This year, Thanksgiving falls on sad anniversary

When Courtney Williams looks at this month’s calendar, she sees Thursday as Thanksgiving — nothing more.

The 22-year-old from Lynn­wood said “it never would have occurred to me” that this year’s holiday falls on the date President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The date Nov. 22, 1963, wasn’t drilled into her memory in school, said Williams, who was sitting Tuesday in the Everett Public Library’s Espresso Americano coffee shop.

For people my age and older, it’s a date chiseled as deeply into our minds as Dec. 7, 1941, is for those of my parents’ generation. For me, Nov. 22 can’t pass without a thought of the national tragedy: I was in fourth grade at Spokane’s Jefferson Elementary School. Mrs. Komp took us to the gym. A radio was on. Teachers were crying. They sent us home.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, it will have been 44 years since that day. It’s such a monumental memory, I can barely believe that many Americans are too young to share it.

This fall brings new reminders of how long it’s been since 1963. On Oct. 15, a woman born just after midnight on Jan. 1, 1946, officially became the first member of the baby boom generation to apply online for Social Security retirement benefits, for which she’ll be eligible as she turns 62 next year. Earlier this month, Tom Brokaw’s book “Boom! Voices of the Sixties” was published, taking a long look back at the boomers’ heyday. His timeline runs from the 1963 assassination to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

What I’m struck by, as the anniversary and Thanksgiving coincide, is how much our culture has changed in 44 years.

Back then, Nov. 22 seemed a long, long time before Christmas. Part of that perception may be because I was a child, anxious for Christmas toys. Even so, microfilm of this newspaper from Nov. 22, 1963, shows a time when the holiday shopping season wasn’t backed up to before Thanksgiving.

Inside that newspaper — which had the headline “President Kennedy is Killed!” above The Everett Herald name — were no ads for holiday gift sales, although Thanksgiving was only six days off.

The Everett YMCA advertised a ski school, there were sketches of Bestform knee-length girdles. Fish and chips at Taylor’s Ferry Lunch cost $1. Christmas wasn’t mentioned in a single ad.

That’s how I remember it, too. It was late fall, not the start of what we now call “the holidays.” Darkness came early, but weeks would pass before anyone put up Christmas lights.

It was the first time I can remember the TV being on for days — and it was just a few days. That, too, strikes me as a great difference from what would happen today if such a shocking event were to occur.

Nov. 22, 1963, was a Friday. By 4:30 a.m. the next day, an autopsy had been performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital and President Kennedy’s body was returned to the White House, where it remained for 24 hours. That Sunday, Kennedy’s coffin was carried on a horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol to lie in state. And on Monday, Nov. 25, 1963, dignitaries from all over the world attended the state funeral at St. Matthew’s Cathedral before Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Did it really happen so quickly? By Thanksgiving, Nov. 28, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson was asking that Americans remain “determined that from this midnight of tragedy we shall move toward a new American greatness.”

Karen Charnell, executive director of the Snohomish Senior Center, was 13 when Kennedy died. “I remember stunned silence,” said Charnell, who was a middle school student in Port Angeles in 1963. “Nobody really told us. I was in the lunchroom, and I think it was one of those things, somebody told somebody told somebody. It spread like wildfire.

“My family didn’t talk about those things. It was that era, you were protected. What that did to somebody our age, it became very confusing,” she said. “The foundation had been shattered.”

Dick Sims, 73, of Lake Stevens, was only 29 that day, but his memory is clear. He worked at Boeing’s Plant 2 on E. Marginal Way in Seattle.

“They came over the address system to say that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas,” he said. After hearing Kennedy had died, he went home. “I watched it all on TV. There was nothing else on,” he said.

This year it’s Thanksgiving. Other years, for a growing number of Americans, it’s just another day in the hectic shopping season.

Not for me, though. Not for millions of other Americans. Nov. 22? “I never forget that,” Sims said.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.