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JFK assassination: 10 'where I was' stories

"November 22, 1963" gathers dozens of "where I was" stories from the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

3. Christa Bock

R. Norman Matheny
Berlin residents climb onto the Berlin Wall after it was opened.

  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

Bock was living in West Berlin, Germany

"I was at home and was listening to music on the American Forces Network when the announcer interrupted the program with the news that the President of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy, had been shot.... That night there were hundreds of thousands of Berliners who mourned his death by joining in the torchlight march which ended at the Schöneberg Rathaus [city hall] where a memorial service was held for our American friend. I remember that thousands of Berliners had candles in their window that night as a sign of mourning for the dead chief-of-state. I am not aware of any specific reason, political or otherwise, why the people of my country loved John F. Kennedy so much, but they liked him very much even before his visit there during the summer of 1963. When he gave his famous speech, his words, 'Ich bin ein Berliner' just increased our endearment and affection for him."

3 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.

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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.

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