Hank Whittemore's Memoir

November 22, 2009 will mark the forty-sixth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.  On that terrible day of November 22, 1963, I was in New York City…

New York City - November 22, 1963

Earlier that year I had graduated from the University of Notre Dame.  On the third of November, I had celebrated my twenty-second birthday.  Now I was in Manhattan having lunch with a fellow actor, Richard Fithian, at 666 Fifth Avenue.

I had met Dick in the summer of 1959 when I was seventeen and he was several years older, in his twenties.  We had acted together in Blue Denim at the Barn theater of Mount Kisco, NY.  Heading the cast was the beautiful and talented Eileen Fulton, then just twenty-six years old, who would go on to become a great TV star as Lisa in the long-running soap opera As The World Turns.

After lunch we divided the tab and Dick went up to the cashier to pay while I made a call.  I sat inside one of the several large wooden phone booths with folding glass doors along the wall.  When I hung up and turned around, I saw through the glass that long rows of patrons were lined up at the booths, mine included.  It was a strange sight that made no sense.  Why would so many people be making calls all of a sudden?

I opened the door and made my way to the cashier’s desk, where Dick was waiting.

Jackie and Jack - this is how it had been in New York - this is how we thought of them

“What’s going on?” I said.

“The president’s been shot!”

“What?”

“He was shot in the head, I think.”

We were already out on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue.

“My god,” I said.

The city was gray and bleak.  It seemed that everything had come to a standstill.  The street seemed to be covered with silence.  People appeared to be moving in slow motion.  At street corners, men had stacks of newspapers with freshly printed headlines for sale.  The papers reported that Kennedy had been shot, but there were few details.

Dick and I wandered up Fifth Avenue until we came to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  A crowd was out in front of the huge church, on the steps.  People were waiting around for something to happen and we automatically joined them.

St. Patrick's Cathedral

“Is he dead?” a man in the crowd yelled out.

“If he’s dead,” another man hollered out, causing all heads to turn in his direction, “the bells will ring!”

Just a few seconds later the bells of St. Patrick’s Cathedral began to ring.  They rang loudly and the entire crowd on those steps fell to its collective knees.  We all dropped down, kneeling together, knowing at once that our young vibrant president was gone.  Some began praying aloud; others wept; nothing made sense and we knew the world would never again be the same.  The world would be forever different than what it had been a second ago.  It was impossible, it could not have happened, but President Kennedy was dead.

Later, along the West Side Highway, many cars heading north out of the city were parked over on the side, their drivers hunched over as they listened intently to their radios.

I kept driving back north to Larchmont, where I had grown up, and where I was now living with my young wife and our baby girl, Eva, who had been born just two months earlier.   Some time in the future, I told myself, I will tell her about this day.  I will try to tell her the meaning of November 22, 1963, if only I could learn what it was.