‘I was frightened for myself, my family and my country’

At the Hammond Street Senior Center in downtown Bangor, a quiet retreat in the snarl of midday traffic, the card players lay down their hands and in an instant rewind four decades worth of memories back to that dreadful November day.

It’s like recalling a nightmare so vividly disturbing, they say, that it’s difficult to find the right words to describe it after all this time. Like most Americans of their generation, they can tell you exactly where they were on Nov. 22, 1963, when they heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. They can tell you, too, how they reacted on that day and the days that followed as they numbly watched the tragic drama unfold live on TV.

The hard part is trying to define the effect it had on their lives, their once-youthful dreams for the country, and the way they have looked at the world ever since.

“I was absolutely horror-stricken and frightened for myself, my family and my country that day,” said Lorraine Roberts, who was watching a children’s TV program with her 4-year-old daughter in Presque Isle when the news broke. “I spent the rest of the day on the phone. It was so unsettling that I just needed to talk with people. I felt as if my world were tumbling down around me somehow and would never be the same. And it never was after that.”

Lee Sirabella was 42 at the time, working in the darkroom at his photography studio in Brewer, when the news came over the radio. Struck by the enormity of the moment, he tape-recorded radio news broadcasts for the next three or four days. He still has those tape reels, but has never had the heart to play them even once in 40 years.

“I don’t want to relive that moment,” he said solemnly during a break in the computer class he teaches at the senior center.

Sirabella remembers Jack Kennedy as the bold, confident, charismatic leader who had brought the nation safely back from the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was the larger-than-life young president who had a way of making people believe that anything was possible in America, even going to the moon. And when he died, Kennedy took that vision and boundless promise with him, Sirabella said.

“There was an expectation back then of good things to come for the country,” he said. “He made us feel we could depend on him to take us in the right direction. When he said we would go to the moon, I was jubilant. His death was the end of Camelot, as they say, and the age of innocence.”

Linda St. Thomas will never forget the screaming and wailing she heard on that grim day. She was 24 then, living with her husband and infant daughter on a military base in North Carolina.

“I was walking with my daughter back from the canteen to the trailer park when all of a sudden there were people crying loudly everywhere,” St. Thomas said while sitting with a group of knitters. “I stopped and asked a woman what happened and she said, ‘Kennedy’s been shot! Kennedy’s been shot!’ I rushed home and turned on the TV. It was devastation, just devastation. Everyone was screaming and crying and carrying on something terrible. I hadn’t heard that kind of thing before, and I haven’t heard it since. Part of it was that we had experienced an assassination for the first time, of course, but part of it was Kennedy himself. Everyone loved him, in a way you don’t see with presidents anymore.”

For Anna Watkins, who learned of the shooting while watching TV with her baby daughter in her arms, it was as if someone had pressed a button that day and ushered in an “age of assassinations.”

Lionel Lord, who was a guidance counselor at the Fifth Street School in Bangor at the time, said the announcement over the public address system created an eerily disorienting silence throughout the entire building.

“I felt as if the world had stopped for a moment,” he recalled. “There was no sound, and then everyone was crying.”

JoAnn Easton had just finished wallpapering a bedroom in her Dover-Foxcroft home when a friend telephoned her with the news.

“I felt absolute disbelief,” she said. “I was concerned about my father, who thought JFK was the greatest president since Roosevelt. I worried about my five kids, too. We always talked politics in the family, and I wondered how I was going to explain it to the children. We weren’t a big television-watching family, but we watched the news for days. It was not just Kennedy’s assassination, but the mess that followed with Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald right before our eyes. It was a terrible time.”

Most of the folks at the senior center agree that the murder of a single individual could never again cause such widespread anguish and unease as Kennedy’s assassination did 40 years ago. TV brings so much death and destruction into our living rooms these days, they say, that we’ve become almost conditioned to the ugliness and brutality that the world can inflict on us without warning. The unforgettable images of 9-11 will remind us forever that there’s a dark side to Kennedy’s once-bright promise that anything is possible in America.

“We’ve seen so much that we’ve become nearly desensitized,” Easton said. “I don’t think an assassination could ever shock the country the way it shocked us then. We’ve been through too much; 1963 was so very different, but that innocence is gone.”