A Former Janitorial Assistant's Remembrances of November 22, 1963

View of Mt. Rainier from Kent, Washington

Two time zones west of Dallas at Kent-Meridian High School, it was actually just after 10:30 AM, third period, when we heard over the public address system:  "President Kennedy has been shot." Ironically, it was P.E. class and we were receiving a Physical Fitness Text mandated by the President's Council on Physical Fitness; a mile run, rope climb to the top of the gym, standing broad jump, pullups, situps, agility test and lifting 100 lbs.

Fourth period was typing class.  Girls who were possibly future secretaries sat on the right side of the room behind electric typewriters with the rest of us getting manual ones.  The earlier announcement about the president made the mood an entirely somber one.   For a kid growing up on TV westerns, getting "shot," meant getting killed, so I never considered the possibility of recovery.  After the bell rang, that potentiality was negated with words from Principal J. Arthur Stewart:  "President Kennedy has died."

'47 Dodge

After school I worked for a janitorial service named A.B.C. Maintenance("Always Be Clean") to be first in the phone book.  George Pringle, a manic-depressive, who played boogie-woogie piano when he was down, operated his business out of a '47 Dodge with fluid drive and paid me $1.25 per hour, the same hourly wage Lee Harvey Oswald, the President's assassin, received for temporary full-time work at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.  The back seat was removed from George's Dodge and the rear cavity including the trunk was filled with mops, buckets, wax and a floor buffer.

Our cleaning job the evening of 11/22/1963 was a small radio station on the highway between Kent and Renton, Washington, a routine job of emptying trash cans, cleaning the rest rooms, sweeping and dusting.  One of the rooms contained a teletype machine.  News releases from Reuters News Service were mechanically printed by the machine, then deposited in a tray below, folded back and forth along a perforated crease.  Most of the news items that night were condolences issued by governments from around the world and details about the assassination.  Mesmerized while reading, I forgot my work for several minutes.

That night I put my ear to the speaker cloth of an old world radio/shortwave/longwave borrowed from my grandfather. With a gentle control of the dial, you could tune in the BBC, Radio Moscow, stations from around the world.  I got little out of the oriental music, followed by Chinese, Thai or Japanese, but many of the stations broadcast in English.  That night, it was all about the assassination.  I remember thinking that, even though, the Russians hated us, they still were civil enough to convey their sympathies.

I do recall worrying about the career of Vaughn Meader, a comedian whose career was nearly 100% based on imitating JFK.  One of my friends, Jerry, had the album, "First Family," which was

Vaughn Meader

worth one listen.  Most of the pics I saw of Lee Harvey Oswald showed him in a white t-shirt.  I was watching TV live when Jack Ruby killed him.

The funeral, the honor guard, the eternal flame, Jackie, John John, Caroline, LBJ's swearing in. That's all a blur.  We all saw the same stuff.   It was the image of Kennedy we admired, not the man we really didn't know.  He looked like a movie star compared to the buffoonish, beyond crude Nikita Kruschchev, his Russian counterpart, but more importantly, won the showdown during the Cuban missile crisis even if he flunked out on the Bay of Pigs.