It was an ordinary Friday, until ...

Dominican Academy's fifth-grade class that greeted Nov. 22, 1963, as any other day.

Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, was just another school day for me when it began. 

The vinyl passenger seat of my family's new Volkswagen Beetle was cold as I readied for the eight-mile drive to my elementary school in Plainville, Mass. My mother, in the driver's seat, lit up the first of several Parliament cigarettes as we backed down the driveway and turned into Dean Street. There was no radio in the car, so I had to be satisfied with my imagination as we passed the same scenery that we saw every day.

By the time we had traversed Mass. Route 106 past the new Fernandes supermarket and crossed U.S. 1 to reach the back roads that took us to the Catholic elementary school at the top of a hill on School Street, I was often nauseous. Arrival meant blissful relief for my lungs, which had been repeatedly assaulted by second-hand smoke from the multiple cigarettes my mother inhaled during the drive -- not knowing at the time that each cigarette she crushed into the tiny ash tray on the Beetle's dashboard was contributing to the emphysema that would plague her some 40 years later.

The former Dominican Academy in Plainville.

I was in the fifth grade -- my first year in a classroom on the south side of the Dominican Academy building, to the left of the auditorium that dominated the center section of the sprawling one-story building. It was like a rite of passage to be on the on the other side of the auditorium, leaving the wing that was dominated by seeming infants. Even our uniforms reflected our new-found maturity, as the boys traded their clip-on bow-ties for the traditional Windsor knot tie (although mine were still of the clip-on variety).

There were 35 students in our classroom, the full fifth-grade enrollment, the students seated according to their academic rank -- the so-called smart kids at the extreme right of the classroom nearest the wall to the hallway, and the lesser-accomplished students at the far left, where they could peer out the windows and daydream to their hearts' content, as befitting the expectations that the nun teaching the class had for them.

I was seated in the first seat of Row 2, a testimony to my already-developing penchant for underachievement. That meant I was supposedly the eighth-smartest kid in the room, the seven in the first row all having better grade-point averages than I. But it had its advantages; I was able to do anything I wanted with my legs without having to worry about bothering a student in front of me, and I was in a direct line to the 19-inch RCA black-and-white television sitting atop elevated rollers at the front of the room, which was useful for my yet-to-be-diagnosed nearsightedness.

Sister Mary Eugene was not only the teacher, she was also our school's principal. She was elderly and ill-tempered in the same mold as many of our teachers, which led me to create the fantasy that almost all of the faculty were "linebackers in drag," having long left any vestige of femininity behind under the flowing white robes and black cape of the Dominican order. Why this convinced gullible parents that this represented a "better education" than what the local public schools offered is still a mystery to me.

Most of the morning was devoted to dogma, as religious indoctrination was a large part of the Dominican Academy mission. Then came lunch, when we filed past the door to pick up the small milk cartons distributed by upperclassmen and then returned to our seats to consume whatever our parents put in our lunch boxes. Then it was time for reading study, which we had begun sometime after noon. 

At some point, the sound of one student reading his assigned paragraph was interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing across the hall in the principal's office. As Sister Mary Eugene was teaching us, the task of answering the phone fell to the No. 1-ranked student in the class, who was Joanne Hastings. She dutifully leapt from her seat and exited the room to cross the hallway, and at some point, the ringing stopped. Sister Mary Eugene called for the reading to resume, and thus I could not hear the conversation.

But it didn't last long.

Within seconds, it seemed, Joanne Hastings came running back into the classroom. She was crying and tears were streaming down her cheeks as she struggled to shout, "The president's been shot! My mother said the president's been shot!"

Sister Mary Eugene gasped, then after a pause that seemed to last forever, she moved quickly to the television and turned it on in search of confirmation of this horrible news.

For a few seconds, we tried to watch the CBS coverage on a Boston TV channel. But the reception was poor close to the Rhode Island border in those days, so Sister Mary Eugene turned away from the static-obscured face of Walter Cronkite to pick up NBC's coverage on a Providence channel.

Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.

Gradually, the kids in the class started to understand what had happened. They heard that the president's motorcade in Dallas was turning into something called Dealey Plaza when shots rang out. They heard the reporters say that the president appeared to have been shot in the head. They heard that as the motorcade suddenly sped up, a Secret Service agent jumped onto the presidential limousine from behind to force the First Lady to stop crawling out onto the trunk. And by the time we heard that the limousine had arrived at Parkland Hospital and the president was receiving emergency treatment, many of the students were crying.

Not me, however. I was transfixed by the history unfolding in front of me. I wanted to know every detail. Although only 9 years old at the time (and the youngest member of my class because of my aptitude tests), I knew full well who President John F. Kennedy was -- former Massachusetts senator, youngest president in history, defeated that sweaty guy Nixon in a really close election, and had scared the shit out of me in October of 1962 when he stood toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union over nuclear missiles in Cuba. And now, people had tried to kill him.

JFK and Jackie as the motorcade began.

But Jack Kennedy also was America's first Roman Catholic president, overcoming years of religious discrimination upon his election. And thus, not surprisingly, Sister Mary Eugene almost immediately ordered the class to stand, rosary beads in hand, to pray out loud for God to spare his life.

I was incredulous. I looked at Sister Mary Eugene and pointed to the television and said, "But this is important! This is history! We should be watching it!"

Sister Mary Eugene was incensed. "You will PRAY! You will pray to save the life of our Catholic president," she shouted. 

"We can't help him," I said. "He was shot in the head!"

With speed that would make a linebacker envious, Sister Mary Eugene grabbed the brass-tipped yardstick sitting on her desk and took a windmill swing at me. The yardstick caught me on the pinky of my right hand and opened a gash, the scar from which is still visible today.

The scar, from knuckle up.

She ordered me to stand and start praying, regardless of the blood dripping from my hand. I stood, fighting back tears and mouthing the words of the Hail Marys so I could hear as much of the news reports that I could. Even when the broadcast confirmed that the president had died, Sister Mary Eugene forced her whimpering classroom to continue reciting the prayers for his eternal soul. And I continued to watch the broadcast, seeing the reporters struggle to contain their emotions as they spoke of events that would become a turning point in American history.

Students were kept in school because our parents could not be notified for an early pickup before the regular dismissal time. Most of the members of the fifth grade were huddled together in their usual cliques and whimpering. I remained in my seat, glaring at Sister Mary Eugene and glancing occasionally at the blood-soaked napkin covering my right pinky. Eventually, she took a Band-Aid out from her top desk drawer and told me to put it on the finger. Then she hovered over me menacingly and said, "You don't want for me to tell your parents what a bad Catholic you were, do you?"

I said nothing. Not long afterward, my parents' VW pulled up outside the classroom. I left the classroom through the door to the playground and walked to the car, where I found my father behind the steering wheel. I got in, saying nothing.

"You know what happened today?" he asked me.

"Yup."

"Are you OK? Do you need me to explain anything to you," he asked.

"Nope. Can I watch TV when we get home?"

My father nodded. He knew I would learn more from the television newsmen than he could provide. But then he saw the fresh bandage on my finger with blood already seeping through. 

"What happened there?

I paused. I knew my father. He was a kind and loving man, but he also had a temper that could erupt like a volcano. And if I told him that Sister Mary Eugene had assaulted me with a brass-tipped yardstick because I wanted to know what happened to the President of the United States, he would have flown into a rage that, fueled by the events of the day, might have gotten out of control.

"Cut it on the desk," I said. He nodded and we drove home in silence. 

I didn't tell my parents of the real reason for the cut on my pinky for nearly 40 years.