Interior of the limousine in which JFK and Mrs. Kennedy had ridden.

For a long time, this was the date that stuck in our heads. We weren’t even born when Pearl Harbor was attacked and September 11 wouldn’t happen until the 21st Century. No, our date was November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

November 22 was a Friday that year. We were in high school and that’s where nearly all of us first heard the news. Most of us, I expect, then spent the weekend following the assassination with families, glued to the television set, watching the sad and momentous events taking place.

Odd, in a way, but I spent the weekend at Boston College. BC had earlier invited me and several other high school classmates to visit the campus, beginning the evening of November 22. As you might imagine, just about everything we were to do during that visit was canceled. Our arrival was scheduled for only a few hours following news of the assassination, however, and, communication being much slower and more limited those days, we showed up anyhow, not knowing.

We occasionally saw some of the TV coverage that weekend, but mostly moped about in a desultory way. (I did not see, for example, when Jack Ruby shot and killed the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.) We were supposed to attend the BC-BU football game scheduled for November 23 in Fenway Park. It was to have been the last game in the BC-BU series, but it never happened.

That weekend was the first time I was in Boston without my parents. I didn’t want to spend that Saturday night in the dorms. So a few of us took the T into town and went to Kenmore Square. We were underage and most everything was closed down anyway. We ended up in  the Kenmore Square Cinema, where we watched Lord of the Flies. That cheered us up. :)

While we were students at BC, there were memorial Masses for President Kennedy in our freshmen and sophomore years, on Monday, November 23, in 1964 and on Monday, Nov. 22, 1965. There was also an effort then, according to the Heights article “Kennedy Memorial Library Fund Drive in Last Phase,” to raise money for a library to commemorate JFK within the soon-to-be-built Institute for Human Relations building. Alas, the Human Relations building was not built and there is no JFK library on campus. (McGuinn Hall, which houses the Graduate School of Social Work, was under construction while we were at BC and opened in 1968.)

There is a memorial to a Kennedy on campus, but it is in honor of JFK’s older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., who was killed in WWII. The auditorium in Campion Hall was named in Joseph Kennedy’s honor when the building opened in 1955. There is a plaque in Campion honoring the older Kennedy brother.

In April 1963, only seven months before his death, President Kennedy was the main speaker at BC’s Centennial Convocation. As a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, JFK had been the speaker at BC’s 1956 Commencement, where he also received an honorary degree. At the Centennial Convocation, the President opened his address with a quip that generated much laughter. “It is a great pleasure to come back to a city where my accent is considered normal,” he said, “and where they pronounce the words the way they are spelled.”

Here is a video (11:27) from that event:

You can see in the image above, to the right of JFK, BC President Michael Walsh, SJ, and, a little more to the right, recently elected Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy. You can also see the typed speech, with his handmade changes, on the JFK Presidential Library and Museum website. You can also see the printed brochure for the entire Centennial Convocation there, following the speech.

JFK’s appearance on campus was before we got there, but his death was still deeply remembered when we were at BC. It is a sad and somewhat amazing reflection of the times that the assassination of JFK was still a fresh scar when we entered BC and, two days following our graduation in 1968, JFK’s brother, Robert, was fatally shot in California.

Boston skyline November 9, 1965. Boston Globe file photo Joe Dennehey.

Shortly after 5 pm on this date in 1965, the lights went out. And they would stay out for 13 hours. It was what was later termed the Great Northeast Blackout.

The loss of electrical power hit more than 35 million people in eight states: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. In Boston, people were trapped on the T and in elevators, and traffic was snarled even more than usual.

In 2015, the Boston Globe published an article about the blackout on its 50th anniversary. The Heights didn’t say much about it at all at the time. A truncated November 12, 1965, edition had a column called “Puff” in which item #5 was “Blackouts which force us to go four pages instead of twelve.” There was no mention I could find of it in the next Heights.

This time of year, it was dusk then, not quite complete darkness, though soon after it was dark. I remember very few details about that evening. What I recall is more a growing sense of concern as the power stayed off longer and longer. Just about all radio and TV stations were knocked off the air. If someone had a transistor radio, I assume people would have gathered around it.

The blackout would also have started around mealtime. Were meals still served in McElroy? Only uncooked options? We welcome recollections!

Classmate Bill Dalton performing on opening night, Middle Earth, November 11, 1966. Heights photo.

Football games, except for Holy Cross in 1967, ended in November, and for the most part basketball and hockey didn’t start until December. School was in forward gear, but thoughts of the Thanksgiving break . . . and the climactic Holy Cross football game . . . loomed large. Here’s some of what happened in Chestnut Hill and in the world in Novembers, 1964-67.

On campus

1964
The School of Education advised that, while there might be an exception or two, women students would not be permitted to marry as undergraduates. In the November 13 article, Mary Kinnane, dean of women at Education, said, “We adhere to the position that a woman cannot be a full time undergraduate student, a full time wife, and a full time homemaker.”

We elected class officers in each school, as reported in the November 20 Heights. Elected president were Peter Driscoll (A&S), Felix Albano (CBA), Peggy Grace (Nursing), and Kathy Cooney (Education).

1965
The requirement that Catholic students attend a religious retreat each year was cancelled. A Heights editorial in the November 5 issue entitled “Amen” praised the decision. It reported that an annual retreat was compulsory for all Catholic students a year before and argued that a “compromise” six months previous that had reduced the requirement to two retreats in four years was insufficient.

The November 19 edition contained an interview of Robert Drinan, SJ, dean of the law school, conducted by four Heights editors. Fr. Drinan was outspoken on many matters during the mid- and late-sixties and was elected in 1970 to Congress. He was re-elected four times and left Congress in 1981 after Pope John Paul II ordered all priests to withdraw from electoral politics. Fr. Drinan died in 2007.

1966
A two-day convocation November 11-12 marked the dedication of Higgins Hall, the new science center. The November 18 Heights article about the dedication reported that the building was named for John Higgins, a close friend of Boston businessman and philanthropist Stephen Mugar. Among the four scientists presented honorary degrees during the dedication ceremonies was James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, after whom the Van Allen radiation belts are named and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1960. An article in the November 4 Heights previewing the dedication provided additional information.

We’ll talk much more about the “coffee house” in O’Connell. Here we simply note that Middle Earth opened on November 11, as reported in the November 18 Heights. Among those appearing in the first talent lineup was classmate Bill Dalton.

1967
The November 3 Heights had several articles related to controversy generated by an incident at the BC Law School several days earlier when three members of the Law faculty confronted a representative of the Dow Chemical Co. on campus and asked that he leave. The Dow representative was there (BC Law was then in More Hall) to see three students who had signed up for interviews. Dow was the principal manufacturer of napalm, an incendiary chemical used by the US military in Vietnam and the focus of criticism. An estimated 200 Law students and faculty gathered to observe or participate in a debate over the actions of the faculty members. A Heights editorial on the subject criticized the faculty members’s attempt to bar the recruiter, saying, “No one has the right to judge another person’s worthiness in regard to his possible appearance on campus.” A followup article in the November 13 Heights reported on BC policy regarding on-campus recruiting and mentioned that Law students had voted 319 to 63 in support of a completely open recruiting policy.

About 400 students, faculty members, and staff attended a “Rally in Support of Troops in Vietnam” November 6 on the Bapst Library lawn. The rally was sponsored by the BC chapter of Young Americans for Freedom.

Classmate Richard Sawaya resigned as editor of The Stylus, the campus literary magazine, because of a censorship dispute, according to the top story in the November 17 Heights. Francis Sweeney, SJ, “advisor” to the magazine, had objected to a Sawaya story in which he described “an act of love between a man and his wife and the use of religious imagery in a sexual connotation in a second story, which Sweeney considered blasphemous,” the Heights reported. Sawaya and Fr. Sweeney had brought the issue to Carl Kowalski, director of student activities, who determined that faculty advisors did not have veto power over student decisions. Fr. Sweeney, appointed by the BC president, brought the issue to President Michael Walsh, SJ, who decided that Fr. Sweeney, in this case, did have veto power. The same issue carried a Heights editorial that criticized both the decision and the process that brought it about.

The outside world

1964
LBJ won big, easily defeating challenger Barry Goldwater on November 3, winning in 44 states and the District of Columbia. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connecting Staten Island and Brooklyn opened. English replaced Latin in Masses in the US.

1965
Days of Our Lives premiered on NBC. A crowd estimated at 15,000+ protested the Vietnam War in Washington, DC. US and North Vietnamese regular forces met for the first time in the Battle of Ia Drang.

1966
For the first time, the entire program lineup on NBC was broadcast in color. Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California. US bishops ended the rule that Roman Catholics could not eat meat on Fridays. Massachusetts voters elected Republican Edward Brooke to the US Senate, making him the first African-American senator since Reconstruction. The Washington Redskins defeated the New York Giants, 72-41, the highest scoring game in NFL history.

1967
Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) announced his candidacy for US President. US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara resigned.