Part One November 22, 1963 Gaffney SC

     John Grooms is a 1967 grad of Gaffney High School and former editor of Creative Loafing in Charlotte NC. This is his piece also published in his opinion piece compilation, In Praise of Weasels.

      From November 1998 -- Published on the 35th anniversary of John Kennedy’s murder, this piece is a portrait of a teenager and a small town on the brink of changes.

JFK, Dallas & High School Football

John Grooms

My high school's football team played for the state championship on the day John Kennedy was killed. That night, actually. There was nothing anyone could do; I don't think there was any official discussion about whether the game should be postponed. The showdown had been scheduled for a long time and when would it be played if not on November 22? In any case, there was no way I wasn't going. There was too much riding on it.

I was a freshman at Gaffney High School in South Carolina, and my answer to the standard boomer question of where I was when I heard Kennedy had been shot is that I was waiting at the water fountain before going into sixth period Latin class. I was third in line behind a cute strawberry blonde cheerleader I’ll call Shirley, who was the object of many freshman boys’ crushes, including mine.

"Just shot, that's all I heard," said the girl who ran up to our line to tell us about it. "Just shot."

I imagined at the time that the President had been hit in the arm or shoulder and that he'd be all right. I gulped the cold water from the fountain and walked into Latin class, a couple of steps behind Shirley.

Gaffney High School would play its last football game of the season that night 60 miles to the east, against Lancaster High, in Lancaster, SC. Both teams were undefeated going into this last game and, as there were no playoffs then in South Carolina, the winner would be declared state champion.

Small Carolina towns like Gaffney had grown throughout the 1950s and into the Space Race decade, but the undertow of the past still tugged at us mercilessly -- in the sluggish pace of everyday life; a resistance to change so deep that it was

nearly a primal instinct; the narrow field of interests; in all the slow, stifling ways that drove high school students away after graduation in those days. In short, towns like Gaffney and Lancaster had precious few things to get super-excited about, and very often the high school football team became the focus of the town's energy, both incubator and repository of its dreams.

We were lucky. The Gaffney High School Indians had won so many state championships over the years, triumph had nearly become routine. A truly great football team, which we had that year and knew it, was enough to whip everyone into a frenzy. Add to that a season-ending state title game against an equally undefeated rival – and Got-o-mighty, that was almost more than we could stand.

No one had talked about anything else for a couple of weeks. Folks on the street, fellow students, even teachers, neighbors and checkout girls at the A&P, friends on the phone, deejays on the radio, columnists in the town newspaper, everybody everywhere. The air was heavy with weeks' worth of boasting hurled between the two towns.

School boosters had the idea, unprecedented in town at the time, of chartering buses for the drive to Lancaster.They were overwhelmed by the demand, so they enlisted even more buses, also quickly filled. The championship game had become a juggernaut, by far the biggest event of the year. We were wrapped up, secure in our own drama, our self-contained world, basking -- perhaps for the last time -- in small Southern towns' traditional disconnection from the big national picture.

During football season, Friday's last class was cut short so the students could hold pep rallies in Gaffney High's wobbly, classic old auditorium. Our rallies were so wild and raucous -- just a notch below a riot, really -- newspapers from neighboring towns would sometimes send reporters to cover them. For a solid half-hour or more, we let loose a fire hose blast of clamorous, howling cheers, fired by teenage dreams of greatness -- singing, screaming, jumping up and down and flailing around and roaring in a ferocious way that could only happen in a town where speaking in tongues at revivals wasn’t uncommon. The rallies always

left us hoarse and rasping as we slammed out of the auditorium, facing yet another five hours before the actual game.

On November 22, though, most of us were uneasy as we filed into the auditorium around 2:15, wondering what had happened to President Kennedy.

I felt a small tug in my chest as I spied Shirley the Crush on the freshman cheerleading squad, standing onstage, hands on hips, next to the older cheerleaders, awaiting the word from the principal. She was biting her lower lip, her gaze darting randomly around the auditorium while the other cheerleaders focused intently on the pep band, seated in the front rows.

The principal, a big man who rarely exhibited interest in students’ day-to-day concerns, walked up the side stairs and across the stage to a microphone. He motioned for silence, and then told us what he had learned on the radio: President Kennedy had been critically wounded, "but he's OK."

The rally went on as scheduled, one of the wildest and loudest ever, a wall of championship fever denying entry to the dark outside world.

When we left the rally, we heard right away that Kennedy was dead.

My father had bought tickets for us on one of the chartered buses to Lancaster to attend the game. We didn't see each other much, as the weekly visits mandated by the divorce settlement had petered out a couple of years earlier. My mother had remarried, to a man I didn’t like and who was getting tired of my reminders that he wasn’t my father.

Late that afternoon, Mom dropped me off in front of Dad's house. On the way she asked me if I was sure I wanted to go ahead with the trip, in light of the day's tragedy. I looked at her as if she had lost her mind.

For me, excitement about the game was entangled with expectations of sharing it with my father. We had taken in more things together in the past couple of months – a movie, a football game, a county fair and such -- and seemed to be building to a new reconnection. The championship game could open that door. If Dad and I joined in the intensity of the contest that was consuming the town, and breathed the same air as the thousands of others who were just as crazed, then we

could catch up on what we'd missed during the past few years. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.

Instead, that was the most awkward evening I ever spent; and awkward in an indescribable way, as nothing like it has happened since to compare to it.

At Dad's house, he and I talked numbly about the assassination before we left, both of us either looking at the floor or at a spot a few inches to the side of the other's face, exchanging whatever information we had gleaned from radio or TV news reports. Then we got into his car and listened to more radio news from Dallas as we drove to Gaffney High stadium, where a fleet of buses waited to take the tribe of fans to the big showdown.

But obviously, everything was different, and in ways we could neither quite grasp nor fend off. The murder felt more monstrous than anything I had known, unnatural and overpowering, like a force of nature that had suddenly turned evil. Its appalling pull drew us into its awful maw, and we had no choice but to talk about it, react to it anyway we could, just to see if our ramblings would accidentally make some sense of it. It didn't work. Dad parked the car at the school and we climbed onboard our bus for the trip to Lancaster.

Feelings on the crowded coach during the long ride through the dark were tangled and confusing. Rather than the all-American communal football fever we had had every reason to expect, our high spirits – genuine but sputtering, in fits and starts - fought against uneasy silences, and our conversations avoided Dallas, shoving back the obvious for just a while longer.

Cheers often erupted, like fireworks exploding over a fog, but just beneath the surface of our rolling pep rally roiled a strong, unspoken guilt for going ahead with the game in spite of Kennedy's death. That guilt fit tightly into our resentment that something the world considered more important -- the outside, mostly Northeastern world that defined American reality and in which we were only partly included -- was draining the meaning from our dramatic local clash. We hated it, even as our bus kept rolling eastward toward the season's close, and bravado and boasting filled the coach with the hubbub of teenagers on the move.

Now and then during that bus ride, we lost ourselves in the upcoming showdown and yelled out old favorite cheers like "Two bits, four bits" or just

"Indians Indians Indians Indians," over and over like a chant to ward off the real world. But then things would quiet down, and tongue-tied clumsiness would rule the bus again