Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, affected every "baby boomer" in high school and changed our lives. That day remains seared in our memories no matter where we lived in the United States. I was a junior at Bayside HS in Queens, N.Y., when the horrific news resonated throughout our school. Those feelings of helplessness and disbelief that we experienced were felt in every city and state across the nation, including Bethlehem.

I asked Southside Bethlehem native Carol Henn what she remembered being in high school that day.

"Liberty HS was filled to bursting with more than 3,000 students," she said. "When the buzzer rang every 45 minutes to signal the change of classes, Liberty's hallways and stairways became surging seas of humanity, with a noise level that was deafening. Students rushed to get to their next classes and tried to conduct business along the way: 'Hey, can you give me a ride home from practice?' 'Did you get the chapters for the assignment from Mrs. Heller?' 'Are you going to Kostas's after school?'

Within a few minutes, the halls would clear and silence would reign until the buzzer sounded again. This process repeated itself every day in a way that was predictable and comfortable. Except on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963."

That day, Carol remembered she had left Clifford Steinbach's solid geometry class on the first floor of Liberty and headed to the old gym at the back of the building, for Phys. Ed. class. Over the din of all the noise, she heard someone shout "Carol!" When she looked up at the stairway to her right, she saw her cousin, Sandy, leaning over the railing. As the crowd pushed her along up the stairs Sandy shouted, "Kennedy's been shot!" Nothing about her pronouncement seemed real to Carol who shouted back, "You have a warped sense of humor!"

By the time Carol made it to the gym, the same news had filtered to other students. There was confusion and no one seemed to know how much truth there was, if any, to this crazy rumor. Students filed into the locker room, put on their cobalt blue cotton gym suits and socks and sneakers, then made their way back out to the gym floor. Their Phys. Ed. teacher, Crystal Leidig, told them that the news had come over the radio in the principal's office.

"President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas, Texas." That's all she knew - all anyone knew. It didn't seem real. Just as Sandy's shout seemed unreal, it seemed unreal to Carol.What was instantly real were the gasps and cries of "Oh, my God!" from the 50 or so girls in her class.

"Many girls burst into tears. Some sat down on the gym floor and put their heads in their hands as if to block any more news from coming into their consciousness. Mrs. Leidig, for reasons I couldn't understand then and can't understand now, decided to go on with their class. She reminded them that the president was an advocate for physical fitness and they could pay no greater respect to him than by going on with their physical fitness class," said Carol.

Mrs. Leidig told them to do 100 jumping jacks. Carol thought she was insane (or in shock). Most of them tried to do the exercise.

"Some of us just sat down on the gym floor and sobbed, not caring whether Mrs. Leidig would be angry or not. We tried to do what we had been told to do, but did the exercise in a limp, weak, half-hearted way. Most of us gave up about halfway through the required 100 and simply sat down on the gym floor. Then Mrs. Leidig then told us to do leg lifts. Perhaps she reasoned that since all of us seemed to have collapsed onto the floor, she might as well assign an exercise requiring us to be there. At last, she dismissed us early. It was the last class of the day and we hurried into the locker room to change into our school clothes," Carol said.

When class was dismissed, kids flew out of the front and side doors of Liberty. They converged on cars with radios to hear whatever was happening. "For the first time," Carol remembers, "it was quiet in Kostas's Drug Store at the soda fountain where we listened to our transistor radios. As usual, kids were lined up three or four deep at the counter. Kostas's was across the street from Liberty and was the after-school gathering place for scores of students. Looking back, those after-school hours at Kostas's were right out of "Happy Days" or "Dobie Gillis" or "American Graffiti." Those were the days of CMP sundaes, vanilla Cokes (my standard), flirting, pre-dating, going steady for a few, some serious talk among friends, and the unspoken but universally shared recognition that we were Teenagers, with all the angst and privilege of that word - except on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963," Carol said.

That afternoon, few kids ordered anything. There was no laughter, no flirting, and almost no talking. There was the sense that they needed to be with each other but they didn't quite know why.

At some point they knew they had to go home and left Kostas's. They fanned out in a dozen different directions, headed to homes all over town, as they did every day.

"On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963," said Carol, "we headed out into a world that had suddenly changed, a world we no longer understood."

"That night of Nov. 22, my family, like almost every other family in the country, sat transfixed in front of the television," Carol said. "At some level, the events of the day still didn't seem real. Soon, the image of Jacqueline Kennedy's blood-stained pink suit would be burned into our memories, as would the sight of Walter Cronkite, in shirt sleeves, removing his horn-rimmed glasses to look into the camera and tell us that "President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m., Central Standard Time. "That Cronkite had to clear his throat and regain his composure somehow gave all of us permission to lose ours, to cry without apology, to cry without really understanding why, without understanding the enormity of what had happened, what we had lost," Carol remembered.

"Our lives were simpler in those days before cell phones, smart phones, video conferencing, texting, 24/7 news, sound bites and instantaneous analyses," Carol said. "People had time to think, to absorb and to consider. Information overload was not yet a reality much less a given. The news might be hard to hear, hard to bear, heartbreaking to contemplate - but it was absorbable. There wasn't one version of the news on CBS and another on Fox. There were no talking heads rivaling each other in fear mongering and speculation. There was no avalanche of analyses from self-proclaimed experts. We heard the terrible news and were left to our own thoughts and feelings, our own instincts and intelligence. It was enough," Carol said.

Pundits would later say that on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, and in the days that followed, that television became an altar, a town hall, a gathering place for a nation in mourning. As it never had before, television united people and brought them together in their grief. In the days following President Kennedy's death, a score of images broadcast from television screens would become shared currency for the country: Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office as the 36th President of the United States aboard Air Force One; a dazed looking Jacqueline Kennedy standing to his left, still wearing that blood-stained pink suit; the drawn and suddenly older faces of brothers Bobby and Ted Kennedy; the black-veiled widow; the caisson; a black horse with boots reversed in their stirrups marching to Chopin's solemn "Funeral March;" the young daughter with her honey-blond hair blowing in the wind behind her hair band; the toddler son in his little coat, either saluting his father's coffin or simply shading his eyes from the sun. It hardly mattered as everyone wept at the sight of that little boy who could not possibly know what he had lost.

"For me, one of the most unforgettable images was the stunning, gut-punch shock of the scene broadcast live from Dallas," Carol recalled. "Skinny and rumpled and looking meek, Lee Harvey Oswald was being led out of the basement of the Dallas Police Department, to be taken to the county jail, when a male figure in a dark suit and hat lunged on the scene from the right and pointed a gun at Oswald's belly. Pow! Pow! Pow! The shots rang out as we watched in disbelief. Oswald's face contorted itself, his mouth open in a vertical 'O,' his eyes closed tight against the shock. The scene looked like something from a TV crime show, but David Janssen and Gene Barry were nowhere to be seen. The suited figure with the hat was, we would learn, someone named Jack Ruby and he had just killed Lee Harvey Oswald as perhaps 100 million of us watched it happen. Never was 'live' TV more 'live' than this," Carol said.

"On that unforgettable November weekend, I had one other thing to think about. I was the president of the student government at Liberty High, and I knew we had to do something to commemorate what had happened.

The most immediate idea was to place a memorial in the display alcoves in Liberty's beautiful marble lobby.

"I framed a large portrait of the president and carefully calligraphied a small banner with the simple words John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917-1963. Later, in consultation with Principal Charles Klein and with other officers of the student council, it was decided that we would create the John F. Kennedy Memorial Award, to be presented annually to one or more graduating seniors in recognition of outstanding service to the school," Carol said.

"Over the five decades that have passed since 1963, I have glanced through the news stories of graduation at Liberty, looking for that award. It is still listed, still being presented - presented to students born more than three decades after that day in Dallas, presented to students for whom JFK is as distant a figure as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. The services for which these students are honored aren't very different from those that were recognized in the 1960s: tutoring, student government, stage crew and theatre, marching band and athletic team leadership, among others," she said.

When Carol passes Liberty HS these days, she knows that kids still sprawl on the gym floor painting banners to cheer the Hurricanes on to victory, there is still a cachet to being on the prom committee, and kids still hang around after school - at the ice cream parlor that replaced Kostas's -flirting, laughing, worrying about their popularity, and talking about things that seem so critical when you're 16 years old.

"In many ways," said Carol, "it's the same as it was in 1963, 1953, 1943 and long before. Except for Friday, Nov. 22, 1963."