On this day, November 22, 1963, US President John F Kennedy, JFK, was shot dead.
In a poignant piece on RTE’s Rising Time programme this morning, Sheelagh Coyle, a long-time resident in The Rock in Laois, recalled her memories of that day in the Word in Edgeways segment.
You can read the piece below, or listen back on this link here.
On this day, sixty years ago, the president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in Texas. It’s probably only those of us over 70 who now remember that day.
So, if you were alive then, like me, where were you?
I was not at home. I was a boarder in the Convent of Mercy in Moate in Co. Westmeath.
At Christmas every year the school produced a musical.
The parish priest of Moate had been buried on that same day, a Canon Pinkman, and as a mark of respect, the musical rehearsals had been put on hold.
I remember that some of us chorus girls were sitting by the piano in the dining room waiting for a nun to join us to play the songs we needed to learn for the musical.
Then, suddenly one of the day girls came in and announced the astonishing news of the death of the American president.
She told us about a newsflash and of Charles Mitchell, the RTE newsreader, interrupting a television programme to tell the country about this terrible event. We all froze and were completely stunned.
The nun arrived then and for the next hour we just sat and talked about it. Not a note was played.
None of us got to see or hear the funeral as we had neither radios nor televisions in the school. But the day girls kept us informed and we then heard two days later of the shooting of the main suspect Lee Harvey Oswold.
We’d all remembered the president’s visit to Ireland that summer. Of 1963. We remembered his charm, his good looks and the huge excitement generated by his presence in the country of his ancestors.
For he had been a star performer with wonderful speeches delivered as we’d never heard from our own leaders. We’d watched him on television and television was very new to us then in the Midlands. The rented set in our house was only 6 months there.
We had all been saddened when his newborn son Patrick died not long after his visit that summer. And now his life had ended so abruptly.
We thought of Jacqueline, his wife and their two children in the aftermath of the assassination and we prayed for them all at night prayers.
We were absolutely fascinated at that time by the Kennedy family in Ireland. We constantly saw photos of those beautiful people on holidays in Hyannis Port. We had followed all the gossip and all the trivia about them. They were far removed from us in so many ways in the sixties. But those of us who were alive 60 years ago will once again recall today where we were when news first reached us of the death of President John F Kennedy.
Go ndeanai Dia trocaire ar a anam.
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