President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was a watershed event for Harvard residents of a certain age, as Pearl Harbor was for the preceding generation, and the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, will be for the current generation. Many Harvard residents have vivid recollections of where they were when they first received news of the shooting and the strong emotions they shared with families and neighbors during the following days.

Television, which had yet to become a fixture in every home, played a major role in memories of the events. Although still-shots from Abraham Zapruder’s amateur video of the shooting were not published until the next year, television provided Americans with indelible images of the aftermath, including a bloodied Jacqueline Kennedy leaving the Parkland Hospital with her husband’s body, and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s swearing-in aboard Air Force One that same afternoon. Two days later, millions witnessed Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald as he was being moved from the Dallas Police Department to a local jail. More millions watched the dignified funeral ceremonies, scenes of which are clear in the minds even of Harvard residents who were too young to have any real understanding of events at the time.

Elizabeth Marr of Ayer Road recalled that she was at the General Store, chatting with her mother, who kept the store’s books, and Ed Pieters, who ran all the store’s nongrocery operations on the second floor. News of the shooting came over the radio as she stood there with her youngest child on her hip.

“I remember feeling as if someone had knocked the breath out of me,” Marr said. “My children remember that the house was jam-packed full, because our neighbors didn’t have a television. People felt the need to gather together,” Marr said. She remembered the shock of watching Ruby shoot Oswald on live television. “We had no idea of the possible ramifications of that second shooting, and no clue about Ruby’s other connections. We thought it was one man, one purpose. We took it at face value.”

Although Marr said that television coverage of national and world events was not new, “it was never quite like this. This was just such a shock. So many people identified with the couple and the family.”

Arline Marteney of Tahanto Trail said that she and her husband, Gene, were Kennedy fans. “We were so excited by President Kennedy’s call to serve; we planned to join the Peace Corps after my husband finished graduate school, but by then I was pregnant,” she said. Recalling the assassination and the events of the next few days, Marteney said, “I was very much in front of the TV. It was just so unbelievable and everything was changing so swiftly. There was a feeling of unease, a feeling that the Russians or the Mafia could be behind it, and we wondered if they were going to destabilize the government. It was a comfort to know that Johnson took over the government so quickly,” she said.

Although their growing family kept them from joining the Peace Corps in the 1960s, Marteney said that President Kennedy was the couple’s inspiration for a working trip to Guatemala with Habitat for Humanity, taken to commemorate their 40th wedding anniversary. “His reaching out to the world meant a lot to us,” she said.

Don Green of Oak Hill Road said that, although he and his peers at Bromfield were fully aware of events at the time, they didn’t feel directly affected. “Young people talked about it, but didn’t understand the full impact. I remember watching it on television, but young people weren’t as politically motivated in those days as they are now.” Karen Green recalls her classes at a floral design school in Boston being cut short. “We all went outside, and just sort of milled around, waiting for news,” she recalled.

Bromfield history teacher Steven Besold was a fourth-grader in Sister Lourdette’s room in 1963. “We had a television in the classroom that was only used to watch some program with a lady who taught us French,” he recalled. “Sister Lourdette put the television in front of the room and let us watch Walter Cronkite on CBS. It was the only time in my Catholic education that I ever remember the nuns allowing us to watch something on TV that wasn’t the French lady.”

Bromfield student Eve Karon of Graniteview Lane said she became interested in the Kennedy brothers during her freshman year, as a result of a project for Ms. Kathleen Doherty’s American history class. She memorized Robert Kennedy’s speech to a campaign crowd in Indianapolis, given the evening of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, just a few years after Kennedy’s brother’s death.

“Although I wasn’t alive during President Kennedy’s term, I strongly believe that fateful day was a turning point for that generation and generations to come, and the United States is just now beginning to get back on track,” she said.

Chris Ready of Still River Depot Road said that she was living in Cleveland at the time. “I was at a luncheon with a lot of Republican friends. When news of the shooting came over the radio, the reaction of the group as a whole was not at all like mine. I was frozen, but the first thing that two women did was to call their husbands to see how it would affect the market,” she said, still astonished and chagrined. “I couldn’t understand it. I excused myself and drove home. The rain was coming down and my tears were continuous. There was an awful storm in Cleveland that night. I’ll never forget it. Regardless of whether the president is of your political party, it’s an awful thing when a head of state is assassinated,” she said.

Buddy Schmidt of Bolton Road didn’t recall any special observances of the president’s death. “We just all wept in our own time,” she said. Schmidt does recall vividly her 12-year-old son’s reaction to the news. At first, she said, he pulled the rocking chair up close to the television as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Then he turned the chair around to the wall, so that none of his family could see the tears streaming down his face. Schmidt embraced him and said, “Johnny, don’t ever be ashamed of honest tears,” advice that she said he’s remembered well, and quoted back to his mother often.

Dorothy Klotz is a fifth-generation Harvard resident, who grew up on Lovers Lane and now lives on Partridge Hill Road. In 1963, she was a young mother, living in Ridgefield, Conn. Like other interviewees, she expressed long-held regret at President Kennedy’s abbreviated life.

“It was a strange and difficult time for everyone,” she said. “He didn’t have an opportunity to live long enough to make other than a personal impact on the political structure. He never had a chance to finish what he had started.”