Scrapbooking 1963: The Kennedy Scrapbook

By Louise Rachlis

As I burst through the door for lunch on November 22nd, 1963, the radio on the kitchen counter was loud with frantic voices.
My mother in her apron was hunched over, listening.
I had been in a grade 12 French class when I first heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot.
Like everyone else, I’d thought it was a joke.
Nobody at Ridgemont High School believed such a thing could possibly happen, and we were overwhelmed when we found out it was true.
Everyone ran home (high school students still ate lunch at home) to listen to more news on the radio, and then on the TV where there was live coverage.
A few days later, on Sunday November 24th, we saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald live on TV. GRIEF-CRAZED CLUB OWNER SLAYS SUSPECTED ASSASSIN.
Everybody was in shock for a week, and talked about almost nothing else.
A young and naïve 16-year-old, I automatically kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, because even I knew it was history in the making. No other news event in the nearly half century following moved me to do the same thing.
The Kennedy scrapbook is A Hilroy Product No. 707, price 29 Cents. The cover is a cowboy on a bucking bronco, and the words Scrap Book in script writing in the upper right corner.
The clippings are attached to the scrapbook with yellow, peeling cellophane tape. The pages themselves are now yellow too. The scrapbook has travelled in a shopping bag through my childhood in Ottawa, my apartments and houses in Toronto, and back to Ottawa. Many other pieces of paper and memorabilia have been abandoned along the way, but the Kennedy scrapbook remains.
Each day for that week in 1963, I spread out on the living room floor with my clippings and the scrapbook, adding items as I cut them out from the Ottawa Journal and the Ottawa Citizen.
By the end of the week, I’d easily filled the scrapbook:
A paper boy fed papers into reaching hands. He had never been so busy.
He looked at the silver in his hand.
“I feel funny taking it,” he said.
As Ottawa received word of President Kennedy’s death, government offices ground to a halt. Most Ottawans worked for the federal government, where “civil servants laid down their pens. Typewriters were silent.”
As the Journal reported, people in restaurants topped eating. In stores already decorated for Christmas, shoppers froze. They remembered the Kennedy’s visit to Ottawa in 1961. Some wept quietly.
Teenagers passed with transistors to their ears. They were not listening to the hit parade. They were not talking…
Telephone switchboards at radio and television stations and newspapers were jammed with calls from information-seekers.
An ambulance firm said it had handled two cases where elderly people had collapsed at home shortly after hearing word of the President’s death.
The large photographs from the newspaper are all black and white, and framed by giant headlines like DEATH SHOCKS WORLD and ‘MY GOD…THEY’RE SHOOTING AT THE PRESIDENT!’ There were dozens of photographs of Inauguration Day 1961, of “the many faces of John F. Kennedy”, of John and Jackie with Caroline, six, and John Jr., three. And over and over, black and white photos of Jackie, 34, in her pink suit stained with blood.
One of the newspaper stories was about the reaction in New York City: “Sense of doom as N.Y. halts.”
Eerily foreshadowing the reaction decades later to 9/11, the Herald Tribune News Service noted that “No news ever hit New York harder. Or more visibly.”
By now the reaction on the streets was close to a sense of doom. So many people rushed to telephones to get in touch with loved ones, relatives, home and hearth that entire telephone exchanges and long distance circuits were tied up for an hour…Traffic jams cropped up all over town as drivers stopped, often in mid street, to shout to one another or simply stare and try to take stock of what had happened.
It was the same around the world. “Nations mourn, statesmen weep,” reported the Canadian Press. Moscow radio and television interrupted its regular programs to tell Russians the President was dead. The radio then played funeral music.
The Ottawa Citizen noted that the Citizen switchboard was a mass of red light as people tried to call for information, and in many parts of the city the telephone service was out as circuits became overloaded within minutes.
Some classes at Carleton University and University of Ottawa were cancelled Friday afternoon and others were dismissed because students had congregated in hallways to listen to portable radios.
Into the coverage came “the new president”, Lyndon Johnson. “He leans to affability, to back-slapping and shoulder-hugging, but on occasion he can be irascible.” I didn’t really care or pay attention to Lyndon Johnson, but somehow I felt that his clippings had to be in the scrapbook too, because this was history.
Through the United States Embassy doors in Ottawa, a steady procession came to pay respects to the President. Prime Minister Pearson’s name topped the second page. Mayor Charlotte Whitton’s signature is “spotted among those of work-a-day Ottawa – signatures ranging from the shaky scrawl of the elderly to round, childish efforts of youngsters.” The embassy announced Sunday that Ambassador and Mrs. Butterworth have cancelled their receptions scheduled for Dec. 4 and 6 “due to national mourning.”
The discussion that would continue until this day began with stories asking, “Did Sniper Have Help In Firing Fatal Shots?”
On Thursday December 5th, 1963, the Ottawa Citizen reprinted Theodore H. White’s article from Life Magazine, “For President Kennedy an Epilogue.” White quotes Jackie as saying: “There’ll be great presidents again – and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me – but there’ll never be another Camelot again…At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records: and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’”
More than forty seven years later, I put the crumbling “Scrap Book” back in its plastic bag, into the shopping bag, and return it to the attic. Don’t let it be forgot…