revolution began my mother wrote – in a similar diary this story was lifted from – an interesting reflection: “I remember when Joel (my dad) said We was all being screwed over when Reagan sent the National Guard into Berkeley. He said it again when Kent State went down. But then Watergate hit and he was in no doubt. We were all being screwed over.
“I called him a late bloomer and he got a little cranky. I told him I felt the same way but in Dallas day they wasted Kennedy. I wondered then are We being screwed over? I got my answer pretty quickly: They shot Oswald and I knew We were.”
The revolution had begun.
