It’s easy for me to remember that day. Sometimes, it’s as if it were yesterday. Others, it seems a lifetime ago.

I was in sixth grade. I was in the lucky group that had lunch then recess. That meant close to an hour and a half before we had to be back in class. In 1963, we had no middle schools in Culpeper, Virginia. We stayed in the same elementary school classroom, and the teachers rotated to us for sixth grade. We all knew that two o’clock meant math with Mrs. Kelly. That day she wore a green dress, belted, and her red hair was loose, not in her usual bun. She was pretty strict on behavior but a good math teacher.

I don’t much recall lunch, except that this was Friday, so it was likely fish sticks. I don’t much recall recess, except that I likely got picked last (as usual) for whatever team sport we played in the gym. It was a bitter cold day, so we didn’t go outside. When the bell rang, we hustled to the hallways because one thing Mrs. Kelly did not like was for anyone to be late.

At 2 p.m. sharp we were all seated and waiting for her to start. But she didn’t. She stood behind her desk, hands clasped in front of her, her eyes on the back wall of the room. She was crying.

By 2:05 p.m. it was beginning to be difficult for 11- and 12-year-olds not to fidget in the silence, but no one spoke. I think we’d sensed something was wrong.

At 2:10 p.m., the intercom box at the front of the room above the blackboard crackled, and Mrs. Ross, the hard-nosed principal, said, “Attention, please. I regret to inform you that at 1 p.m. central time, President Kennedy died from a gunshot wound he suffered while in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.”

It was her voice. We all knew it well. Some of us from one-on-one discussions in her office, but she was the one who made the daily announcements during Home Room, so we knew her voice. This time it wasn’t harsh or snappish–what she was known for. It sounded as if she were struggling not to cry.

Mrs. Kelly cried harder now. Later, I figured out that the teachers had learned of the President’s shooting while some of us were at recess, and that’s why she was crying when we entered the room.

Even we 6th graders were quiet at the news, and it was when Mrs. Ross said we should pack our schools bags and head for our busses because we were being dismissed early, that most of the kids in my class cheered. Again, later, I hoped it was because they were happy to be going home early on a Friday. But this was the rural south and well before the “liberal” northern Virginia set the political tone for the state. Virginia was then an anti-civil rights, highly segregated state. I’m sure many of the cheers were for the fact the President was dead because their bigoted parents probably wished for that at the dinner table or prayed for that in church.

My mother met me at the bus stop, she who imitated Jackie’s hair style, large sunglasses, and pill box hats to the point where my father nicknamed her “Jackie,” and she was crying, too. She grumbled a bit as she walked me home that the news had interrupted her stories (soap operas) and speculated that my father might be reactivated again from the reserves, as he had the year before during the Cuban Missile Crisis. She wasn’t happy about that, and I suspect that was the main cause of her crying.

My not-yet 12-year-old brain knew this was historic. Yes, even then, history was my favorite subject, and I glued myself to the television when I got home and rarely strayed away from it through the following Monday, November 25, the day of the funeral. Via that medium, I “witnessed” it all: the arrival of the casket back in D.C.; the images of blood and brains on Mrs. Kennedy’s suit, rendered as faint smudges on black and white television; the “news conference” with suspect Lee Harvey Oswald; Jack Ruby’s shooting of Oswald on live television, an ashen-faced Oswald loaded into an ambulance; the speculation over Oswald’s intentions, who had ordered him to kill Kennedy; the swift decision that it had to have been the Russians since he’d defected to Russia briefly; and the funeral.

My father was indeed notified to prepare to be called up for reserve duty in Washington, D.C. this time, not West Germany, but that never happened. My father had mixed emotions about the assassination. He’d been an ardent Kennedy supporter in the 1960 election, happy to see a young veteran of World War II, like he was, vying to be president. He took me to D.C. on a bitter cold January 20, 1961, to see history. Now, he’d become disillusioned over Kennedy’s support for desegregation and civil rights. (I’ve never side-stepped my father’s racism; it was the one huge, unforgivable flaw in an otherwise decent man. He and I fought many a verbal battle over this in my teen years.)

In a way, as an historian, I’ve been “witness” to so many events in my long life that rocked the status of our democracy: the assassinations of the 1960s, the anti-war protests, the fight for women’s rights and gay rights, 9/11, and 1/6/21. But the one that shook me hardest was President Kennedy’s assassination. At the time, I couldn’t imagine losing my daddy, but the President’s two children had had their father taken from them by a man who wanted to make a name for himself. Maybe that’s what eventually drove my fiction. My antagonists tend to be my version of real people who simply wanted someone to notice and acknowledge them, like Oswald, Ruby, McVeigh, etc.

For those of you who weren’t born by November 22, 1963, I recommend a National Geographic docuseries titled, “JFK: One Day in America.” With interviews with some of the surviving on-site witnesses–secret service agents, people in the crowd in Dealy Plaza, journalists who covered the event–and some news footage never seen before, it is a detailed and thorough reliving of that day without, thank the gods, that particular frame from the Zapruder home movie.

Sixty years ago today but as if it were yesterday to some of us.