Counting Down To Anniversary Commemoration

Every generation has its "Where were you when ... ?" question. From Pearl Harbor to the Twin Towers, history's landscape bears the craters of pivotal, often literally explosive, moments.

Where we were and what occupied us at the moment the news came reminds us how events can, like a magnet dropped on among iron filings, create national unity where only an instant before random self-absorption prevailed.

Where I was in the early afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, was in Miss Rice's fifth-grade classroom at William Jennings Bryan Elementary School on Hillsborough Avenue, just back from lunch. I don't recall the entree, but there had been ice cream in cups for dessert. I'd picked chocolate.

Forty-five years later, chocolate ice cream still reminds me of an intercom announcement, a darkened classroom, the flickering black-and-white image of a stricken Walter Cronkite, and Dallas.

In the numbed scramble that followed, I found my cul-de-sac neighbor and boyhood pal, Matthew Schoenig, and we shuffled the mile-and-a-half home together, exchanging few words. I remember a bright blue sky and intensely deep shadows.

If everything unfolded as scheduled Saturday morning - this was written before the fact - Cub Scout Pack 360, based in Tampa Palms, observed the 45th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in an appropriate, if only coincidental, fashion.

Weeks ago, Nov. 22 had been announced as "rocket day," marking the introduction to amateur ballistics for this particular group of grade-schoolers. "Excellent timing," I'd whispered to the mom next to me. "What a perfect way to spend the 45th anniversary."

"Forty-fifth anniversary of what?" she whispered back.

Sometimes I forget (sometimes on purpose), at 55, I'm usually the senior member, by at least a dozen years, in any gathering of elementary school kids' parents. My formative memories - the release of "Sgt. Pepper," Neil Armstrong on the moon, the My Lai village, Joe Namath's Super Bowl boast - were dry pages in some dimly recollected history book.

Still, this was one plucky mom. "Wait. Don't tell me. Forty-five years ... 1963 ... " A light popped on. "President Kennedy's assassination!"

"Bingo."

So, on the same weekend that America's largest generation spent hauling out its scrapbook of scarred memories, pondering the motorcade, the three shots, the shaky Zapruder footage, the caissons, the young widow, his toddler son's iconic salute, the unresolved evil of Lee Harvey Oswald, Camelot dashed, a bunch of junior astronauts under the direction of a scout master born near the tail end of the Apollo Program will have performed a far more fitting, if unwitting, tribute.

This would explain, for those traveling County Line Road near Grand Hampton on Saturday morning, the sight of miniature missiles and blooming parachutes overhead.

President Kennedy, who unreservedly assigned God's work to free people, boldly vowed that America would make it its business to send a man to the moon and return him to Earth and do it before 1970 dawned.

America did not fail. Saturday, observed by at least one member of the generation that remembers where it was when the awful news came, those who someday will receive the torch of leadership pass sent rockets heavenward. God willing, it was good.