Fred Elder
I was recently reminded of the Kennedy Assassination and its effect on my life. On the day President Kennedy was assassinated, Friday, November 22, 1963, I was at the University of Kansas taking a scheduled test in my Lubrication Theory class. This was a class in Mechanical Engineering to teach us the basics of how to analyze the various machine elements that need lubrication and the ways and means to provide that lubrication.
As I said, on November 22, 1963, I was seated in Marvin Hall taking a test in my Lubrication class. This was a closed book exam involving long and difficult equations, plus mathematic manipulations that included numbers with highly variable significant digits, both before and after the decimal point. Remember, this was before we had hand calculators and calculations were by slide rule and/or pencil and paper. In short, it was difficult for all.
Our professor was not in the room for the entirety of the exam – he would enter and leave. Right in the middle of the exam, the professor entered our classroom and rather breathlessly announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Without further comment he immediately walked out and we were to complete our exams, which everyone dutifully tried to do.
Of course, completing the exam and considering the implications of an assassinated President were difficult competing concepts to keep in one’s mind. I, probably like others in the class, did the best I could to ignore the information of the shooting of President Kennedy as I worked to complete the exam. I did reasonably well on the exam, but I have wondered, how I would have done had the Professor kept his counsel until all had completed the test. I would bet I would have done better.
The story does not end here, for me. We were scheduled to play a football game against the University of Missouri on Saturday, November 23, 1963. With Kennedy soon pronounced dead, the football world (at least as I knew it) was up in the air as the United States had decided that Saturday, November 23, 1963, would be a day of mourning for President Kennedy. Hence, we were soon told that the game had been postponed for a week. Practically, it meant that the football team players would not get to go home for Thanksgiving as Thanksgiving was the Thursday prior to the rescheduled game, November 30, 1963, and we would need to stay in Lawrence to practice.
The training table tried to give us a ‘real’ Thanksgiving dinner on that Thanksgiving Thursday, but I was not the only one who found the entire day rather hollow. We did not even practice on that day, and for me, practice would have been a welcome distraction from an empty, lifeless campus.
Ah well, we got through it and played our last football game of 1963 against Missouri on November 30, 1963. It was a good weather day for a football game, with afternoon temperatures in the high 40’s. In spite of the game being delayed a week, there was good attendance of some 45,000 fans in Lawrence, but Missouri came out on top, 9 to 7.
As an aside, the Kansas vs Missouri football contest was the oldest continuous football rivalry west of the Mississippi River until the conclusion of the 2011 season, when Missouri left the Big 12 Conference to move to the Southeastern Conference.
*Frederick T. Elder was selected as an Academic All-America Football Player by the College Sports Information Directors of America, in 1964 and he was the first person so selected from the University of Kansas.
