The document is a newspaper article from November 22, 2013 commemorating the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963. It describes how local residents reacted with shock and disbelief when they heard the news. It also discusses how gatherings have been held at Dealey Plaza in Dallas each anniversary to memorialize JFK and discuss conspiracy theories around his death.

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© 2013
Times-Shamrock
Newspapers
INDEX
Two sections, 18 pages
Vol. 148, No. 138
Classifieds B5
Comics B3
Dear Abby B4
Deaths A5
Opinion A4
Sports B1
TV listings B4
Weather A10
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Tonight’s low: 29
Tomorrow’s high: 56
Delegate M.
Kirkland Cox,
R-Colonial Heights,
was unanimously
re-elected House
Majority Leader. A3
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JFK commemoration edition■ Remembering the awful
day. A6
■ Baby boomers reflect on
assassination. A7
■ Finding profit in ‘truth’
of JFK. A7
BY JAMIE STENGLE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
L
oose gatherings of the curi-
ous and conspiracy-mind-
ed at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza
have marked past
anniversaries of the
assassination of
President John F.
Kennedy, featuring
everything from
makeshift memori-
als to marching
1917-1963
JFKA nation remembers 50
years after assassination
Please see JFK,
Page A8
FROM STAFF REPORTS
Marian Cohen had to lie down for a while on the
morning of Nov. 22, 1963. The expectant mother
was a month shy of giving birth to her first child,
and a wave of exhaustion had hit her.
She woke up minutes later from a phone call
from her husband, who worked at a nearby news-
paper in Bethlehem, Pa.
“He said, ‘The president has been shot.’ And I
asked him, ‘The president of what?’ ” Cohen said.
“I could not wrap my head around the fact that
[President John] Kennedy had been shot.”
Within the same hour back in Virginia, a neigh-
bor burst out of his home and ran to Miriam
Hatchett as she was hanging cloth diapers in her
backyard. He shouted the news several times
before it sank in for Hatchett.
“I just stopped in my tracks,” Hatchett said. “It
was frightening. You would get tearful about it
because he was such a vivacious man.”
A simpler, more innocent world that many Tri-
Ciy area residents knew jolted, then came to a
stop.
Florence Farley, a former Petersburg City Coun-
cilor and Petersburg School Board member, said
she was recently reminiscing about Nov. 22, 1963.
“I was in Davis
Hall at the time,”
Farley said. In 1963,
she was a professor
at Virginia State
College — now Vir-
ginia State Univer-
sity — in the Psy-
chology Department. “And a coworker and
I just got in the car and started riding.”
Farley says she doesn’t know wheth-
er she and her coworker were looking
to go anywhere in particular or if
they contemplated driving to Dallas.
Eventually, they ended up at “the Catholic
church on Washington Street.” Once there, she
and her coworker went inside and just prayed.
Farley said the rest of the decade was filled with
other destruction, including the assassination of
Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy, and the assas-
sination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King
Jr.
INSIDE:
• Reflections on
Kennedy. A4
PROGRESS-INDEX PHOTO
Extra edition of The Progress-Index
newspaper on Nov. 22, 2963.
Please see REACT, Page A8
Community paralyzed in moments
after president’s assassination
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2013