Hairs on my neck rose as Marcia Smith talked. Tears welled, too. No kidding.
“We did see Air Force One come in for a landing,” she was saying. “And we did see the casket being unloaded. I had a very clear view of Jackie Kennedy in her pink suit with the blood still on it,” her husband’s blood.
“It was an experience. Just unbelievable.”
Got goose bumps yet? Well, you had to be there.
A lot of us were. All baby boomers know where we were the instant we heard President Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963.
(Me? Judge High School, Friday Mass. The teachers in my row muttered “… President … Dallas … Governor Connally …” and then came the announcement: “Please pray for the president, who is very ill.”)
But how many took part and thought their part was long gone until it slammed them?
Earlier this year, Marcia burst into tears in front of a display of an old telephone switchboard at the Route 66 Museum in Barstow, Calif.
Her grandchildren were puzzled. So was she. When she figured out why, she decided to write, to tell her grandkids about switchboards and Kennedy.
Marcia lives in Farr West now, but in 1963, she was “just a girl from Plain City” who joined the Air Force.
On Nov. 22, she was working the telephone switchboard at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C.
Old-style switchboard, with lights and plugs. Marcia’s supervisor “nudged me to plug in, and I looked, and it was a national emergency priority one call, and we received the word Kennedy had been shot and he was on his way to Parkland Hospital,” in Dallas, where he was pronounced dead.
“The whole switchboard just lit up like a Christmas tree. There was not one bulb that was not lit up, and we did not get a chance to go to lunch.”
At 5 p.m., they went out to watch Air Force One land.
“The following day, I was called to my first sergeant, and I was asked if my class A uniform was clean. I said yes, it was.”
And that’s how she got to march in Kennedy’s funeral parade.
“So I had a part in history, a little girl from Plain City, that will be forever in my mind. Black Jack the horse. Little John-John. I was there. I saw it.”
I can see those things again in my mind’s eye, but who, today, remembers that Black Jack was the riderless horse in that parade, representing a fallen leader? That John-John was John F. Kennedy Jr., 3, looking so cute saluting his dad’s casket?
Who even remembers Kennedy?
We’re talking nine presidents ago. Smith said her grandchildren know the name, know he was shot. But that’s it.
Not their fault. Wars have come and, mostly, gone. Man landed on the moon. Clinton was impeached. 9/11 is now most people’s “where were you?” moment.
History books rarely tell what history was like. Marcia remembers it as a national moment of pure sorrow.
Marching in that funeral parade, Smith said, “I looked at the people standing around us and the tears and the heartache and the sorrow. Oh my goodness, how could you not be impacted by something that was so deeply felt?
“The incident down in Barstow showed me that this is part of history, and I need to put it down for my kids as well as anyone else who might want to read it.”
So she is, word by word, memory by memory.
So others will know.
The Wasatch Rambler is the opinion of Charles Trentelman. He can be reached at 801-625-4232, or ctrentelman@standard.net. He also blogs at www.standard.net.
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