On this day 50-years ago, I was an 18-year old, home from college, asleep on a Wednesday evening. I was awakened by my distraught mother pounding on my door as she wanted me to join her in watching the news of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in California. “He’s been Shot!”
It was an awful evening we shared. We were both “Kennedy” people. I had met and shaken his hand just weeks before at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation near Blackfoot Idaho.
A bit of irony was that just 5-years earlier I was home sick from school. I was 13, wrapped in a blanket on the couch as I watched “Truth or Consequences,” the TV game show. It was interrupted with the news of the assassination of our president, John F. Kennedy. I rushed to where mom was asleep, pounded on her door and awakened her to let her share the news.
In retrospect, I had a much better time watching the “shooting stars,” playing Scrabble and just fooling around with Mom than I did crying over the deaths of people we admired greatly.
I wonder what kind of world it would be if Sirhan Sirhan hadn’t taken his 22 caliber pistol he’d just bought and put it to the head of the man who had just won the California Presidential Primary. Some things, (easy guns in America,) and angry males, never change.
From MSN:
On June 4, only hours before the shooting, Sirhan visited the San Gabriel Valley Gun Club to purchase ammunition for his .22-caliber handgun.
He made a specific and ominous request of the counterman: “I want the best box of shells you have, and I want some that will not misfire.”
Sirhan went to the firing range, squeezing off more than 200 rounds before heading out around 5 p.m.
(Jack Sunday is a radio veteran with nearly 50-years “behind the mike.” He hosts “The Drive,” 4-7pm, weekdays on KFGO. He likes to say he’s not old…just aging.)
