Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy one of those historic moments when people always remember where they were when they heard the news.

To mark the event, WestportNow is presenting a series of articles detailing where WestportNow readers were on that fateful Nov. 22, 1963. This is Part 2. See Friday for Part 1.

Diane Goss Farrell

I was in second grade at Burr Farms Elementary School and an announcement came over the intercom.

We were sent home early that day, and I recall there being no school the day the president was buried, which for some reason, I remember as having been a rainy day in Connecticut.

The reactions of my parents obviously had a big impact on the way I remember the events at that time. They were deeply concerned about the Kennedy family and somewhat fearful of threats from our then enemies.

The shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on television by Jack Ruby seemed a surreal event, and yet it was the first time I understood the power and impact of news breaking in front of the public in such an instantaneous fashion.

In the years since the tragedy, I have come to realize that that was the first major news event I experienced as part of a human collective.

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, as well as the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, seemed more familiar each time they occurred, as if repeating the experience of President Kennedy֒s assassination.

Pete Wolgast

In November, 1963 I was working as an economic and financial analyst for Standard Oil Company(New Jersey), since renamed the Exxon Corp., in the RCA Building (now the GE Building) at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City.

On the afternoon of Nov. 22, I was in a conference room with about 20 people. At about 1:40 p.m someone entered the room and slipped a note to the chairman of the meeting.  He announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and that no details were known. 

About 30 minutes later the same person entered the room with a second note.  We were then told that President Kennedy had died from the shooting, the company offices were closing down immediately and everyone was to go home. 

The chairman of our meeting said that of course the announcement did not apply to us and our meeting continued.  About 4 p.m. our meeting concluded and I returned to my office and then left.

On the way home, I was most concerned as I still did not have the details of the shooting and who was involved. At home, we learned what had happened in Dallas and followed the events of the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald.

We were watching TV when he was brought into the police station and to our horror shot.  I clearly remember watching the sadness of President Kennedys funeral on a black and white 10-inch TV at our home. 

Everyone in the country was hit by this tragedy. It was a total shock. Events in my mind are so clear about what happened on Nov. 22, 1963, and the following days that it seems like it happened just yesterday.

As we watched the funeral on TV, I was building my daughter a doll house

Lisa S. Rome, M.D.

I was in the fifth grade at the time at Albany Academy for Girls. I remember coming home in the afternoon and being excited about getting ready to go to dance class.

This was a coed dance class where we learned the fox trot and the cha cha. We wore white gloves and had dance cards. If we behaved properly our treat would be the opportunity to dance to “Sugar Shack.”

As I was changing my clothes from my school uniform the phone rang. I learned that dancing school was canceled for that afternoon because President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. I remember wondering why President Kennedy being shot in Dallas would affect my dance class in Albany, N.Y.

Today I am serving my fifth term on the Representative Town Meeting (RTM) in Westport

Tom Feeley

I was an Infantry Platoon Leader, 3rd Infantry Division, drinking with my buddies in the Officers Club near Wurtzburg, Germany.

The Officer of the Day strode into the bar ғcovered. He was therefore packing a loaded .45-caliber Colt automatic (wearing a hat in an officers club, unless armed, is such an etiquette breach that the offender must buy the bar a round).

He pointed at the bartender: “The bar is closed. He turned to us: Red Alert.”

This lieutenant was our drinking buddy, so we thought it was a joke and started laughing.

He looked us dead on: “I’m not kidding—THE PRESIDENT HAS BEEN SHOT! THIS BAR IS CLOSED! RED ALERT!”

At the motor pool, my four APCs (armored personnel carriers) already had live ammo on board, and we roared into the forest to begin our advance to pre-selected defensive positions near the East German border.

We sweated till dawn awaiting the probable Russian attack; doubtful we could hold, even if we used our (then TOP SECRET) battlefield nuclear weapons. Yeah, we were ready. You were safe.

Jo Fuchs Luscombe

I was living in Libya (part of the oil community) at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, and, like you (and probably most Americans), I can vividly recall the shock at hearing the news on short wave radio. 

It was early evening and we remained glued to the radio for hours and hours.  I can still close my eyes and remember all the details of the tragedy and the confusion that followed. 

It seemed to me a travesty to be so far away from home.  The sense of loss was enormous.

The entire community attended a funeral mass at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in downtown Tripoli.  Although Libya is a Moslem nation, at the time many nationalities and religions co-existed. 

The cathedral was packed and large crowds had to content themselves with gathering in silence on the nearby streets.  All were grief stricken and in total disbelief.

For weeks afterwards, the international community found ways to extend sympathy to Americans.  I was very touched by this.

I experienced the same emotions on 9/11.  Once again, I was away from home, visiting in Santa Fe.  Maybe I should never wander far from home

Michael Beecher

I was 7 years old and in the third grade at Bedford Elementary School (located in the building that now houses the Westport Town Hall).

I assume the school administration and teachers had decided not to announce JFK’s assassination so as to not upset the students. 

I didn’t find out about it until I stepped aboard the school bus at about 3 p.m. The bus driver stood up and faced all of us and said, “President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas today. I’d appreciate it if you could all be quiet on the ride home.” 

We were all stunned.  Sure, some of us were too young to understand the full import of this news, but every kid back then knew who Caroline and John John were and we knew they had just lost their father. 

I remember spending that weekend glued to the TV set and witnessing Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder broadcast live on Sunday while I visited my friend, Peter Blau. 

It’s cliche to say that America lost its innocence that day, but I do believe that, on a personal level, I saw the world differently from that day forward.

Alice Shelton

I vividly remember the day. I was five years old. I came home from kindergarten to find my mother in tears.  It was probably the first time Id ever seen her cry.

In 1999, while I was researching the RTMҒs history for our 50th anniversary celebration, I found it comforting to read in the minutes that our RTM had remembered President Kennedy. 

On Jan. 7, 1964, the RTM passed a Resolution of Tribute,” which read:

ӓThe Representative Town Meeting of Westport, Connecticut, herewith pays tribute to the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, 1961-1963.

“It pays its deepest respect to his idealism and courage as exhibited in his efforts for civil rights, for youth programs, for a strong America in a world of peace.

“It deplores his tragic and untimely death and the violence of spirit which caused it.

“It hopes that from this tragedy there will emerge a spirit of devotion to the true principles of our nation:  freedom, justice, and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.

The RTM agreed that a copy of the resolution would be sent to Mrs. Kennedy.

Gordon Joseloff, Editor and Publisher, WestportNow

I was a freshman at Syracuse University and had just completed a class and was walking to the campus radio station where I worked in the news department. As I crossed the campus quad, I saw people gathered around someone who had a radio and several girls crying.

Upon learning the news, I sprinted to the radio station where we suspended all programming, put on funeral music, and began gathering reaction from people at the university and the city.

As a teen journalist the year before, I had attended JFK’s now-famous 45th birthday party at Madison Square Garden where Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to him.

Like many other Americans, I felt inspired by his youthfulness and the promise of his New Frontier. His death was a crushing blow.

But by a quirk of fate, my horror at this attack on one of our leaders later became very personal.

As a reporter for United Press International, I happened to be in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

Two months earlier, I had worked the streets of New York getting reaction for UPI when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.

Seven years after that, still working for UPI, in another strange coincidence, I was outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1975, when Sara Jane Moore attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford.

Having been a witness to attacks on our leaders from a close vantage point, this 40th anniversary of JFKs death is as painful as ever.

Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy one of those historic moments when people always remember where they were when they heard the news.

To mark the event, WestportNow is presenting a series of articles detailing where WestportNow readers were on that fateful Nov. 22, 1963. This is Part 1.

Claire Shumofsky

That momentous Friday 40 years ago, I was a college student at NYU and was walking along sedate Madison Avenue browsing at the lovely shops lining the street.

Suddenly I became aware of the bells of St. Patrick’s Cathedral chiming solemnly and noticed clusters of people at parked cars listening to their radios.

I learned quickly why Madison Avenue had changed and knew that our world had changed as well.

Ira Bloom, Westport Town Attorney

I was sitting in Mrs. Wolf’s fifth grade at Davis Street School in New Haven.  It was sometime in the early afternoon, and Mrs. Wolf was in and out of the classroom talking with people, probably other teachers or the principal.

Eventually, they canceled school and sent us home early, telling us the very sad news.  I next remember sitting in our living room with my mother glued to the television (black and white images, of course). 

My mother, father, brother and I sat there for most of the weekend, viewing the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday, and then JFK’s funeral. 

Although I did not realize it at the time, this was the first major television event that I recall, where most of the nation focused nonstop on television coverage of a major national event.

Bill Scheffler, Ann Sheffer

We remember vividly: we were in home room, which was, then as now, room 509, at Staples—home rooms were assigned alphabetically, and Scheffler and Sheffer were together.

We had just gotten our report cards (a more trusting generation gave them to the kids for transport home) and were preparing for the Thanksgiving break.

After the news, lots of walking around on the interior courtyard (where we were allowed to smoke), teachers giving updates and students listening on transistor radios. Slow dispersal home to watch TV for a long, long time.

Very difficult to explain to our CNN-raised youth how utterly astonishing it was to actually see Jack Ruby shoot Oswald a few days later.

You didn’t ask, but we also remember Kennedy’s inauguration on a bitterly cold day when we were home from school on a snow day, Robert Frost assisted by the president—it was a really extraordinary to be able to watch this stuff live, something we now take for granted.

Miggs Burroughs

I was a freshman in the drama department at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie-Mellon University), and I had just returned to my dorm from morning classes.

I sat at my desk and began sketching the face of JFK as he peered down on me from the photo I had taped to my wall when I first arrived in September.

I turned on the radio to KQV, as was my habit, and heard Frank Sinatra singing, “Fairytales can come true, it could happen to you, when you’re young at heart….”

No sooner had I finished sketching the outline of his face, when the song, and the fairytale and the dream and my own youth were all interrupted in one stunning blow by that horrifying news bulletin.

By Mary Maynard

Special to WestportNow.com

Mary Maynard with the guns of the submarine Narwhal at the Groton submarine base. Contributed photo

Editors Note: In 1941, Westport author Mary Maynard, then Mary McKay, was an 8-year-old living with her family in the Philippines where her father managed a gold mine on the island of Mindanao. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, the McKays quickly gathered what supplies they could and fled into the jungle. They believed that their stay would be brief. But the days turned into weeks and the months into two harrowing years. They lived in close confinement as the often worm-infested food supply fell and their group swelled with more refugees. Eight months after Pearl Harbor, some chose to surrender to the Japanese and be interned in prison camps. But the McKays moved farther into the jungle where they were plagued by disease and shortages of essential items. Eventually, a submarine arrived to evacuate American civilians, taking them to Australia. Maynard recounted her experience in her book “My Faraway Home: An American Family’s WWII Tale of Adventure and Survival in the Jungles of the Philippines” (The Lyons Press, 2001). Especially poignant with this week’s marking of Veterans Day, Maynard takes a look back at a day she will never forget.
Sixty years ago today on Nov. 15, 1943, Gen. Douglasl MacArthur sent a submarine to snatch me from the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands.
Thats a topic sentence to grab your attention; there’s much more to the story than that.  It is a story of clandestine, dangerous, missions of mercy undertaken by U.S. submarines in World War II. The records of the War Patrols were classified until 1975, and by then the story was cold.
On many of the larger islands, after the Philippines fell to the Japanese in May of 1942, Filipinos and few hundred American soldiers who had not surrendered to the Japanese began to form guerrilla bands. 
Radio messages asking for help from the outside world were ignored because the codes were not current.  After a risky sailboat trip south to Australia was successful in convincing the Allied forces that resistance in the Islands should be supported, submarines began to visit cautiously at first and then more and more often.

The submarine’s arrival in Mindanano. From memory by Mary Maynard. Contributed drawing

They brought supplies that any army needs—guns, ammunition, medicines, shoes, even Communion wafers to a Catholic country—through dangerous waters. 
The boats, as the Navy calls submarines, brought in coast watchers who tracked enemy convoys and helped to decimate Japan’s merchant marine.  They brought in undercover spies who could report on Japanese defenses.
Often the submarines endured hours of depth charges and always the men lived with heat, and cramped spaces and danger. 
When the gangways were crammed with supplies for the Philippines, the sailors crawled through the spaces left on their hands and knees.  Boats were lost, but still they kept supplying the islands with materil and hope.
My family was caught in the Islands when the war began; we went into hiding, too.  The rumors of submarine visits seemed too good to be true until a Life Magazine printed in 1943 found its way to our hideout. 
My father wrote a letter to Gen. MacArthur (a pre-war business associate) begging him to allow my mother and me to go out on an empty submarine. At first the answer was a categorical no!
Later, someone in Australia decided that if we could live in hiding for nearly two years, we could endure a week on a submarine, and the answer changed to If you dare!
On a moonlit night, the cargo submarine Narwhal docked at Nasipit, Mindanao, off-loaded 90 tons of goods for the guerrillas, and took 32 passengers—among them three children and eight women—to Australia.
We were the first to make the trip, but the quiet submariners, by the end of the war, slipped 453 people out of the Islands and never lost a one.
They were proud to do those secret missions, the old sailors I talk to now say, because they were saving lives instead of taking them.

Editor’s Note: Once called “the man who epitomized style on horseback, William C.  Steinkraus was the first United States rider ever to win an Olympic individual gold medal (Mexico City, 1968). A U.S. Equestrian Team member from 1951 through 1972, he competed in six Olympics. Following are excerpts from his remarks at today’s Westport bridge dedication honoring his sister, Ruth Steinkraus Cohen.

By William C. Steinkraus

Given her interest in the United Nations from its very inception, it was the most natural thing in the world for Ruth to think of somehow getting Westport involved in the U.N. and getting the U.N. involved in Westport.

William Steinkraus tells today’s Ruth Steinkraus Cohen Memorial Bridge dedication ceremony his sister would have cherished the honor Westport and the state bestowed upon her. WestportNow.com photo

This eventually occurred through the medium of the International Hospitality Committee of Fairfield County, an element of the United Nations Association of the USA and Westport’s own jUNe day and other special occasions.

Ruth was an initiator and driving force behind these activities and many others, enlisting the help of an army of dedicated volunteers, and in the past four decades, more than 50,000 U.N. diplomats, staff and State Department personnel have visited Westport for one or another of the Hospitality Committee’s special events.

Ruth would have been thrilled but not surprised that jUNe day and the rest of the committee’s activities are still continuing after her death, for they have surely meant too much to too many for them to be suspended.

Editors Note: With the East Coast approach of Hurricane Isabel, WestportNow presents this update on emergency preparedness based on comments made at the Sept. 2 meeting of the Representative Town Meeting.

By Denis McCarthy

Westport Fire Chief

The town maintains a public shelter at the Long Lots School. The capacity of that shelter is about 200 residents. It is run by the Red Cross. During a typical winter storm, power outage, or hurricane we get 25 to 30 residents.

Surprisingly, we get residents far in from the coast that are frightened and alone during an emergency.  The shelter provides an important place for them to have camaraderie and care at the same time.

It is not extensively used during a disaster. We did have a study in the late 80Ғs, early 90s by the Army Corps of Engineers that identified the total population that would be subject to flooding or significant wind damage during an event.  That becomes our worst-case scenario for planning purposes. 

We have been instructed to develop sheltering capacity for 650, well beyond the 30 or so that we have experienced in the past.

When Staples is open, we will have generating capacity in the auditorium, the cafeteria, the field house and the old gym, food supplies and for the central heating unit that will provide the excess capacity for a once in a lifetime event.

This, hopefully, would be for the very, very rare event, the typical ғ100-year storm that is going to wreak havoc and make the Compo Beach neighborhood, lower Hillspoint Road and Saugatuck Shores uninhabitable for a period of time.

We also have at GreenԒs Farms School the capacity to provide auxiliary power into the school that would serve as a feeding station and some respite care during the day but not necessarily for overnight shelter.

Although, the town did not build, could not afford or chose not to afford, making Staples High School a shelter that could withstand an earthquake and the worst of the hurricanes, I feel that based on where we are and our experience, we are well positioned for providing a place of refuge for residents.