On that Friday morning, Woodstock actress, Sara Mulligan, was making her way from her home on Glasco Turnpike to the library in Port Ewen where she was scheduled to give a children’s reading. When the news broke over her car radio she simply turned the car around and headed back to Woodstock. Once home, she sat with family before their television for the next four days. We were “just stunned.”
Radio also signaled the warning to other Woodsckers as well. Vince Christofora, proprietor of Woodstock Meats and who, in 1963, had recently moved to Woodstock, was in Woolworth’s on Ulster Avenue that afternoon (where Ulster County now maintains an office complex between Kingston and the Town of Ulster). When word came, Christofora recalls, every one in the store just “stopped shopping” and gathered around a radio that was playing in the center of the store. As news of the president’s death followed a short time later, those who had gathered around the radio began to slowly peel away — to go where they needed to go.
For Woodstock Supervisor, Jeremy Wilber, much of the entire event played itself over radio. At home on that Friday, admittedly faking a “bellyache to stay home from eighth grade classes,” Wilber was reading in his bedoom when his mother “burst into” his room with the report that “the president has been shot.” Without access to a television, Wilber recalls, “we hurried to our 1955 Chevy station wagon to listen to updates on the radio. We did not know the president’s wounds were fatal. In moments the president’s death was reported. My mother wept. Soon after school buses brought kids home early. I met my friends. We were all numb with shock and disbelief. I think it was a sunny day.”
There was a man marked with the scars of his love of country, a body active with the surge of a life far, far from spent and, in a moment, it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.
For so many who, like Wilber, are members of the “baby-boom generation,” the events of those four days 50 years ago played out in similar fashion. We were in school on the Friday before Thanksgiving week. Loudspeakers brought the news. Lynn Sehwerert, Woodstock’s Deputy Town Clerk, remembers that she was walking down the main hallway at Onteora when the PA system erupted. “I just stopped moving. I didn’t know what to do.” A junior in high school at the time, her memory still calls up the smallest of details, “I remember making eye contact with the hall monitor,” as if to ask “what do I do?”
Janine Fallon-Mower was in her third grade class at Lake Katrine Elementary School and still recalls, after being put on the bus early to head home, the uncertainty of the moment. Sitting alone as the bus rumbled towards Woodstock, she remembers, “looking out the window as the bus driver navigated the sharp turn on Zena Road just past where the MacLeods use to live, wondering what had happened? I knew the president had been killed, but I didn’t know what that meant.”
Deborah Allen Heppner (this writer’s wife), a seventh grader at the time, remembers the word spreading up and down the corridors of Onteora as teachers tried to explain the unexplainable. She too recalls the bus heading home. “As we came down Glasco Turnpike and I got off the bus, there was my mother in the front yard waiting for me. She never met the bus before.”
There was a father with a little boy, a little girl and a joy of each in the other. In a moment it was no more, and so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.
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