> First was on November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. This was when The Fifties actually ended and The Sixties began. (My great aunt Eva Quakenbush, née Searls or Searles—it was spelled both ways—told us what it was like when Lincoln was shot and she was 12 years old. “It changed everything,” she said. So did the JFK assassination.)

This always amazes me. Things you learn in history class seem like so long ago, yet here is a living person who spoke to someone with living memory of the civil war. Which also means that people living today had direct relatives who were slaves. The last American slave died in the 1970s, which means they have relatives alive today only a generation or two removed from that. I have people a generation or two younger than me right now! The past is not so far in the past.