John F. Kennedy by William J. Moore

On November 22, 1963, I was a United States Air Force Technical Sergeant stationed at Mather AFB Sacramento, California. I was the Non-Commissioned Officer in charge of the Marksmanship program. At the time the radio announcement was made of the "shooting" of the president in Dallas, Texas, I was conducting annual pistol training for about 30 Strategic Air Command (SAC) Bomber Wing Pilots and Navigators. We "piped" the news over the Public Address system we used to control the firing sequences, and the "attitude" toward the pistol training became deadly serious. At that time it was still a question of whether or not it was a "cold war" conspiracy or just some "nut" and these fellows knew that if we went to war, they were going to be the ones that dropped the bombs on Russia.

Needless to say I was also quite concerned, as I had a wife and 4 small children and did not relish the thought of conducting pistol training in some foreign country during wartime.

Upon returning home that evening I ran into my neighbor's Mother, and as we discussed the events of the day, she told me that she usually wrote a poem when she had some traumatic or delightful experience in her life. They were usually about family happenings, but sometime they were related to "bigger doings."

The more I thought about it that evening, I became enchanted with that idea and sat down and wrote a poem and presented it to her. I have no idea what she did with it, if anything, except read it.

The opening paragraph is exactly as I wrote it that night and has remained in my conscious memory all these almost 40 years. Every so often I would run them through my mind and think, "someday I'll finish that again." Well that someday was today!!

William J. Moore - August 20, 2002