Residents can recall in detail the circumstances of the assassination 50 years ago
By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
For millions of Americans, Friday’s 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy still lives vividly in their memories.
Random interviews with Hillsborough residents brought back the images of Mrs. Kennedy’s pillbox hat and blood-stained pink dress, Jack Ruby’s shooting of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and little John-John saluting his father’s casket as the caisson rolled by.
Mary Diehl of Hillsborough shook her head at how decades had flown by.
”I do not know anyone who does not remember where they were when Kennedy was shot,” she said. “They were milestones you remember because time stood still.”
She was a student at Marywood College in Pennsylvania. The school canceled a semiformal dance on the weekend, and sent everyone home, she said.
”As I think back on the power of emotions being experienced, we were wondering ‘is this going to end?’” she said.
Helen “Chickie” Haines said she was at Muhlenberg College, near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Word came at the dorm and everybody ran to the TV “and pretty much stayed glued to it,” she said.
Like many people, she saved the weekly issue of Life magazine, as she has likewise put aside newspapers and magazines of other momentous events, like the Challenger shuttle explosion or the 9-11 terror attack.
She said she had never bought into the conspiracy theories, but a recent incident made her think again, she said.
She said it was only this past September when her brother, who was stationed in Texas with the Air Force and had been trained to pick out key words in Spanish on radio transmissions, said he had heard the words “Kennedy” and “assassination” in airwave chatter before the shooting.
Gene Strupinsky, the township’s “business advocate,” said he had supported President Kennedy as a representative of “my generation.” He speculated on how the world changed that day.
”It makes me wonder what we would be like today if that event had not occurred,” he said. “We started a significantly different course soon after that.”
Mr. Strupinsky said he was a CCNY student working out of the house that day in Queens, New York.
”It was beyond belief,” he said. “He was so young and we hadn’t had him so long a time. Today it’s not surprising if someone shot at the president, but not them.”
Mr. Strupinsky also clearly recalled the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy, because he was married in twice (two faiths) in that week.
Nancy Greggo of Hillsborough said she was washing the floor in her rec room in Huntington, Long Island.
”Four days later, everything was still on the unwashed floor,” she said. “I was glued to the TV. I eventually had to get rid of the bucket.”
Ms. Greggo’s mah jongg playing partner, Jo Janiec, said she was picking up her children at Sacred Heart in Manville, when the church bells began ringing.
”We all fell to our knees,” she said. “I still get goose pimples thinking about it.”
Phyllis Friedman of Hillsborough was tending to her baby, she recalled.
”I was changing the diapers at my mother’s house and all of a sudden my mother started screaming,” she remembered. “I thought something had happened to her, but she was watching TV.”
Mollie Zezulinski of Hillsborough said she was a bookkeeper in Garden City Long Island, writing a federal report on a process that kept torpedoes from spinning.
She said, “Someone walked in and said ‘I just heard something and I’m not sure if it’s right. I just heard Kennedy was shot.’”
She kept at the report, but “it wasn’t coming out right, I was so shocked,” she said.
Darlene Swanson of Hillsborough said JFK was “the first president I was ever interested in.”
She recalled being in English class at North Plainfield High School when an was made an announcement over the PA system.
The reaction was “pretty much silence,” she said. “I think everyone remembers these incidents that affect you, especially the first one you see,” she said. “For the younger generation, it would be 9-11.”
Hillsborough’s John Reddan said he watched events unfold on a TV in sixth grade in Ascension Grammar School in New Milford.
He recalled how the television broadcast all weekend without commercials.
”I remember it as a kid because it was just mesmerizing,” he said. “My father had the TV on for four days. It’s an incredible spectacle to this day. He’ll always have the Camelot thing with the way he died.”
Mr. Reddan talked about the details of the crime and how police handled the case — you saw Oswald deny the crime as he walked down the hall at the police station, for instance — some of which are still questioned to this day.
”It’s going to be one of the great mysteries in American history,” he said. “It did change America”
He compared police procedures then and now. How could civilian Jack Ruby be allowed to get close enough to shoot Oswald as they were transferring him on that Sunday, he wondered.
”One of the most awful things in history and nobody stepped up to take charge,” he said.

