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“A
Grassy Knoll in Chicago”
My first memory in my life was that of two faces on the television with large numbers
underneath their names. The newsman said after this long night, John F. Kennedy was now our new President, what ever that
meant. I don’t even know whom the other guy was since he did not get large enough numbers to become
President. I know my mother was happy with this result and I recalled earlier that day my mother taking me to the voting booth
where I had to stay outside while she pulled some levers behind the curtain of some mechanical device. I don’t remember
anything more about our new President for the next two years.
I do remember getting sick a lot with colds, flu and
chicken pox. One day I was playing with my best friend who happened to be a girl. She played the cowgirl
and I was her horse and she rode me around my kitchen of the duplex we lived in on the north side of Chicago. While I tried
to gallop around my kitchen, all of sudden my leg gave out. The next day I could not walk at all.
My mom took me to the doctor and he said I was seriously ill and had to go to the hospital. I had been to a hospital
before for my tonsils, and that was scary enough. It was a very frightening experience. This time I did not go home after
a day instead it took three weeks for me to walk again and leave hospital. I was told that I had rheumatic fever, what
ever that meant. But it attacked my knee somehow and that’s why I couldn’t walk.
Soon after I came home from the hospital, my parents decided to buy a townhouse on the northwest side of Chicago, near
the new expressway. I remember the sad day when I helped my parents pack up all our possessions on a rental
truck, said a final goodbye to my best friend who happen to be a girl, and rode to our new home. After
setting up our new home in October of 1962, we learned that President Kennedy was going to visit Chicago, and his motorcade
would pass right near my new house on the expressway. I remember that
day when the entire neighborhood, seemingly the whole city, lined the overpasses, the sides of the expressway and the on ramps
so we could see our President pass by on the way to a downtown hotel. We all heard he was a very friendly
man of the people and he might wave at us from the top of the Presidential limousine. On the day of the
visit I was luckier than most who came to see the President. I was on a grassy knoll in the center of the
cloverleaf entrance ramp of the expressway. The police allowed this because the expressway was closed to
normal traffic. I saw the Presidential motorcade drive by us, the thousand strong cheering Chicagoans proud to see their President
in person as it was. The limousine came within 75 feet of me and I saw the famous chestnut hair and the
profile of the man who I saw on television two years before for about two seconds before he went under the underpass. To my
disappointment he wasn’t waving at us on the top of the limousine. While all thousand of us were waving, cheering and
just enjoying this historic moment in our life, the President was looking down and looking very serious, not the friendly
man we elected two years ago.
 I was disappointed by my personal contact with my President,
a few days later I found out that the Soviet Union was building nuclear missiles in Cuba, and we might be going to war with
Cuba and the Soviet Union. I knew that a war with the Soviets might be with nuclear weapons. Even at eight
years old, I knew what a nuclear weapon could do. I watched a lot of scary movies by then, that showed
a nuclear bomb over a city would cause a five-mile wide fireball and incinerate everything within. During
that crisis I laid in my bed and thought what it would feel like to be incinerated, what would it be like to die?
President Kennedy somehow got the Soviet Union to remove those weapons and the thought of dying any minute went away.
For the next twenty-five years I still worried about dying that way.
 I didn’t
die by the “bomb” in 1963, but my old friend or fiend rheumatic fever came back and it was a four-week stay at
hospital. The illness did not hit my knee, but my heart. After a few days I was up and
mostly healthy even if the doctors did not agree. I was a veteran patient in the kid’s ward of this
hospital and my fellow kid patients would go out at night and race wheel chairs down the hall and I went with my fellow Catholic
patients to midnight mass even though I was not Catholic. It wasn’t so bad to be in the hospital
this time; my parents brought me chocolate malts. They also gave me a poster of my new favorite rock group the Beatles that
I heard for the first time on WLS radio during my hospital stay. My health was fine but I saw many kids
that did have severe health problems. One kid was seriously burned in a fire and another had an arrow shot
in his eye by his brother. I never heard if he lost his eye but it made us kids squeamish. A few adults
as well I think.
 After I got out of the hospital I still got colds and the flu;
my mother, who worked everyday had my grandmother take care of me during those common childhood illnesses. During
one such illness in November of 1963, I was home from school with my grandmother watching a boy at Bozo Circus on WGN television
going for bucket number six of the Grand Prize Game. The ball was in the air and well on course to land in the bucket for
the final round of prizes for this boy, when the screen went blank and a voice announced that shots had been fired at President
Kennedy’s motorcade during his visit to Dallas Texas. Within an hour we learned that the President had been hit by the
shots and he had died from his wounds.
 During the next few days
we had learned that he had died in an open limousine, from shots fired from a building behind his car while he was waving
at the cheering people in Dealey Plaza. I could not help but remember how I saw him secure in that limousine by my home 13
months ago and now he was there, in an open car and some evil person shot at him in Dallas. Later
the police said they found that person. We saw his assassin killed right before us all on
live television.
We were watching the sad formal funeral of our
fallen President. It was very sad to see his kids not much younger than I dealing with the death of their father, John-John
saluting his father’s casket and Jackie his wife lighting the eternal flame.
This public death taught all of us who lived through
it, the human process of death and mourning, which helped me deal with the death of my 32-year old brother, who died of brain
cancer eight years later. In 1964 my favorite group
the Beatles, helped the nation get over this tragedy with their appearance on Ed Sullivan. Beatle-mania
was well on its way. The new expressway by my house was renamed the Kennedy expressway. The space program
that President Kennedy believed in landed men on the moon by the end of the decade.
 Another of my brothers was drafted in 1966 to a war that I didn’t even know was happening in, Vietnam.
My brother didn’t want to join the Army or go to Vietnam or be a hero. In 1967 he was in the
Army and went to Vietnam as a medic. Surrounded by the Viet Cong and being shot at and shelled by mortars,
his fellow soldiers were being injured, killed and calling for a medic. He could have just stayed put in
his foxhole and be somewhat safe, but he didn’t. He did his job. He got many of
his fellow soldiers to the helicopter and saved a few poor souls that were there in this unfortunate war. The
Military gave him a bronze star for his bravery. But he knew better. His heroism was
being humane, not his desire to be a hero.I was only twelve when my brother went to Vietnam,
two years later I entered high school. President Nixon was trying to find a “peace with honor”
solution to this war. The “war” went on and on. My upper classmen were being
drafted by now. Most of them had three choices, the draft, Canada, or prison. Many of
these young people were protesting on the streets all over the country because they were being forced to make these bad choices.
As the conveyer belt of time seemed to send me down into that draft at the end of high school, I had to ponder my choice
too. There was also a fourth possibility, not becoming a draft status 1A. I thought maybe my two bouts
of rheumatic fever might make me a draft status of 4F and save me from going to the war. I don’t
want to say that I didn’t want to fight for my country, what ever that meant. I mean this country
was asking teenagers to die for this country in a war against Ho Chi Minh and his minions who didn’t hate us.
Although by this time they had killed fifty thousand of our soldiers, because we were in their country killing them.
As I was nearing the end of my high school days, I signed up for the draft, but by now Ho Chi Minh was dead and by some miracle
Nixon and Kissinger got their “peace with honor” and this amazing long sad war was over and I became the first
son in my family who never had to serve in the military.
 In 1974, I watched a television docudrama
called Missiles of October. This film was about John F. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.
In the film, Kennedy and his adviser learned of the presence of missiles in Cuba just days before a scheduled trip to Chicago.
Since the press had not found out about this yet he decided to go to Chicago anyway, so as not to trip off the press that
there was a serious problem developing. As I watched this I realized why this very friendly President was not so friendly
that day when I saw him in Chicago. He was about to tell us that maybe the world would come to an end soon, if he was not
very careful with the job we elected him to do. While this answered a personal question from my youth, I found it very
ironic that while I watched him from that grassy knoll in Chicago, saving the world for all of us. His life would end 13 months
later near another grassy knoll in Dallas.
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