What were you doing when.....

[SSlater]

I was working for the FAA in Washington. On that same day , the FAA was moving from temporary quarters in "Old Navy Building", to their own new office building. Since I was a Structural Engineer, I was overseeing the handling of huge boxes of files - would the floors support this concentration of weight? Would the elevators carry more than one box? etc.
In my office there was a "Teletype Machine". That was a typewriter - connected to a phone line, that received important messages (sometimes Coded.) When a message came in , the machine would "clang". One bell for a routine message. 2, 3, 4 or more, as the importance increased. The assassination news was 10 clangs. That miserable machine clanged all day. The message may have been a one-liner, but it got 10 clangs. I believe it clanged more than it typed.
When the typing stopped. someone would run over and read the message out loud. That constant irritating noise, would not allow me to accept the true meanings of the messages.

My children were just tots, and were really my whole world. By the next day I thought about the Kennedy children - their father would never come home again for some joyful tumbling play time. To me that was the Tragedy. Eventually, his death came to the front.