On the Thanksgiving after the JFK assassination, a small Pennsylvania town was still dazed - but Santa was coming
People in North East, Pennsylvania, woke up Nov. 28, 1963 still making sense of John F. Kennedy's murder even as they prepped for holiday shopping and Christmas.
Sixty years ago, northwest Pennsylvanians woke up to this reflective, yet unifying North East Breeze on Nov. 28, 1963. They walked outside to 40-degree temperatures, a clear sky, a northern wind. They bent over, picked it up and began reading it eagerly, I imagine.
A gunman killed the president six days earlier in the middle of the day, then another man killed the gunman, also in public. They had the Thursday off because it was Thanksgiving.
The newspaper captures an interesting moment in American history as people actually experienced it in North East, Pennsylvania, a small town along Lake Erie between Buffalo and Cleveland. It’s awkward: tragedy entwined with “well, we have stuff to do.”
John F. Kennedy’s portrait at the top of the front page, Christmas carolers at the bottom. A story about memorial services honoring the president next to a bolded headline saying Santa Claus is coming to town.
Then a highly questionable reprint of an article written two years earlier by 14-year-old Margaret Graham. The editors clearly plucked the grisly parts to rerun on, of all days, Thanksgiving. In it, Margaret praises JFK, then just 10 months on the job, but also speculates on how his presidency will play out: being killed is one of the options. The headline “North East Girl Predicts Assassination of Kennedy” seems a bit of a stretch. But there it is, just above the banking hours.
The paper is mostly ads. Black Friday before we called it that. A table and chairs for $11.77. Monopoly cost $3.33, Clue $2.98 and Sorry $2.27.
Then there’s more evidence life goes on. In the “Personalgraphs” section, the Montgomery’s had a baby girl, the Youngs family went to a wedding in Buffalo, and “Mr. Harold Beebe is under observation at Hamot Hospital Room 502 and would enjoy hearing from his friends.”
Mixed in are Thanksgiving ads people no doubt rewrote in the last minute to strike a more somber tone, like this one for The National Bank of North East: “During this Thanksgiving week so complicated by the injustice that was beset us all, let’s remember the things which we do have to be thankful for. A strong, continuing government, peace, freedom, religion by choice, prosperous farmland, a spirited, active community, lasting friendships.”
It ends: “We urge everyone to give special thought to all the meanings of Thanksgiving and to go to church this weekend.”
Then on Page 4 a searing tribute to JFK traces his journey from WWII and the presidency, to his death and burial (just three days earlier) at Arlington National Cemetery.
Later this Thanksgiving Day, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, would make a 10-minute national address, where he’d rename the NASA space launch center in Florida for Kennedy and try to rally people to use the “midnight of tragedy” to “move toward a new American greatness.”
I’m Sean Rossman, a writer and editor exploring many subjects, like that Nate Bargatze joke. I’ve also written about why you should have a baby during a big tennis tournament, lessons learned from marathon training, and how to write about relationships and ages. If this work connected with you, subscribe below.