Where were you when you first heard the news 50 years ago?

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I took the news back to school with me.

You went to school on Saturday??

Dad didn't believe me: former MP Andrew Tink
In Australia, it was a Saturday morning when the news broke.
Author-historian and former NSW Liberal MP Andrew Tink was 10 years old at the time and living in Sydney when the news came through.
"I was out riding my billy cart with a couple of friends, who were also riding bill carts, we were 10 years old ... and we had a transistor radio, which was quite a new thing in those days, strapped to one of the billy carts, and it was on," he said.
"This news flash came on that President Kennedy had been shot.
"I raced home, my parents were still in bed. I barged into the bedroom and poked my father in the side and I said: 'President Kennedy's been shot' and he said: 'Don't be ridiculous' and ordered me out of the room.
"Later on, about and hour or so later, when unfortunately by that time President Kennedy's death had been confirmed, Dad was very apologetic.
And George didn't believe me!

And George didn't believe me!

I didn't disbelieve you, either.

I was playing cricket for my school. Not the First XV, so we were condemned to playing on a vast sports ground in the middle of nowhere.
In those days teachers trusted us to do everything ourselves and our parents operated on a 'we do not need to know anything so long as you get home in time for dinner' basis.
The great thing about cricket is that you get to spend a lot of time lying around doing nothing. If you are a poor batsman you get even more time to relax.
On that day our side was batting so we were lying around in the sun and most of the boys had gone to sleep. Those that were awake were listening to music on a transistor radio. Others have noted that transistors were a pretty new item of technology at that time.
The programme was interrupted by an announcement that the station was linking to the national station for an important news announcement.
We were stunned by the news of Kennedy's assassination. Part of the reason for that was assassinations did not figure in our understanding of how the world worked. We were also living in a world where the threat of a nuclear war was always in the background and somehow this event made the world a scary place.
We did not cancel the game - it just drifted into nothing. Players in the field came off and we all sat around listening to updates until it was time to go home.
I went home and listened to the radio announcements with the rest of my family.
   

Hmm...well, let's see..My father would be 18 and about done with high school and my mother would be about 9 years old and in elementary school at the time, so I am rather sure that the killing of Kennedy did not affect me in any way.

Hey, you never know. Had kennedy not been killed, maybe the US would have pulled out of Vietnam, got bored and invaded Denmark. then your father falls in love with an American nurse and you are never born.

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I took the news back to school with me.

You went to school on Saturday??

Remember which side of the world I am on

Amazing!  I'm not quite the only barfly to have been on the planet at the time!  I can remember going to work that day (it was my first job, as a clerk for Rhodesia Railways - the main, almost the only, employer in Bulawayo).  What I can't remember is what day of the week it was.  Saturday?  Well, perhaps: I had to work every second Saturday, which would have certainly exacerbated my feeling of stunned disbelief giving way to grief (I was 19 dammit, my generation's King Arthur had just been foully murdered, to be replaced by someone I considered then - and now -to be totally unfit for the job).

By the way folks, here's a tip (unrelated to the subject matter of this thread):  if any of you use Opera as a search engine, be wary of inducements to update to the new version.  I did, three days ago, and this evening is the first time I've been able to connect to the saloon website (and some others) without receiving a haughty refusal, on the grounds that the site is "запрешен" ("banned").

By the way folks, here's a tip (unrelated to the subject matter of this thread):  if any of you use Opera as a search engine, be wary of inducements to update to the new version.  I did, three days ago, and this evening is the first time I've been able to connect to the saloon website (and some others) without receiving a haughty refusal, on the grounds that the site is "запрешен" ("banned").

As its your thread, going off topic is tolerated.
And I don't think your browser was the problem. The Saloon was "down", as the tech heads say, for the best part of the weekend-see a separate thread.

I was seven years old living in Northern Illinois.  I remember coming home from school for lunch and mom was crying.  I remember going back to school, but I don't think much work was done because the teachers were more upset than we were.

This thread makes me feel young! I wasn't around at that time.
RIP JFK
 

When I heard the news I immediately crapped my pants.  Actually, that is an educated guess;  I was two years old.  In contrast to the poster who had grown up at a time when assassinations didn't register in the mind well, being a child in the US in the 60s and 70s meant that you probably took assassinations more nonchalantly since they seemed to occur so frequently.  Yeah, I think we have much worse government because of the Kennedy assassination(s) along with all of the other ones. Not only for the loss of many good men (I can't think of any assassinated women at the moment) and not only for the potential leaders dissuaded from public service, but also for the damage to the idea that we can solve our problems peacefully.

In first grade at a Catholic school.  The nuns took it all quite badly.  They marched us out of school and into the nearby church and lead prayers for an hour or so before sending us all home. Didn't really know what was going on, but felt like everything was off kilter. Especially when getting home and finding everybody home, (normally not for hours later), and my mother, (from Massachusetts), crying uncontrollably.  A "through the looking glass" experience.