43 thoughts on “November 22, 1963”

  1. Nobody remembers anybody who died that day like who died on Sept 11 2001.

    1. Terrible story from a neighbour over here in Birmingham, England re: 9/11.

      An English friend of his who worked high up in one of the Twin Towers heard a huge bang; an announcement circulated telling everyone not to panic and to stay where they were. This source said that all the non-Americans ignored the Health & Safety recommendation and simply started walking down the stairs.

      Past the floors where the plane hit, as it turned out. The chap survived, thanks to his disregard for the official advice.

      That’s the story.

    3. Joe Slowinski died on that day, 29 hours after being bitten by a krait, also on September 11.

      How does that work? – time zones. It was the 11th in Myanmar when he put his hand in the bag, and the 11th in faraway New York when artificial respiration ceased.

      Analogously, my cousin was born on Nov 23 1963, on the very day Kennedy was shot.

  5. Until now I thought there were only two other famous same-day deaths: Adams and Jefferson, and Stalin and Prokofiev.

    Can anyone think of another?

      1. Cervantes and Shakespeare died on consecutive days; now that was a really bad 48 hours.

        1. Not quite. Spain and England were on different calendars (Spain on the Gregorian, England Julian) so Shakespeare died eleven days after Cervantes.

      1. That’s not the exact same day. (Yeah, it was Aug 16th for both, but Babe died in 1948 and Elvis died in 1977).

    4. Re: simultaneous deaths, my mates Mark and Luke tell me that their mate Yeshua, big in Galilee, and two pretty well-known criminals died on the same day. Matthew says about the same thing; but he doesn’t say how many robbers there were. My other mate John, doesn’t mention the lags; don’t know what to make of it myself.

  6. In other news….The Beatles released their second L.P. on that date. And played a gig in Stockton-on Tees with The Vernons Girls, The Kestrals (sic), Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers, The Brook Brothers and The Rhythm & Blues Quartet. Remember them? Me neither.

  7. Huxley I knew about because I’m a big fan of his writing, especially Brave New World and Doors of Perception (and their follow-up essays, Brave New World Revisted and Heaven and Hell). C.S. Lewis, I didn’t, since I’ve never cared much for his brand of apologetics (or for apologetics in general), with the exception of The Screwtape Letters, because who can resist an epistolary novel — especially a demonic epistolary novel.

  11. Yes, I did know this… a favorite bit of trivia.

    Speaking of the “every American over a certain age” proviso, this reminds me of a great line from “L.A. Story.” Steve Martin tells a much younger Sarah Jessica Parker something like “it’s like knowing where you were when Kennedy was shot.” Replies a bouncy SJP: “oh no, they shot Ted Kennedy?”

  12. The same day that JFK was assassinated the CIA had signed off on killing Fidel Castro. See: Desmond Fitzgerald. Desmond Fitzgerald and Robert F. Kennedy were planning the action. The Kennedy brothers were obsessed with getting Castro. See: Wikipedia.

    Regards,

    John J. Fitzgerald (no relation to Desmond)

    Frances Fitzgerald was Desmond Fitzgerald’s daughter. She wrote a book about Vietnam, _Fire in the Lake._

  14. Peter Kreeft (I think) wrote a book about a conversation between the three of them, with JFK representing western rationalism, Huxley eastern mysticism, and Lewis christianity. I’m sure Kreeft had Lewis winning (iirc, the book was published by Nav Press or IVP), but I never read it.

  18. And the very next day, Nov. 23, 1963, the first episode of Dr Who aired on the BBC.

  19. 15 May, 1970. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green. Perhaps this does not cont because their deaths were related. But, both are mostly left out of our history lessons.

    1. I had a college professor(Philosophy) who believed the driver of the presidential limo shot Kennedy with some sort of alien weapon!

  21. But how many of you know that C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley also died the same day?

    You win some, you lose some.

    (sorry… couldn’t resist)

  22. I only know this because it was part of an assignment in a Techniques of Research class, back when such questions took more than thirty seconds to answer. Less if you Swype fast and have 4G.

  23. I read a lot of CS Lewis in my youth but none of his books made as much of an impression as The Abolition of Man, which, I think, he wrote before his conversion. So succinct, clear, jargon-free and true.
    I think it should be prescribed to every first year philosophy class.

  25. @Barry Lyons, who wrote:
    “Until now I thought there were only two other famous same-day deaths: Adams and Jefferson, and Stalin and Prokofiev.

    Can anyone think of another?”

    How about Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009?

Comments are closed.