Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for November 22, 2019

Just like my parents could remember where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor, I remember when I heard about the assassination. By the time of the bus trip home that afternoon there were 20 criminal investigation experts on the bus all spouting their theories about Oswald’s arrest and for sure conviction. So much for the expertise of 12 year olds.

It really does hurt and resonate more when the date falls on a Friday.

I didn’t like him, but it was a tragedy all Americans took personally. Oswald’s murder I saw live on tv. Talk about coverups.

There was a lady who had a rust(?) stain in her eye. Her Doctor told her it would take a year to fade away. It was gone in 3 days!!!

I was in second or third grade at a church run school when the principle stuck her head in the door and said ‘The President’s been shot, and he’s dead.’ It was nice of her, but most of us didn’t have an awareness of JFK at that time. We learned quickly, as did my preschool child who was watching the Challenger takeoff with his class and the shuttle blew up in front of their eyes. Their teachers tried to explain it to them, and I tried, too. I think I failed.

This would seem to place A&J at retirement age.

Not that they’ve mentioned the workplace for quite some time…

I was in 6th grade. The principal came on the intercom and told us the President had been assassinated. We were studying the brain and one of the boys said “I wonder if he was shot in the medulla oblongata?”

Well done, Jimmy. Well done.

here in DK I heard it on the radionews about 22:00, while reading Popular Mechanics (in Danish: Populær Mekanik). Ran and told my sister and parents about it, we were very sad to hear about it, but as my father said, there is nothing we can do about it. Anyway, it was hard to fall asleep after that.

I imagine that many reading this strip today will be asking, WHAT?

Kennedy was my commander-in-chief when he was murdered by a Communist traitor. I never thought much of him politically, but I give him great credit for ordering the program that had us install safety locks (“Permissive Action Links”) on all the nuclear weapons at our storage depot in Germany.

I was on leave at the time and had just finished some transaction at a coin-and-stamp store I used to frequent. When we were finished with our business, the owner said in German “I’m sorry what happened to President Kennedy.” It was the first I’d heard. My high-school German was pretty good, but I had never learned that German has different words for “shot” (geschossen ) and “shot to death” (erschossen).

My thoughts raced toward coup-d’etats and possible Communist conspiracies, but the man confirmed that Johnson had been sworn in so I was relieved we still had a chain-of-command. Outside the store I stopped an Army captain (the population of Kaiserslautern then was about 1/3 American) who confirmed the basic facts. He told me we weren’t on alert and that he didn’t think it was necessary to return to my base but that I should keep listening to Armed Forces Radio just in case.

I continued my leave by travelling to Frankfurt a.M. in hopes of seeing a performance of Carl Orff’s grand Carmina Burana, but in honor of the tragedy the theater substituted Verdi’s grim opera La Forza del Destino — “The Power of Destiny”. I also attended a concert performance (I don’t remember of what) where they asked that the audience not applaud. When a handful of people forgot and started to clap at the end, they were quickly shooshed down. It was eerie as everyone silently left the theater when we should have been wildly applauding the performance. The Germans loved JFK and took his death very hard.

I was in high school physics class. The intercom phone rang and the teacher answered. He then told us that the President had been shot and we were to go home. Mom was sitting in front of the TV crying. She didn’t even notice that I was home early.

The best “funny papers” are those that are not when they should not be.

Thanks, Jimmy.

I was in the second grade. That makes Janis about my age-64. I am not yet retired though.

I remember being in French class for JFK. The other tragedy we remember is where we were on 9/11

There was a 30 minute gap between the shot – which was reported immediately because of live coverage – and the time he was pronounced dead. During that gap there was nearly universal speculation that he was dead because of the shot in the head. I was in 7th grade class and we were told he had been shot and killed.

The world would be so different if JFK had lived.

I was in the grocery store, and heard the announcement that “the president has been shot”. I turned to the person next to me and remarked, “That couldn’t be the American president” and she agreed. By the time I got home, Walter Cronkeit was on the air, trying to hold back tears to announce JFK had died. https://tinyurl.com/uubp9ve

Am I the only conservative who reads the comics?

Johnny, we hardly knew ya. I was in the fourth grade and remember the teacher’s announcement to my class. I raised my hand and said, “It must have been Richard Nixon!”

Junior in High School, don’t remember what class, but just finished test on Gettysburg Address and handed it in, sad day

Wow! There it goes! One of the few places left where one could seek a few moments of solace, away from the crazy, polarized, partisan world we live in! Be more like Arlo and Janis people!

Camelot the song from the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Bp5odIZjQ

Sitting in 2nd grade with a view of the school flagpole out the window. The principal went out and lowered the Flag to half-staff, something new to all of us, then went home a didn’t leave the black & white tv set until bedtime. Politics didn’t matter, but I knew it was a sad time for all. From a lifelong republican now at 60-something, I wish we had him back in office today.

I’ll always remember it. It shook people all over the world, even in the USSR. People say the wheels came off afterwards but I believe the shooting was a symptom of this already occuring.

Amazing that after a charming and loved young president was killed, nobody launched a gun control effort. We knew the problem was the gunman in the Book Depository (as well as those on the Grassy Knoll).

I remember riding with my folks for ages trying to get a news paper. No Internet, no CNN, No 6PM news as it wasn’t on yet. Struggled to get information. They finally got a newspaper just as a stack was given to a newspaper person on a street corner. (Yes there were people who sold newspapers on the corner back then!)

Janis looks fabulous for someone in her sixties. (And I’m in my sixties myself.)

Can somebody explain this to me? #nonUSreader

He was a martyr:JFK makes an argument for universal health care at Madison square garden, NY.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14A1zxaHpD8

Can’t even get away from the vile hatred of white Trump supporters on a comic page. What a sad world we live in today.

How about you keep your politics to yourself?

Thank you, Jimmy Johnson, for this today. I too have been thinking about it. It was a terrible terrible day, a terrible weekend. Thank you for remembering.

IMHO JFK was a political moderate but left leaning. He did great things for civil rights. By today’s standards as a white, middle age male he would automatically be a racists, misogynist, anti gay xenophobe. What have we become when due to gender race and age certain Americans are automatically put in a certain category; isn’t this the perfect definition of bigotry?

A good President but it wasn’t Camelot.

Can you imagine what the left would do to JFK today?

I was in junior high at a school near Miami. A year earlier, we had gone through the Cuban Missile Crisis with convoys of SAMs and troop carriers across south Florida. It was Spanish class and our teacher was a wonderful older man, a retired USAF colonel (and Korean War ace, though we would not find out that fact until his death decades later) and Puerto Rican native who had ‘re-purposed’ himself as a teacher of recalcitrant middle school students. The school’s PA system came on in the middle of class with the unfolding news. Col. Ramirez’s teacher training had not prepared him for what to do in such a circumstance. He fell back on his military training and attempted to continue the class. I was the one who told him the PA’s broadcast was what more important at that moment. The day is seared into memory.

Seeing as there are so many here who were unborn on this date in 1963, I must give you one of my favorite math-history jokes and see who “gets it”.

Me: My uncle was almost President of the United States, don’t-cha-know?You: Oh really? How?Me: He was skipper of the PT108.

Interesting. Not ONE word about Camelot or the Kennedy administration in all this – although I guess the reference to an untimely end is tangential.

For some reason this quote from Dennis Leary comes to mind: ““Stevie Ray Vaughn is dead and we can’t get Bon Jovi near a helicopter?”

Thank you for honoring JFK. I remember the assassination every year. Too many people have forgotten.

Long time ago I thought highly of him until I learned how he secretly bargained with the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis and slept with virtually everyone except his wife!

It is overcast and spitting at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri. After chow we march out in ponchos. Destination an old former motor pool. Mission, hand to hand combat training. Fatigue jackets off, ponchos covering our brand-new M-14’s. A jeep comes out with news. The President has been shot. We get dressed to march back to base. Before we can form up in ranks another jeep appears. President Kennedy has died.

This morning I read three newspapers. Not a word about that awful day. Just an oblique, cryptic reference in the comic strip Arlo and Janis. Mr. Johnson, thank you.

I remember that day well. I was in HS when it was announced, the entire student body squeezed into 1 classroom, devastated. As if the world we knew, had changed, suddenly, forever

I oft times wonder what kind of President he would have become.

Such hate today! All inspired by Jimmy’s benevolent reference to a beloved past president—JFK. What is the world coming to? It’s just sad.

JFK was what he was, good and bad, but all versions of Camelot are fiction.

I was a senior in college and I remember exactly where I was and how I felt…total shock and sadness. Back then one had to be 21 to vote so I wasn’t old enough to vote in the 1960 election. At that time I thought JFK was wonderful, but as time passed I learned just how wrong I was. He got us into Vietnam, tho I’m sure he had no idea of how things over there would escalate. I’ve always wondered if LBJ was involved in the assassination. Whatever the case, the U.S. was changed forever. I woke up this morning and thought, today is Nov 22, this is the day President Kennedy was killed. I’m glad to see that Jimmy Johnson remembered. Thanks you.

My class was on a field trip to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The chair Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot is there. The guide drew parallels between Lincoln and Kennedy. At that time, the greatest sin for schoolkids was the possession of a transistor radio. One girl flipped on her radio a few minutes later and heard the breaking news that the President had just been shot. She screamed the news and a teacher flipped out and took her radio away. We begged to be able to listen to the news, but she was adamant, no radio. We got on the bus and someone toward the back of the bus took out her radio and we crowded around to hear the news. Still no word on whether he was dead or alive. The girl suggested we all pray for the President and got down on her knees, which again drew the attention of a teacher who came running back and took the radio, oblivious to our pleas for news of our beloved President. We got back to the school and sat at our desks just in time for the announcement that the President was dead and we were to go home. We sat in front of the TV for days. I can’t say I was in front of Lincoln’s chair at the exact moment of the shooting, but it had to be very close. The two deaths are so closely entwined in my mind.

I was home from school sick that day and watched the whole thing on TV. Walter Cronkite did a tremendous jobs of keeping us collected during a impossible event.

I was born in 58 and have no memory of the assassination. I think my family bought our first TV shortly after it happened.

Get out and vote and send him out of DC in complete rejection and humiliation

I was born in 1957 and asked my mother what had happened. She said it was a very sad day the president died. (We were watching the death march.)

Wow, so many angry people with just one comic. Don’t vote Dem or Rep.

How far the Kennedy Camelot has fallen from its pedestal! Sad!

I saw this comic in the local paper and came here to thank Jimmy Johnson for it…never expecting that the first thing I would see was a bunch of hateful, ugly remarks about JFK. We’ve been told he wasn’t perfect, none of us are, but he was a pretty good president during the time he had and he inspired a generation to a higher standard of behavior and citizenship. What a twisted world we now live in that people are compelled to post remarks such as they have to smear & degrade him, feeling so emboldened under the cover of anonymity.

I was at work when the announcement came through. Not everyone was shocked. The Republicans that I knew, and those I didn’t know until then, laughed and cheered. They were happy that that damn Catholic Democrat was dead and a not a moment too some. I will always remember their joy. I have felt some joy as I have heard of each of them dying too. None too soon.

So glad you remembered, Jimmy Johnson. Thanx.

Amazing what decades of good PR and a fawning press can do. JFK wasn’t a “bad” president— but he wasn’t King Arthur, nor would the majority of most Democrats (and NO “progressives”) agree with his positions re: foreign policy, taxes, power of the government, 2nd Amendment, 1st Amendment.

I was in fifth grade. The teachers were told to pick up their intercom and were told about the shooting. The teacher told us that the President and the Governor of Texas had been shot and we should pray for them to live. I being an odd child tried to bargain in my prayer for the Governor of Texas to die so the President could live. (Yes, teacher in public school said to pray and it was just accepted.) The teachers were later called back to the intercom and told that the President had died.

Over that weekend I presumed that everything had shut down as television had. I was therefore surprised when my dad suggested that he take my friend and me to the movies as it never occurred to me that the movies were open or that it was appropriate to go one. So whenever I see the John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara movie “McClintock” I think of Kennedy’s assassination.

I still cry every year. And the heck with the dumb comments.

This has aged well. Look who we have in there now! LOL!

And here we are, 5 years later and he is running again. I don’t care about mean tweets or his personality but I do care about affording rent and food and safe and closed borders. And getting the respect on the world stage that we once had.