On the early morning of June 5, 1968, classmate and roommate Richard Sullivan shook me awake at about 3 or 4 to tell me, “Bobby Kennedy’s been shot.”

I was, of course, stunned, as I’m sure you were when you first heard. Didn’t we just experience the assassination of Martin Luther King? What’s going on? I hung on to the fact that I knew only he had been shot. Maybe he would survive. . . . No, he died 26 hours after being shot.

I post about this on this blog, because, while the shooting of RFK did not fall specifically within the time we were at BC, neither did the assassination of his brother, John F. Kennedy, in November 1963, but they were tragic bookends to our college years.

Most of us, by that time, had gone our separate ways after graduation on June 3. There was no group or institutional response, no Heights, no University gathering, as there had been when Dr. King had been killed in April.

As college students, we had some wonderful times, times we celebrate and remember during this reunion. But we also were college students during some terrible times. I’m certain we remember many of those times, too.