"It seemed so wrong ..."

It wasn't long before we started playing the "Where were you when ..." game.

It wasn't actually a game. It was therapeutic.

"Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?"

A couple of days ago I sent off an email to a handful of old friends and relatives.

I suppose it's saying something about the age of those in my inner circle that so many were in school.

My niece Terry was still quite young. "I was out on the playground for recess at John B. Cary Elementary School. I was 9 years old and in the 4th grade. The teacher on duty sent me into the school for another kickball. As I walked through the halls, an older student was screaming 'The President has been shot! President Kennedy has been shot!' I forgot all about that kickball ... and ran immediately back out to the teacher and told her what I heard.... She rounded up all the students and escorted us back inside the school where we spent the rest of the day watching the newscasts on TV, some of us in awe and some of us scared and crying."

Terry wasn't alone. There were grownups, too, who were scared and crying.

Terry's brother, Mike, was older. He had stayed home that Friday morning because he was sick, and his grandfather took him to the doctor's office. "We had finished at the doctor's and were going by the drugstore to pick up a prescription when we heard on the car radio that JFK had been shot." Mike was 12 years old.

My friend Walter, an Army brat, was a sophomore in high school in Atlanta. He was about to go to the auditorium for an assembly to mark the end of Democracy Week -- "I have no memory of what exactly that was about," he wrote me -- when the principal put a radio station on the PA system.

"We went to the assembly; I remember nothing of it at all, as I'll wager is true for most of the other students. At the end of the program Sister Mary Whatever, the principal, announced that he had died. We were led in a prayer or two and walked numbly back to get our coats and begin the long trip home (two city buses and about an hour).

"Downtown Atlanta was spooky, weird and quiet. Once I got home I sat, like most Americans, in front of the TV for four days."

My friend John David, with whom I worked at AFTV in Germany in the late 1960s, still stays in touch via email. We haven't seen each other since December 1969. Like Walter, he was a sophomore in high school in 1963.

"Came over the P.A. Teacher was pretty bummed. I was too young to understand the severity of this, but soon after we were all dismissed. I recall my mom and dad were not happy, but no real mourning -- we (I guess I was formative) were GOP voters, ex military dad, college grad mom. I doubt they voted for the man, and I remember being sort of bummed out with the 24x7 wall-to-wall media for a whole week."

Chuck Minx also worked with me in Germany. He taught me most of what I know about photography. I haven't seen him either since coming home, but we stay in touch. He wrote me from his home in California.

"I was in my dorm room in college and heard shouting downstairs. I found my dorm-mates in agitation in front of the TV. We as a nation used to think that this kind of thing only happened in other countries. Afterwards, we had to face the fact that we were no more stable or less volatile than anywhere else."

My friend Jill, who grew up to be a newspaper reporter and a free-lance writer and editor, was 17. She was a high school senior in Fort Meyers, Fla.

"I was ... coming out of my 5th period Spanish class and encountered my friend Marcia who told me that President Kennedy had been shot. She had been in the high school's administration office and heard the report on the radio. I headed for my next class, physical education. In the girls' locker room, I heard the announcement from the high school's principal that the President was dead. I felt numb."

As did so many of us.

"I had just been to the cinema with my father in the West End of London," wrote my most far-flung correspondent, Christine, who is now an author and indexer. She was a grownup whose memories went back to the Blitz. I thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of somebody who was not American.

"We'd been to see a Garbo film, I can't remember which one. As we were about to descend into the underground station -- I think it was Leicester Square -- we saw a newspaper [display] which announced that President Kennedy had been shot dead. Again, I don't remember the exact wording. My father and I looked at each other in shock and disbelief. Neither of us could speak."

Christine was for all the world like an American in what she was feeling and thinking 50 years ago.

"Kennedy was an unbelievably charismatic figure, the youngest US president to have been elected to office.... He seemed to emanate confidence, optimism, vigour and intelligence," she wrote. "Quite apart from politics, the Kennedys made a strikingly glamorous couple. It seemed so wrong that JFK should have been cut down at such a young age, when he still seemed to have so much to offer. We grieved for Jackie, who was by his side when he was shot. No wife should have to see her husband die in such a horrifying way."

For the record, I was in the announce booth at WTVR TV recording promotional station breaks for that night's prime time. They would never be heard on-air.

Fifty years ago we clung to each other for support. This year, we don't cling. But we do share. We survived. And we have never forgotten that day.