It has been 45 years.

There is not enough one can say about this day if you are my age and were in the US in 1963. I was 11-1/2 at the time. Nothing much bad had ever happened to me as things went back then. Shortly after I was born we went into the eight Eisenhower years. When JFK was elected it was like all was great in the world. Not that the Ike years were so bad in retrospect but it seemed like we were moving into a whole new direction, the future, full of optimism.

Suddenly on one crisp, sunny autumn afternoon it all ended and everything changed. My sweet little innocent world was altered forever. Hell, two days later I saw the suspected ‘assassin’ gunned down on live TV. It was all cruel doses of reality delivered before I got through my ‘wonder years’.

For better or worse, I never really got over it.