(a true story by Hildegard Caringi)

© September 1965

The day President John F. Kennedy was shot, I sat in the beauty salon of the Americana Hotel in North Miami Beach. We heard the tragic news on the radio, and everyone stopped whatever they were doing.

Customers and employees alike had the look of shock on their faces, and it took them a while, until the heartbreaking event sank in. The manicurist across from me with the slightly squeezed together profile, had grown fascinated with Marilyn Monroe, remotely resembling the late actress in hair style, color, and voice - except for her dark brown eyes and her somewhat chubby legs. She began to cry and so did everyone else present in the hair salon at the time.

I cried too, after all, John F. Kennedy was my President as well, not technically – not yet anyway - since one needs to be a citizen in order to vote, and at the time I had lived in the United States for only a year and a half. But, while still in Germany, I had been on the waiting list to immigrate to America for such a long time, and therefore I’d had plenty of opportunities to gather informative bits and pieces about J. F. K. and his family.

“They were made for one another,” I said inaudibly, clearly idolizing the glamorous couple. I obviously thought - for reasons I had imagined - that there was great passion between J. F. K. and Jacqueline. It clearly showed on every photograph I had ever seen published of them in German newspapers and magazines. I didn’t know much about politics then, and paid no attention to gossip. I was young and my thoughts were pure.

A delicate middle-aged woman in a lemon-yellow suit, with matching handbag, shoes, and hat, had turned her hair dryer off and mumbled under tears, “He was a great man…such a wonderful man…the best of all the Kennedys!”

Nobody in the beauty shop disagreed. “I saw him in person once,” the red-headed beautician with the Swedish accent sobbed. She told her customers and whoever else wanted to hear, her story about the time when she personally saw the President disappear into his private plane. He had turned and smiled at all the onlookers, and everyone waved wildly.

“We all loved him. He was so handsome!” she added.

            “Like a movie star!” the Marilyn Monroe look-alike agreed passionately and continued to weep.

Later that day I heard a young shoeshine boy, with a slightly hoarse voice, ask an impeccably dressed hotel guest. “What will become of the country?”

I couldn’t hear what the man’s answer was. Perhaps he didn’t have one. But not until then did I realize, how insignificant and trivial our earlier comments about J. F. K. had been. It dawned on me that all of us women genuinely grieved for the handsome man and his family, but none of us cried for our country. The man, who was just shot and killed, was after all our president!

(taken from my book, “The Joy of Being, A Vinyard of Poems and Short Stories”)

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Talk to you later,

Hildie

Love to all!

Hildie