A co-worker lost a parent not too long ago and was tasked, along with siblings, to clean out the relative’s home.
And thought of me along the way.
The dearly departed had, over the course of time, saved all manner of stuff about John F. Kennedy including items related to his murder 56 years ago Friday, the 22nd of November. My co-worker gathered up a bunch of it–papers, books and such–and handed the bundle to me.
As the assassination anniversary approaches, the collection takes on fresh meaning–especially the Journals and Sentinels (yes, kids, they were separate Milwaukee entities back then, one coming in the morning and the other in the afternoon) covering that sad autumn weekend. What you hold in your hand is more than a publication–what you have his history pivoting before you, what’s often called “the death of innocence” right there in your mitts, especially the Friday Journal which includes an “extra” that has several pages of Kennedy coverage wrapped around what editors had already laid out as that afternoon’s paper, added after all hell broke loose.
Otherwise, it was a benign Friday before Thanksgiving.
Milwaukee was on the cusp of setting a strike by municipal truck drivers. Shoppers were bracing for Saturday’s Holiday Parade downtown, back when Gimbels and Boston Store along Wisconsin Avenue were THE retail destinations and not a shopping mall. And, the Holiday Folk Fair was underway at State Fair Park. Ads touted pre-Thanksgiving grocery deals. You could get a TV set for $137 bucks–a piece of furniture that stood on four legs in a corner of your living room, not a flat slab of plastic that hung on the wall. That set would show you that coming Sunday’s clash between the Packers and 49ers at County Stadium.
Little seemed to matter after around 12:30 that day.
Those TV sets would take us live to Dallas and there we would stay through the weekend, there and Washington where the nation would say goodbye to its murdered President. The paper’s TV listings for that evening said we’d be able to watch “Route 66” on Channel 12 but the networks went wall-to-wall from the first bulletin to the funeral that following Monday.
It would become the first TV “binge”. We’re told that we never left our sets that weekend, that the nation stayed glued to the screen. Many did, but some in Milwaukee did not. Sure, that Saturday’s Holiday Parade got canceled because of what happened, but the Folk Fair went on, drawing record crowds.
And that football game? It still happened. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle would call it the worst decision of his tenure, not calling off that weekend’s schedule but the fans didn’t seem to mind, at least not the ones with tickets. They packed County Stadium that Sunday—sure, the Journal says, it wasn’t a typical fray. For one, the Packers band didn’t serenade the throng, packing up after doing the National Anthem before kickoff. There were no cheerleaders, no halftime show. Beer sales, a reporter says, were slow although it wasn’t clear if that was because of the mood or the onset of a cold snap.
That bundle of memories lives on a shelf in my man cave and there it will stay. Some would think I’m sitting on a potential gold mine, and they’d be wrong. That’s where the mathematical equation comes into play, the one that reads:
Value = scarcity + demand
How many people crave 56 year old historic newspapers? There are some and they can be found on eBay. It would seem there are more sellers, judging by the relatively low prices. The website jfkmemoribilia.com says tha’s because there are lots of folks like my co-worker who are busily cleaning out a late relative’s home/apartment, finding similar stashes of yellow, dog-eared papers about Kennedy’s demise. It’s what you did in 1963, before the web and YouTube. It made the unthinkable real, made a souvenir of history. You couldn’t record Walter Cronkite for later playback or do a Google search to find him fighting back tears as he broke the news to the nation. Keeping a paper for posterity made it legit.
And there were lots of papers, too: the circulation count on the masthead of each of the weekend’s papers speaks of between 400 thousand and 500 thousand papers being sold. That’s a lot of chances for a late uncle or beloved parent to slide a copy into a dresser drawer for posterity.
It’s not the case for everything. Some books in limited release may be worth more, so don’t just toss ’em away based on this blog. Check with an expert before purging.
For me, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t take that bundle thinking I was latching onto my retirement nest egg. Far from it. What I have is far more valuable to me, a snapshot of tragedy for sure but also a piece of my childhood, reminding me of some of the good of that era before so much of the bad got in the way.
I don’t need a website to tell me that’s priceless.