LEWISTON — When the news broke on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, that an assassin had killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Carol Hanscombe, Bruce Geoffroy and Barb MacGregor were sitting in school classrooms.

W. Wightman Reilly was playing football on that Friday. Rachel Duquette was playing with her dolls.

All said the moment remains indelible.

“He was like one of the family, almost,” said Hanscombe, who lives in Lewiston but was then a Boston schoolgirl. “It just left an impression so much. It was unbelievable.”

At Boston’s Jeremiah E. Burke High School for Girls, the sophomore was in Spanish class when the dismissal bell sounded 15 minutes early. Teachers ushered the girls to lockers without explanation. But word spread in the halls, and when Hanscombe climbed onto her school bus, she was stunned.

“Everybody was in shock, but one thing I noticed was that one of the girls was sitting by herself with a transistor radio on,” she said. “She was like one of the toughie girls in school. She was crying, and that struck me.”

A few minutes later, she climbed off the bus, walked to a nearby Woolworth’s department store and stood in front of a bank of TVs to watch the newscast.

“I was in my early teens,” Hanscombe said. “Everything was supposed to be wonderful.” Instead, the man whose picture was on the wall in her father’s den was dead.

The news interrupted school classes around the country.

In Lewiston, Doris Longtin was sitting in her third-grade class at St. Joseph’s School. Her teacher, Sister Margaret, was called away and returned with word that someone shot Kennedy. In Mexico, classes at St. Theresa School were halted and the children were ushered into the church, MacGregor said.

Though he was only 7 years old, Bruce Geoffroy of Auburn recalled vividly when St. Louis School’s Mother Superior arrived in his classroom.

“It was evident she had been crying,” Geoffroy said. “Then, she made the announcement that President Kennedy had been shot and killed and school was canceled and we were all going home. When I got home, my mom had also been crying.

“For the next few days, we just about lived in front of the TV,” he said, “It was all very sad and confusing for a 7-year-old, and a little scary when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed live on nationwide TV.”

Duquette was 3-and-a-half, sitting with her mother when the TV lit up.

“My mom heard this, fell to her knees and sobbed for a very long time,” Duquette said. “It was the earliest recollection in my life and one that I will never, ever forget.”

Reilly, of Minot, had just turned 18 and was starting his first year at Elon College in North Carolina.

“It was a Friday afternoon and a group of boys were throwing a football,” Reilly said. “I remember it was a pleasant fall day. Someone came out and shouted the news. We were stunned. I went to the chapel and prayed.

Local historian Douglas Hodgkin was a graduate student at Duke University, also in North Carolina. Unlike so many, he was unaware of the news, reading old newspapers in the library when one of the century’s biggest events happened.

“I was doing research using old periodicals housed in the recesses of the basement of the East Campus library,” Hodgkin said. “Late in the afternoon, I emerged to take the shuttle to the West Campus. It was eerily quiet as no one was on the campus or on the streets. Only one other student was on the shuttle, and she sprinted away when we arrived, which seemed unusual.

“I went into the West Campus library to my car to prepare to go home,” he said. “Again, other than a staffer, I saw no one else there. When my wife met me to go back to our apartment, she inquired, “Isn’t it terrible?” Then she explained what had happened.

“Apparently, I was one of the last to know,” he said.

And some people had other things on their minds.

“I was on East Avenue driving home to Sabattus when I heard it on the car radio, not realizing I was in early stages of labor with my first child,” Cathy Blier said. “My daughter was born later that evening at St Mary’s Hospital.”

“I will always remember that day,” she said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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