A day that turned to tragedy

If only it had kept raining that day.

The bubble-top would have been up on President John F. Kennedy's limousine. It would have prevented Lee Harvey Oswald's shot that coursed through JFK's brain - the shot “heard around the world.”

It had been raining but oh, so sadly for us, the skies cleared - the bubble-top went down.

I remember that I was 27 and working in The Gazette newsroom on Nov. 22, 1963. My department was across from the managing editor's office and I recall him standing in the doorway, head cocked, listening.

Puzzled, I wondered why he was standing there, so still, so long.

And then he strode across and told us. The wires soon click-click-clicked.

Shots in Dallas. Shots at the president.

Now wounded. Now gravely wounded.

Now …. dead.

We were all stunned. But we knew what we had to do: Tear the paper apart. We were an evening newspaper then, and people would be expecting “to read all about it” that night.

We had to work fast. We had to forget that an hour ago, Jack Kennedy was vital, charming, smiling.

But we worked as on autopilot. We had to get it in the paper.

I was in the women's department then and we yanked the smiling pictures of Jackie Kennedy in her pink suit and pillbox hat and waving her hand at the adoring crowds in Fort Worth - and changed the stories and the pictures. Into tragedy.

If it had only kept raining that day.

Shirley Ruedy

Cedar Rapids