Faithful gather for 47th JFK remembrance event

Date: 11/29/2010

Nov. 29, 2010

By Debbie Gardner

Assistant Managing Editor

SPRINGFIELD -- I was only in the first grade when Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy on a sunny day in Dallas, but I can still remember the day as if it were yesterday.

My mother met me at the front door as I returned from school that afternoon and said gently, "Debbie, President Kennedy is dead. Someone shot him in Dallas this afternoon. Daddy will be coming home early."

I remember that my dad didn't go to work the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. No one spoke in a voice above a whisper at my house. On the third day, our black-and-white television, perched on the white brick hearth in our family room, carried sepia-toned images of a women and two small children all dressed in black, a horse-drawn hearse traveling slowly down a road and a riderless horse with a pair boots turned backwards in the stirrups.

Even as young as I was, I knew something about the world had been forever changed that day in Dallas.

Last Monday, I joined approximately 100 others who also remember that day for the 47th remembrance of President John F. Kennedy, which took place at the eternal flame in Forest Park.

And listening to the dignitaries who spoke at the event, I learned something I was too young to appreciate back on that fateful day -- just how much Jack Kennedy meant not only to Massachusetts, but also to the city of Springfield.

Congressman Richard Neal reminded those who gathered that "On the final day before the [1960] election, Kennedy spoke from the steps of Springfield's City Hall."

"There are legions of young men and women who now hold public office because of Jack Kennedy's election," he said. "I remember as a child the pride in my family as he emerged from the [Hyannis] armory, victorious, against great odds. We in Massachusetts knew what the world was about to learn."

Emcee James Sullivan reminded us just how close the Kennedy family's ties were to Western Massachusetts when he mentioned how Kennedy family confidante and West Springfield native Donald Dowd, whose January passing was noted with a moment of silence, had arranged to have the eternal flame brought to the Forest Park Kennedy monument site "November 21, 1964, one day before our anniversary celebration."

"Take a moment to say a prayer for all our elected officials . that they will work together to fulfill President Kennedy's dream," Sullivan said.

"John F. Kennedy had his two feet on the ground, but he reached for the stars," Sheriff Michael J. Ashe remarked when he took his turn at the lectern. "November 7, 1960, the day before the election, John F. Kennedy appeared on the steps of our city hall before a crowd much like today's, a cross-section of America."

Ashe then reminded the gathering of the social contract Kennedy urged America's people to make with each other, that "the greatest investment we can make is in our time and in each other."

The final speaker, former mayor Charles Ryan, who was responsible for the 1964 erection of the Kennedy Memorial at Forest Park, reminded those gathered how they, as I had been, were "participants" in something that changed the world as they knew it, something "so intense, it was as though your father, or your brother or your son had died."

"He was able to move this country forward with his tremendous charisma and vision," Ryan said of Kennedy. "The loss from that day has forever changed this country."

"Can you imagine what would have happened if he had completed his term, gone on to a second term and become an elder statesman?" Ryan continued. "We were part, we saw, we believed and we lived it."

Mayor Domenic Sarno, the city Veteran's Agent Dan Walsh, Rep. James T. Welsh, City councilor Henry Twiggs, event co-chair Bill Marot and Registrar of Deeds Donald Ashe were also among the dignitaries who attended the annual Kennedy remembrance.