Tommy Denton

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For those who were of a certain formative age 43 years ago tomorrow, the details of that Nov. 22, 1963, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy linger in the memory with amazing detail and clarity.

I had turned 18 less than a month earlier, and the most devastating experience of loss during those short years was my overexaggerated torment of having lost a few football games.

Word that the president had been shot in Dallas spread quickly through the high school cafeteria during lunchtime, and a grim, somber quiet replaced what was usually the dull roar of students passing in the halls to their first afternoon class.

Those of us who worked on the school newspaper gathered in the classroom that passed for our newsroom, but mostly we stood silently or sat staring blankly at nothing in particular. Friday afternoons weren't production days anyway, but the room offered a sort of refuge.

Someone pulled a transistor radio from a notebook, but by then the report of Kennedy's death had already bludgeoned most everybody's emotions and their capacity to sort out further details.

The bell rang, signaling the passage to the fourth period. Everett Sample taught senior English that period. He was a short, gray-haired, iconoclastic gnome of a man who possessed near-genius for his subject.

"Lovable Doc," as he encouraged his students to refer to him, possessed a doctorate. He presided over his classes as a stern taskmaster who delighted in pounding into adolescent brains the scarcely fathomable mysteries of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Lord Byron -- all intimate friends of his -- as well as the cadences of sonnets, iambic pentameter and Spenserian stanzas.

The murder of a president -- especially that president, who so offended Lovable Doc's John Birch Society sensibilities -- was certainly no cause to disrupt the reverential pursuit of literary wisdom. "Life goes on," he said, and so did class.

As it happened, Nov. 22, 1963, also was the date of my high school's final regular-season football game, although we had already won district and would go into the playoffs.

After English class, I ventured to the gym with my teammates to learn the status of the game. The coaches ushered us into the dressing room and told us the game was still scheduled for its 7:30 p.m. kickoff, about four hours away.

Exhorting us to concentrate, the coaches repeatedly warned us to "get your heads in the game" to avoid mental lapses that could cause injuries.

By 6 p.m., when the bus arrived to drive us across town to the stadium, each player at least gave the impression he had focused all his mental energy on the plans, strategies and contingencies. I had reviewed with silent intensity the array of plays and likely defensive sets that the opposing team might deploy.

Arriving at the stadium, we stepped off the bus, and there before us the huge American flag whipped at half-staff in the bitterly cold wind. My stomach sank, and the best-laid plans and intentions dissolved in the painful reminder of what had happened earlier that day.

Inside the home-team dressing room before the pregame warm-ups, our coaches tried earnestly to refocus our attention and return our concentration to the ordeal at hand.

Then we descended the long ramp into the bowl of Dick Bivins Stadium, only to find the opposing team warming up on our end of the field and taunting us with trash talk as we jogged by.

Wait, I thought. After all that's happened today, and with that flag flying at half-staff to remind us, you guys are already behaving badly? What the coaches' reasoned exhortations may not have accomplished, epithets spit out by several of our blue-shirted opponents did.

When the game ended, we had won, 73-0. The traumatic events of earlier in the day had been shoved aside by the imperative of the moment, at least as we understood it in our youthful innocence about how adults sometimes order the world's priorities.

Memories of that frigid night, and what happened in those grim hours before, rush back each year about this time. I've come to understand better a bittersweet lesson, intended or not, in "Doc" Sample's words: Life goes on.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.