I was in seventh grade that fall, in a brand new junior high (previously, the high school had included grades 7 through 12). In 1963, Vietnam was the setting for a novel, The Green Berets, and the source of exotic words one might catch in passing on the news, like 'Dien Bien Phu' and 'montagnards'. 'Civil rights' was something that occured in The South. In the Rust Belt, everyone was allowed to vote (often more than once an election), and everyone knew that blacks and whites went to different schools because they lived in different neighborhoods, and there were no school buses in our city.

Math class -- the "new math" every adult was whining about, including Tom Lehrer, but which gave us kids no problems. We were learning from the SMSG series: first time I'd seen a paperback textbook, set in typewriter font no less (it looked rushed, and in hindsight, it probably was).

Suddenly, with no prefacing announcement, the speaker above the door crackled into life, well into a radio news report from Dallas. It was early enough, in the timeline we've all memorized since, that all anyone knew was that the limo was rushing to the hospital. No one spoke -- the radio reception was bad enough that we had to listen hard.

At the end of the period, the bell rang and we went to our next class -- which for me was phys ed. We had just started to change into our gym clothes (you remember: uniform shorts and t-shirts) when the principal finally announced the death, and the closing of school.

As I said, there were no buses. Everyone was a walker (or a biker, but November on the southern end of Lake Michigan is not bicycle weather). If any of the group I walked with spoke on the way home, I don't remember. What I do remember is more violence -- I was watching when Ruby shoot Oswald -- and the instant comparisons to Lincoln (no one seemed to remember McKinley), and the collective grief of a nation, embodied in the voice of Walter Cronkeit narrating the funeral.

The following school year, a full decade after Brown v. Topeka Board of Ed., integration came to the white part of town, beginning with my 8th grade class. I've always wondered if Congressional resistance to the Civil Rights Act would have dissipated so readily, were it not for the 'monument factor'.