The day JFK was assassinated (11/22/63)

On that fall day of the assassination, it was overcast and windy in Worthington, Minnesota. My oldest child was four and a half. The youngest was four months old. We lived in a trailer court on the edge of town in a two-bedroom mobile home. At 40' by 10', it was really crowded with our family of six, a dog and a cat. I was 23 years old.

The Mickey Mouse Club came on TV every afternoon at 4:00. When I turned on the TV for the kids to watch, there was only "snow". The TV antenna was positioned on a pole standing inside a cement block and braced by the trailer hitch at the front end of the trailer. The wind had spun it around it so it wasn’t picking up a signal from the TV station in Sioux Falls fifty miles away. Since this happened often, I ran outside to turn it so it would pick up the signal. I ran back inside to see if the picture was coming in. It was, but it wasn’t the Mickey Mouse Club. It was Walter Cronkite saying the president would be “lying in state".  I was confused and stunned as the terrible details were slowly revealed over the next hours and into the night. As the reports were repeated over and over, the reality slowly sank in. 

I had the TV on constantly for the next several days watching the continuous coverage in black and white. In the confines of the small mobile home, I was never far from the TV set so I was watching when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald live in front of millions of people.

I remember being very sad and feeling disconnected from the events so far away, and yet transpiring right in front of me on TV.

 

           This was taken in the mobile home the following year. 

Bad day for the Twin Cities

We had really bad storms move through the Twin Cities on Thursday and Friday nights. They were powerful storms with destructive lightning that caused a number of fires and straight-line winds that toppled hundreds of trees and caused wide-spread power outages. There are big sections of the area that have been without power for several days and won't get it back for several more days.

The terrible winds whipped up fierce sheets of rain that tore off lots of branches and along with them the birds and squirrels sheltered in them. The wooded lot is a shambles with broken branches everywhere. I keep looking out there to see if there are any survivors of the storm but nothing is stirring. I threw some birdseed down in there. This usually produces a several squirrels to come running. Today there is nothing.

The Wildlife Rehab Center is swamped with birds and animals rescued from downed trees. Sadly, there are many that cannot be rescued.

Welcome Spring!