Senator Robert Kennedy – March 25, 1968 – Ditching High School to go Hear His Campaign Speech at a College in the San Fernando Valley, CA – Two & A-Half Months Before His Assassination in Los Angeles
Introduction
My 55th Year high school reunion is coming up later this year and the Reunion Committee is soliciting written submissions from all our classmates to include in an electronic Commemorative Book of Memory & Testament. We are soliciting written memories and look backs of our high school years together, testaments of life’s journey after high school – the joys and dramas, challenges and traumas – and all the other stuff of life. To encourage our classmates to share and write, periodically we are sending out a few of the submissions we have received in an email as examples of what our classmates are writing of their thoughts and life events. The posting below is one that I submitted.
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Senator Robert Kennedy – March 25, 1968 – Ditching High School to go Hear His Campaign Speech
As a writer, I have written multiple snippets and several long non-fiction stories about my grammar school days, but only a few short pieces on my high school life. And the piece below about me and my friend, Steve, going to see Robert Kennedy at San Fernando Valley State College (SFVSC) as it was named at that time, on March 25, 1968, actually comes from the longer non-fiction story about Larry, a friend from when he arrived at St. Ferdinand’s grammar school in fourth grade, to the summer after we graduated from 8th grade in 1964. He did not go on to Bishop Alemany, so I lost track of him, and only heard of him again when I returned home for Christmas from college in my junior year, and my father told me Larry had been murdered, shot with a gun at a party. My dad also said he had a little girl.
I wrote the story titled “Larry with the Sneakers, the Whitest of White, & the Great Walls Around Me”, in 2015. The piece below comes from the section of the story, where some classmates were planning to ditch school in 6th grade, and sort of invited me along. I thought it was a dumb idea with nothing really interesting in it for me and did not go. In the story, I then wrote, almost as an aside, about the only time I ditched school, and that was in high school when together Steve and I, along with most of the senior class, as I seem to remember, ditched school to go see Robert Kennedy. The introduction to this story is on my website as a Non-Fiction Short Story Excerpt: Larry of the Sneakers – Non-Fiction Short Story Excerpt | Writing In The Shade Of Trees
The crowd photo below, I obtained from the archives of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum located in Boston, the only crowd photo attached to the entry on the speech on March 25, 1968. As I was viewing the photo, I realized that right near the center of the photo were five, perhaps six, classmates from Bishop Alemany. Now how neat is that to be part of a photo in the archives of a presidential library!
San Fernando Valley State College, 25 March 1968 | JFK Library
And of course, the two and a half months following Senator Kennedy’s speech at SFVSC were tumultuous for the nation and significant for us with the events of the nation and our lives at Bishop Alemany intertwining.
Our excursion to SFVSC to hear Robert Kennedy speak was Monday, March 25, 1968.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated ten days later in Memphis TN on Tuesday, April 4, 1968.
Our Senior Prom was Wednesday, May 22, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, in the main ballroom.
We graduated at Bishop Alemany on Sunday, June 2, 1968.
Three days after we graduated from Bishop Alemany, Senator Kennedy, on Wednesday, June 5, 1968, was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel just off the main ballroom where two weeks before we had our senior prom.
And the Vietnam War – which escalated after President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, in Dallas, TX, while we were in 8th grade, and was beginning to really get off the ground when we graduated from 8th grade in June 1964 – continued to escalate through our high school years and was destined to continue until April 1975, seven years after we graduated from Bishop Alemany.
These were our times.
Below is the excerpt about my friend, Steve’s, and my time at SFVSC from my story about Larry.
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No one asked me to ditch school again at St. Ferdinand’s. If some ditched school other times, I didn’t know anything about it. Actually I ditched school only once in my whole school life and that’s when I was a senior in high school and all the seniors it seemed were ditching school to go see and hear Robert Kennedy. He was he was giving speech at Valley State College as he was running for president in the California primary in June 1968. I didn’t even really “ditch” school then, because when my friend Steve asked me if I was going – I had a car at school – I phoned my mom and asked her if it would be okay for me to leave school and go see Robert Kennedy and to my surprise, and without a lot of questions, she just said yes I could go.
So at Valley State, I first saw and heard Robert Kennedy from a distance when he gave his speech, and then after his speech I saw Robert Kennedy close up and much more in person as he was walking away on the same pathway as Steve and I were walking towards my car. And Steve, always more sure of himself and more assertive than me, just walked up to Robert Kennedy to shake his hand. Now Kennedy did not look entirely happy and he was talking to an aide, and as Steve walked up to him with his hand out reached, Robert Kennedy said, “Are you old enough to vote?” Then Steve, very quick thinking, also unlike me, said something very clever like, “Don’t I look old enough?” Robert Kennedy then, with his famous soft gentle manner, smiled a bit as he shook Steve’s hand.
Kennedy may have been talking to his aide about the campaign wisdom of speaking at a college where most of the students would have been under 21, which in 1968 was still the minimum age to vote in elections in California, and maybe that’s why he didn’t look happy at first and asked Steve the question. But he did smile and he must have realized that lots of people were there because he was a Kennedy – President Kennedy’s brother! – and he might have even brightened more if we had told him almost the entire senior class of our Catholic high school had ditched school to just come out to see and hear him talk. Maybe he would have also liked to know that I ditched school for the first and only time in my life just to see him, but I didn’t say anything, of course.
The next day at school, the Boy’s Dean of Discipline, told us that the school administration was angry and upset about so many seniors ditching school and that our scheduled “Senior Ditch Day” in just a couple of days was cancelled. I really didn’t understand why the administration and the Dean of Discipline were angry and upset. After all, Robert Kennedy was a Kennedy and a Catholic and Alemany was a Catholic high school and we were all Catholics – and, also, my mother said it was ok and she wasn’t angry. Cancelling our Ditch Day didn’t really affect me anyhow as no one had asked me to participate in any outing on that special senior day even though I had a car. And then, about two and a half months later, another hand reached out to Robert Kennedy except this one had a gun, and Robert Kennedy was dead, shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just off the ballroom where we had had our senior prom just two weeks before.
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Below is a link to Robert Kennedy’s speech on March 25, 1968.
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What a time that was! You were indeed right in the middle of it all. Thank you for sharing!