The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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Where I was

("Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?" the professionally perky TV talking heads have been asking all week, pretending to remember something that happened before they were even born. Not that I owe them an answer or anything, but here's my story.)

Forty years ago today, I was in Mrs. Fern Dougher's 6th grade class at Woodland Elementary School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Mrs. Dougher (pronounced as in "beware of evil doers," she always said) was near the end of a long teaching career, and she often nodded off for awhile after lunch if we were taking a test or otherwise working quietly. But on this day, she was wide awake: we were studying history, specifically the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

One member of our class wasn't in the room: a girl named Lila, who had had back surgery and was spending the entire school year in bed, in a cast and later a brace. She attended via intercom, and since I'd just transferred into the school, I'd never met her. As much as I felt for her, stuck there in a body cast, I admit I also resented her because no matter how hard I tried, no matter how good my work, Mrs. Dougher always praised Lila's work and nobody else's. She would wave Lila's latest report around and berate the class for not matching its presumed quality: "And her flat on her back!" Mrs. Dougher would always add. Mrs. Dougher gave me a D on my country report, because instead of copying passages verbatim from the encyclopedia as everyone else did to produce a 40- to 100-page report, I researched mine and then wrote far fewer pages of completely original material. I think Lila's report must have been 200 pages at least, and Mrs. Dougher waved it at us and shouted for weeks afterward.

[She wasn't the world's best teacher, but that school had a worse one: a fourth-grade teacher who was constantly reaching inside her blouse to adjust her undergarments, and who (before the Supreme Court decision on school prayer), would always send the one Jewish student in the class out into the hall for the religious instruction period, nearly spitting as she slammed the door behind him and muttered, "He don't bleve in Jesus!"]

So that afternoon as we took turns reading aloud from our textbooks about Abraham Lincoln and the Ford Theatre and John Wilkes Booth, we thought it was part of the lesson when Lila squawked through the intercom: "Mrs. Dougher! Mrs. Dougher! The president's been shot!"

Lila was indeed a smart girl, and thoughtful, too: with her mother's help, she put her AM radio next to the intercom and locked the "on" button in place, so that we could listen to the news along with her. And so we did until, after the President's death was officially confirmed, someone somewhere decided school would be dismissed early. There was no bell to end the day, not much organization. I found my second-grader brother in the crowd of students milling around outside the building, and we started walking home. We hadn't gotten far before Mom pulled up at the curb next to us. She drove straight to her parents' and we stayed there all weekend, watching the news unfold on television like the rest of the nation. On the way there, Mom told us what it was like when Roosevelt died: she remembered where she was and what she'd been doing when she heard the news. Forty years later, I don't remember what she told us, except that people were scared then, too.

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:28 PM

22.11.03