Once you see your father cry, nothing is ever the same again.

It was 60 years today that I first saw my father shed tears. I suspect many children watched wide-eyed as their parents wept when President John Kennedy was assassinated. Even those parents who had voted for Richard Nixon, as mine had.

To a confused kid, those paternal tears were the most troubling part of the national tragedy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I grew up in a small town in south Jersey with overcrowded schools.

Elementary schoolchildren were farmed out to classrooms in unlikely places. Some students had desks in the basement of the courthouse. Some other, I think, were in Sunday schools.

My classmates and I spent two years being bused to an old country schoolhouse about 12 miles from our houses. Every morning, we bounced past dairy and horse farms and fields full of winter wheat on our way to that little school. As I remember it, the ancient shingled building with its old-fashioned belfry sat in a grove of trees. In late November 1963, there were still some reddish leaves clinging to the branches.

Friday, Nov. 22, was parent-teacher conference day. My mother worked as a bank teller, my dad was selling real estate and could get away for an hour so he spent 20 minutes that afternoon with my teacher.

While they discussed my academic shortcomings, I played alone on the deserted playground.

The school had a rusty outdoor water fountain that sprayed in random directions. I’d just gotten a drink from it when my father burst out of the double doors. He was pale. He looked angry.

Geez, what did she tell him? I wondered.

“Are you crying?” he asked, seeing my wet face.

“No, I just got a drink,” I replied tentatively. “Why would I be crying?”

“The president’s been shot,” he said, as he sprinted toward our Dodge station wagon.

He turned on the engine and we sat there in the afternoon sun as Dad fiddled with the radio, trying to find the news. He didn’t speak, just stared straight ahead with his head inclined toward the crackly sounds emanating from the dashboard.

We drove home in silence. Somewhere along the way, a somber male voice told us the president was dead.

My father pulled the car over and put his head on the steering wheel. When he looked up, his eyes were wet.

We were off from school on Monday. The bank was closed, too. When one of my friends banged on the back door to get me to come outside to play, my mother shook her head.

“It’s not a holiday, it’s a day of mourning,” she said. “Watch TV.”

Our family spent most of the day in front of our black-and-white Zenith, watching the somber events in Washington.

I don’t believe I have any independent memories of the funeral cortege, of John Jr. saluting his father’s casket or of the riderless horse – images replayed so often that even those who weren’t born yet know them by heart.

But I do have one vivid memory that hasn’t been refreshed by film footage: My dad, staring at the television with his chin in his hands.

And tears streaming down his cheeks.

Looking at him, I was afraid. I sensed that something had gone terribly wrong in our world.

And it had.