Today is the sixty-year anniversary.
Sixty years is a very long time.
But, for all of us who grew up here in Dallas, our city still lives with the legacy of the Kennedy assassination.
This is a very old song I wrote to name what it felt like to grow up here, in the shadow and shame of that day. Not what it felt like for me, because I was a baby at the time, but what it felt like for the other adults that I knew growing up.
The reality is this: none of the adults in MY life ever talked about the Kennedy assassination.
Nobody.
Never.
It was years before I realized that it actually happened just a few miles from where I lived. It was years after that, when I could drive a car, that I found “The School Book Depository.”
And even that was hard, because in those days there was no marker, no acknowledgement, of any kind, anywhere near Dealey Plaza.
I grew to understand all this was, in part, because of this very shame, visited upon my city in the aftermath.
Dallas was blamed for this tragedy in a way that no other American city has ever been blamed for any other contemporary shooting, ever since. Maybe they’re just so ubiquitous now…but nobody ever tries to blame Las Vegas, or El Paso, or Columbine.
But it is absolutely true that for years after the shooting, people tended to blame Dallas.
Some of that came from the very church I served for seventeen years. I’ve written before about Rev. Bill Holmes’ sermon just after the assasination. It was the stuff of legends at Northaven UMC…that one sermon literally changed the trajectory of that church.
Here’s the text and a brief video excerpt from it.
And here is my own sermon from the fifty year anniversary, ten years ago this week.
We would hear about it on vacations, when folks learned where we were from. I even heard it from Russians in Russia.
I tend to believe this was because the Kennedy assassination was the first in a tragically, long line of American shooting events. And, as we still do to this day, we always go looking for “reasons” to make the non-sensical make sense.
To this day, we want to know about the shooters, their motives, their histories, every horrible second of every event. But we no longer blame the cities.
The fact that Dallas was indeed (as the song names) an ultra conservative place at the time…that no doubt played into all this it. I get it.
The blame no doubt led to shame, which no doubt supercharged Dallas’ desire to “look good,” ever since…to be the “city that works.” All of Dallas’ obsession with image, it all goes back to the blame and shame.
This has been said many times.
What has NOT been said very often is what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of all of this. So, that’s why I wrote the song…to talk about all of us from here who live here still.
But, sixty years is a loooong time.
For some perspective, do a thought experiment concerning Pearl Harbor. For me, Pearl Harbor is an event of the long-ago past. Although just 20-years after my birth, throughout my life it’s felt like ancient history. That said, the 60-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor was 2001…just in time for its memory to be eclipsed by a new, historic tragedy.
I suppose my point is, Pearl Harbor has always felt ancient…super ancient even in 2001…in a way that Kennedy does not…at least to those of us who grew up here.
Last year, I gave an oral history interview at the The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza with Curator Stephen Fagin.
I still maintain that this museum itself is the primary reason Dallas has started to heal from this tragedy. As a pastor, it seems to me it’s become holy site of memory…a place for natives to quietly come to terms with it all the things we never talked about….a “thin place” where we can name the unamable we all would rather forget.
But one of the points Stephen noted then was that as they began putting their 60-year commemoration together, they were finding fewer and fewer contemporary folks to interview.
I suggested to him that one of the stories at play here in Dallas is those of us in the “next generation;” those of us not “there that day,” but who grew up in the aftermath.
Those of us with Kevin Bacon numbers of “1” related to the folks involved, and the places involved. I mean, I don’t have to think too long and hard to find half a dozen connections.
— Oswald’s “rooming house” in Oak Cliff is still place you can visit, and msyelf and a church member did last year.
— The Texas Theater little over a mile from Kessler Park United Methodist Church, and is owned by Barak Epstein, a neighbor who lives two blocks away from where I’m writing this.
— My dear church member and friend, Brett Shipp’s Dad was one of the key reporters, on scene, telling the first horrible stories.
— The James Myers’ Father (James is with us on “Coffee on the Porch” each week) knew Jack Ruby.
But my best example of this “small world” quality is in the marriage of Charles Geilich and Judge Mary Brown. They’ve been our dear friends for decades, but in just their little family, they’ve got TWO connections…Mary’s grandfather was the judge in Jack Ruby’s trial, and Charles’ father was a doctor at Parkland.
My point is, there are fascinating connections still, because for those of us who grew up here, we remember that “small town” feel of Dallas
It WAS a small place…it still feels that way to us.
And we still interact with the ghosts of Kennedy, every day.
What the song and video try to capture is…the JOY of that day…the PRIDE of that day. The video helps us remember some this, since it all gets swept away with what came next.
Just take a look at all those smiling faces…HOW HAPPY THEY ARE.
That happiness was a real, if fleeting, thing. And deserves to be remembered.
Now, recall how, moments later, all these folks –and all their children and grandchildren, in very personal and lifelong ways– would live under the weight of the fact that it happened HERE…would always suffer those feelings of shame and blame.
The whiplash of that…this is what I’d hoped to capture in this song.
Much of the “shame” of the event has passed now, dying out with our parent’s generation.
But I will offer this song, once again, for of us who hail from here. This is OUR song.
Alan Gann told me years ago, “only somebody from Dallas could have written this song…”
That’s probably right.
Write what you know.
And honor that past…
Coda: I’ve written seven other blog entries on the Kennedy assasination over the years.
You can find them all here.