Two staff members from South Arkansas Community College shared their memories from former President John F. Kennedy's assassination a couple days from its 56th anniversary.
Foundation Director Cynthia Reyna and bookstore manager Mark Smith grew up in Dallas and discussed their memories of the event Wednesday at the South Arkansas Library Auditorium.
Five newspapers from the Dallas Morning News from the day of the assassination and the four days following were on display during the talk. Smith said he found the papers in a trunk in a crawl space in his late parents' home. The papers will be on display in the college's library today and are open for public viewing.
Reyna and Smith did not know each other growing up, but did live blocks apart from one another.
At the time, Reyna was a middle school student at Sacred Heart School, a Catholic school behind the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, now known as the Cathedral Santuario de la Virgen de Guadalupe, about two blocks from Kennedy's motorcade route.
Reyna said she and her class were able to attend the motorcade around 12:10 p.m., about 20 minutes before the first shot was fired.
"My clear recollection is his smile," Reyna said. "He had the most beautiful smile and the biggest teeth that were white. … And Jackie was so beautiful. From a child's point of view, they were perfect."
After Reyna and her classmates returned to class, the president was shot on Elm Street heading for the Triple Underpass and rushed to the hospital. He then died around 1 p.m.
Smith was a second-grade student at Alex Sanger Elementary at the time, but did not witness the motorcade. He said students were able to attend, though, as long as they were back in class by 1 p.m.
Smith said he remembers watching students return to class.
"One of the little girls in the class, dressed up like she's going to church, walks in the door and she is bawling," Smith said. "The teacher gets up and ushers her back into the hall and [there's] speculation amongst the kids about what's going on. This one loud-mouth boy says, 'hahaha, I bet someone shot the president.'"
Smith said at the time the comment seemed like a loud-mouth comment, but hearing it now, it's shocking.
He said Dallas students were then released to their parents and sent home early.
Reyna said while she and her classmates were waiting for the lunch bell, the principal flung the door open and screamed, "The president's been shot!"
She said, though, that she thought her principal said, "The Russians are coming!"
The assassination happened one month after The Cuban Missile Crisis and two days after the U.S. ended its naval quarantine of Cuba. There was still tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Reyna said this fear added to the traumatic events of the assassination.
She said after it happened, she was left anxious, upset and scared.
After the talk, Smith and Reyna opened the conversation to the attendees.
A man said he attended Rogers Junior High and remembers a classmate, who heard the news on the radio, yelling in the hall that the president had been shot.
A woman, who was in the fifth grade at Southside Elementary, said she remembers a teacher running into the classroom crying saying the president was killed.
"I was like you, I thought the world was fixing to crash," the woman said. "I thought the United States was done."
The woman said all the other teachers also started running down the hall and screaming and crying.
"Kids seeing that, it scared us to death," the woman said.