down the hallway toward geometry class. Something was happening. The teachers had come out into the hall and were herding students into classrooms.
“Don’t go to your next class. Come into my room. Quickly,” said a teacher to me.
The halls were cleared. There was an eerie silence. Is the place on fire? Have the Russians decided to attack after all? Has somebody been caught chewing gum? I noticed the teacher sitting in the desk in front of me. She was holding back tears.
The voice. I had heard that powerful voice so many times, but now it seemed to crack and strain.
“Your attention, please,” said Mr. Evans over the intercom. “We have just received word that President John Kennedy has been shot in Dallas. We have no other word at this time. May we all bow our heads in prayer.”
I can’t remember Mr. Evans’s prayer word-for-word. It’s been more than twenty years. But I think I can still manage its essence:
“Gawd, Our Father. We beseech Thee. A brilliant young leader has been shot. He is a man we love. He is a man we trust. He is our president. Our Father, we beseech Thee now to rest Your gentle hand upon this man and to spare him, O Gawd. Spare him, so that he can continue to lead us, to guide us, to keep us safe from our enemies, to show us how to make our country even greater, to bring justice to all our people, to make for these students, who soon will go out into the world alone, a safe and shining place to live and work and grow fruitful. Spare John Kennedy, O Gawd. Spare our beloved president. Amen.”
We raised our heads. No one spoke. Some of the girls cried.
“Maybe it’s not true,” somebody finally said.
“It’s true,” said someone else, “or Mr. Evans wouldn’t have stopped classes for it.”
All doubt then faded. It was true.
We waited. I don’t know how long we waited. Maybe it was seconds. Maybe it was minutes. Finally, the voice came back again.
“Students and faculty of Newnan High School,” Mr. Evans began, “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is dead.”
The class idiot was Harley Doakes, whose father hated Kennedy because he had wanted to desegregate the schools. When Mr. Evans announced that the president was dead, Harley Doakes cheered. Somebody in the back of the room threw a book at him and called him a stupid son of a bitch.
* * *
Nothing was the same after that. Ever again. I trace my world going completely bananas back to that single moment when the shots first cracked in Dallas.
What, if anything, has made any sense since? John Kennedy was dead and we were left with Lyndon Johnson, who was low enough to pick up a dog by its ears. He proceeds to get us involved up to our ears in Vietnam, and when he finally decides he’s had enough, here comes Nixon again. Why wouldn’t this man just go away?
I had all sorts of trouble trying to decide who I wanted to be president in 1972. Picking between Richard Nixon and George McGovern was like picking between sores in your mouth or a bad case of hemorrhoids. I wanted Nixon out, but I didn’t want McGovern in.
McGovern was the hippie candidate. I had been raised a patriot. I reluctantly voted for Nixon. I admit he did a few things. He opened China, although I’m still not sure what good it did. If you’ve seen one Chinese urn, you’ve seen them all; I still don’t know how to use chopsticks; and I never did like sweet and sour pork.
It was under Nixon that Vietnam finally came to a merciful end, of course, and there was that marvelous, moving moment when the POW’s came home, but it was impossible for me to put heroic garb on Richard Nixon. There always was the nagging feeling each time I saw him or listened to him that he was somehow putting a Bobby Entrekin shuck on me.
Watergate was all I needed. There I had been a decade earlier — a high school senior with a crew cut and even clearer-cut ideals and values. Then the president is shot, and next comes Vietnam, and then somebody shoots Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King is gunned down, and another assassin puts George Wallace in a wheelchair for life. And on top of that, we find out the current president is, indeed, a crook (not to mention a liar with a filthy mouth) and he’s run out of office practically on a rail.
I no longer had any idea what to believe or whom to trust. I was nearing thirty, and practically every sacred cow I had known had been butchered in one way or another.
Nothing was the same anymore. I had seen students burning campus buildings and students being gunned down on campuses by National Guardsmen.
I had been divorced once by then and was working on a second. Half the country was smoking dope. Gasoline was four times what it had cost before. Men were growing their hair over their ears and wearing double-knit trousers.
And they weren’t singing the old songs anymore, either. In fact, it was soon after the death of John Kennedy that the music headed somewhere I didn’t want to go.
If Elvis was a break between me and my parents and my roots, then it was The Beatles who forced me back toward them.
Where Rock ’n’ Roll Went Wrong
AS MOST MUSIC historians know, soon after Elvis became the undisputed King, Colonel Tom Parker hid him out for nearly the next two decades. The only time we were able to see him was at a rare concert or in one of those idiotic movies he began making, such as Viva Las Vegas, which featured Elvis singing and mouthing ridiculous dialogue while several dozen scantily-clad starlets cooed and wiggled. Today, Elvis movies normally are shown very late at night after the adults have gone to bed, so they won’t be embarrassed in front of their children.
However, the rock ’n’ roll storm that Elvis started did not subside after he took leave of the public. As a matter of fact, the music flourished and reached new heights, and when it got its own television show, our parents’ battle to save us from what some had considered a heathen sound was over. They had lost.
Dick Clark was apparently a very mature nine-year-old when he first appeared on “American Bandstand,” because that has been nearly thirty years ago and he still doesn’t look like he has darkened the doors to forty.
Bandstand. I wouldn’t miss it for free Scrambler rides and cotton candy at the county fair. The music they were playing was our music, and the dances they were dancing were our dances. It was live on television, and Philadelphia, from whence Bandstand came, was the new center of our universe. (Previously, it had been Atlanta, where our parents occasionally took us to see the building where they kept all the things you could order from the Sears Roebuck catalog, and to wrestling matches and gospel singings.)
Danny Thompson and I always watched Bandstand together in the afternoons. Danny was not nearly the geographical wizard I was (I had been born seventy-five miles from Moreland in Ft. Benning, Georgia, and had traveled as far away as Arkansas as the quintessential Army brat before my parents had divorced) so anything that had to do with where some place was, Danny asked me.
“Where is Philadelphia, anyway?” he queried one afternoon as we watched the kids on Bandstand do the Hop to Danny and the Juniors’s “At the Hop.”
“Pennsylvania,”
