JFK assassination: 10 'where I was' stories

For the generation before them, it was news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But for baby boomers, the moment they learned of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is the historic event most frozen in memory. In "November 22, 1963," authors Jodie Elliott Hansen and Laura Hansen gather recollections from everyone from Julia Child to Bush 41 to average citizens as to where they were when they heard the news. Here are some of those stories.

1. Terry Baggett

Brian Snyder/Reuters
Walden Pond

Baggett was training for the Peace Corps in Boston

"I remember being a little surprised that many of the stores and businesses there (in Boston) were open per usual, although Kennedy's picture was in many store and shop windows. I also remember hearing a cannon in the Boston Common being fired many times, I think every hour... We rented a car on Sunday and were at Walden Pond when a complete stranger ran up to us with the news about Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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