A news flash from Dallas

If someone told my father, Bud Dryden, news he didn’t want to hear, he simply ignored the messenger and continued what he was doing.

I saw it myself on November 22, 1963. I had just turned 12 and was home from school with the mumps.

Dad, who ran a general store in the tiny town of Auxvasse, Missouri, had come home for lunch that day. He and my mother were eating at the kitchen table. I was in the next room, watching television, when Walter Cronkite broke into the programming to announce John F. Kennedy had been shot.

My parents were rabid Democrats. My mother, now 100, still is. They were married in June, 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, a few months after FDR took office. They credited FDR and the Democrats with nothing less than saving America and giving them a chance to make something of themselves. Needless to say, Bud and Ruby Dryden loved Kennedy, the young Democratic president. The night of his election, they held a viewing party and invited friends over to watch the returns. It was the only time I ever remember them hosting a gathering for anyone other than family.

I ran into the kitchen. “Walter Cronkite says the president has been shot.”

My mother clasped both hands over her mouth.

“You didn’t hear that,” my father said dismissively, as if I’d announced space aliens had landed in uptown Auxvasse.

My mother was as horrified by my father’s reaction as she was by the news. “Bud,” she said slowly, like a mother trying to reason with an out-of-sorts child. “It has to be true. Why would the boy make that up?”

“I have no idea,” he responded, spearing another pork chop.

He finished his meal and went back to the store.

Funny what one does and doesn’t remember about the biggest events of one's lifetime. I’m almost sure mom and I watched TV the rest of the afternoon. I’m almost certain she called him once it was official to tell him the president had died. I don’t remember for sure but I'll never forget how my father reacted to that awful news from Dallas.

I wish I could have sat down with him as an adult and asked him about it but I never got the opportunity He died a little more than two years later.

I've spent 50 years trying to figure it out and I suppose I never will but I do, in a strange way, understand.