Mrs. Powers and JFK

I’ve been meaning to write about the day President Kennedy got shot. But first, I’ll tell you about Mrs. Powers, my fourth grade teacher.

Mrs. Powers was probably in her 40s. Remember, no boy kid can ever tell how old his woman teacher is, I mean unless she’s clearly hot and in her 20s. Mrs. Powers was a sturdy looking woman, probably a smoker, with a stern Scottish face. She could probably drink her dates under the table, if she weren’t married. I have no idea if she drank or not, but she just looked like she’d be “not bad, once she got going.”

But she was usually quite stern with us, only rarely showing a slightly softer side. She used writing as punishment. Whenever I pissed her off enough, she’d make me write 50 times (100, if she was really po’d), “I will not bother my neighbor.” That may not seem like a lot, but it was. Once I even used carbon paper. She must have realized this, but didn’t seem to mind.

Once she caught Jeff Biggers reading Ian Flemming’s Thunderball, one of the the James Bond novels. Biggers wasn’t really “reading” it, he was just looking for the parts involving breasts. Anyhow, Mrs. Powers sees the book, walks over and snatches from Biggers, literally pinches it by the corner as if it were a filthy tissue, then takes it over and drops it in the trash. “That’s a nasty book!” she exclaimed, drawing out the word “nasty” like a sheep saying “baaaaaah.”

Jeff Biggers, by the way, was one of the funniest kids I ever knew. I once punched him really hard in the jaw. I wonder what he’s doing now.

Anyway, back to the Kennedy assassination. Let me first say that on the evening of November 22, 1963, I went to a football game with my Cub Scout troop. I know that sounds strange, but it was the Annual Detroit High School Friendship Game at Tiger Stadium, which pit together the best public and Catholic school football teams. They didn’t cancel it because, someone said, JFK wouldn’t have wanted them to. I mention this now because later it will seem anticlimactic.

Sometime in the early on that Friday afternoon, Mrs. Powers left the room for about 5 minutes. Of course we all started goofing off. But when she came back, instead of shouting at us, she just stood in the front of the room and said, “Class, I need to make an announcement. The President has been shot.”

We all got quiet. Roseanne Raidel and a couple other girls started crying. Boys started asking questions. “How? Where? Did the Russians do it?” Mrs. Powers answered calmly. “In his car, in Dallas Texas, we don’t know.”

After a few minutes of this, Mrs. Powers said, “We’ll all go over to the library. Mrs. Shay will tell us more about this.” Mrs. Shay was the librarian, who I used to like, until she turned against me.

We walked down the hall to the library. We sat in small groups; four or five little circles of little library chairs. My group was near the window. I sat across from Roseanne Raidel, a girl I always liked. She had stopped crying, but was holding it back. Mrs. Shay, who had not yet turned against me, pulled her big chair over to our group, sat down, and asked, “Does anyone have anything they want to say?”

Like a lot of families, the Shouses had a copy of Vaughn Meader’s LP record, The First Family. This was an album of funny sketches poking fun at JFK, Jackie Kennedy, and various other political figures of the time. Most kids who listened to The First Family gradually gathered the ability to do a bad JFK impersonation, and I was no different. So when Mrs. Shay asked, “Does anyone have anything to say?” I replied that I thought that if President Kennedy could talk to us, he would say (and this was in my best bad JFK voice), “Let us proceed with vigah!” (“Vigah” as in “vigor,” a word Kennedy seemed often to use.)

Mrs. Shay smiled (this was not what turned her against me). But Roseanne Raidel’s face soured as she said, “Roger, I don’t think that’s funny at all!” I hadn’t really meant it to be funny. I was just trying to cheer people up, as if a presidential assassination was like losing a dollar.

They might have let us out of school early that day, I can’t remember. We rode the bus home. I got off at the usual corner and ran home to tell my mom the news. I sped around the corner at the back of the house and up to the back door. I pulled it open and started to exclaim, “Mom! The President was…..” Before I could finish the sentence, I looked up and saw my mom sobbing. I’d never seen that before. I’d never seen my mom cry.

Coming soon: Why did I punch Jeff in the jaw?