Universally Boring

Trudy Smith on the JFK Assassination

This was my prompt to my parents: "One of you needs to give me a boring story."

Mom, for some reason, instinctually picked the JFK assassination story. This was interesting to me as I got to thinking about it, because few people see such a monumental event as "boring." As I sat and listened to her, myself even knowing this story from previous mentions, I was intrigued. Because it's particularly interesting? No. But because John Kennedy's assassination is a part of the collective identity involved in being American. It is a 9-11 moment (or is it the other way around?), a nation-wide hyperconscious memory. It doesn't matter how boring an individual story is in regard to one of these events, because the audience knows how important that which transpired was for the nation as a whole. That, in turn, makes the individual memory interesting.

My approach was to insert sounds to convey the "freshness" of the news in that moment-- the kinds of sounds running through my Mom's mind as she decides what aspects of the story to tell and what to leave out. She probably remembers hearing the bell and the sniffles and the carriage. She sympathizes with Caroline, who will never get to have conversations about lost teeth with her dad again. She remembers the shots and the retrospective looks at JFK's speeches. She pictures herself trying to get away from the boring TV.

Do you recognize how many times she says TV?

This is the first time she can remember TV being, well, a memory. Before this event it wasn't really noteworthy. Afterwards it became an unforgettable part of her childhood.

Accounts of the assassination of our 35th president are, for the most part, universally boring. But. The memory is universal. Everyone alive and of age remembers where they were and what they were doing. Boring or not, it's worth sharing because it was a shared experience in an era of great division.

I end the audio with a fade out because the debates-- the who shot who and why-- went on forever. Thus, so could (and has) the story.

(credits: http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3365

miller center of public affairs university of Virginia
Gerald l. baliles, director

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http://www.jfk-assassination.de/media/audio/radio.php)