The second grader who remembers the day Kennedy was killed.

At 56, I am one of the younger Americans with a clear recollection of the day fifty years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The students in Ms. Sherman’s second grade class at Oak Grove Elementary School in Florida were in line waiting to be dismissed for the day when the announcement that the president had been shot came over the public address system.

Times were different then. Seven year olds didn’t understand what being shot meant. At least I didn’t. It was immediately apparent, however, that this was devastating news. Ms. Sherman and the other teachers clustered in the hall, shaking their heads and dabbing their eyes. We milled about, seemingly forgotten. I arrived home to find my mother and our housekeeper, Lillian doing the same thing.

It’s an ordinary story. One of millions flooding back into the minds of Americans who lived through it.  The first successful assassination of a U.S. President since William McKinley in 1901 was a threshold event. We stepped through this time in our history as we did September 11, 2001 to a new, altered perception of our country.

It wasn’t today’s half-century anniversary of JFK’s death that prompted my memories of the day Kennedy died, it was a recent visit to Fredricksburg, Texas. There, on the stove of the kitchen in the home of Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, sat a pecan pie that tells a little known story.

The central Texas ranch of Johnson and his wife Lady Bird were given to the National Park Service after the former first lady’s death in 2007.  Known as the Texas White House, the entire first floor of the couple’s residence has been open to visitors since 2011.

The Texas office of LBJ. Photo courtesy National Park Service

The home, the one room school house LBJ attended, the garage, barn and livestock pastures that are now federal land and the Texas state park and historic site on the adjacent property, provide the most comprehensive birth-to-death look at the life of any American president.

On November 21, 1963, Johnson and Kennedy were together in San Antonio, at a dedication for the Brooks Air Force Base Aerospace Medical Health Center. The following day, LBJ and Lady Bird rode in a car behind Kennedy’s in the motorcade through the streets of downtown Dallas.

National Park Service Ranger John at the LBJ Ranch

Back at the LBJ ranch, preparations were being made for the Kennedys and Johnsons to spend the weekend together.

The story, as told to me by Federal Park Ranger John Butron is that Mrs. Johnson baked her famous pecan pie to cap a Texas barbecue after the Dallas appearance.  Jackie Kennedy may have been an extremely well-educated, east coast debutante but she had never eaten pecan pie and Mrs. Johnson planned to change that.

Of course the pie was never served. Within two hours of the time of Kennedy’s shooting, Johnson was sworn in as the nation’s 36th president onboard Air Force One. His wife and Kennedy’s widow – still in her blood soaked pink suit – stood on either side of him.  Time magazine reported that Lady Bird Johnson took Jackie Kennedy’s hand, telling her, “The whole nation mourns your husband.”

Johnson is sworn in as President. Lady Bird is left and Jackie Kennedy is right. Photo courtesy LBJ Presidential Library

For those of us old enough to remember those events, even dimly, the nation continues to  mourn the death of JFK for many reasons including the nation’s collective death of innocence that came along with it.  This is why in a kitchen that seems frozen in time, a small replica of a pie can reach across the years to deliver such a poignant punch.

The LBJ Ranch is located just outside the tourist community of Fredricksburgh, Texas and is open seven days a week except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. For details click here.

Christine Negroni

Author of The New York Times bestseller, The Crash Detectives, I am also a journalist, public speaker and broadcaster specializing in aviation and travel.