by Neil Stout

I was teaching in the history department at Texas A&M. I emerged from the university library stacks to find the reading room deserted.
The attendants told me that the president, the vice president, and the governor had been shot in Dallas. I rushed to my office in Nagel Hall, where
I listened to my radio with a colleague and a couple of students and learned that President Kennedy was dead and Vice President Johnson was unhurt. We were shocked, but not completely surprised--the anti JFK feeling in Texas was poisonous then. The students in my office were fairly right wing; they certainly didn't gloat, but, like the rest of us, assumed that the shooter was somebody from the right. (I did hear a horn honk, but can't say if it
was in celebration.) Most of the Aggies behaved completely appropriately.

The administration, led by President Earl Rudder, did not: the Thanksgiving Game with the University of Texas went on as scheduled, and the Aggies were given the next day off in celebration of their almost upsetting No. 1 Texas.

I moved to Vermont.