In consecutive shifts my mother and then my father divided the day by driving groups of elderly voters from nursing homes to the polls where Robert F. Kennedy's fight to win the California democratic primary was being waged. During my mother's shift, squeezing as many as 5 elderly but determined Kennedy supporters at a time into our Dodge station wagon, my father took me into the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Ballroom where I hoped I would see Senator Kennedy, but instead experienced only the incredibly blinding glare of television lights. I had met Senator Kennedy before in New Albany, Indiana. I expected and was excited at the prospect of meeting him again. He was alive when I fell asleep in a room upstairs before the results of the election were known.
He was still alive, but mortally wounded, when I awoke early the next morning and found, to my surprise, my father, awake and in front of the television, sitting with his hands clasped in his lap, leaning forward, watching the screen. I had never known my dad, a full time professional musician, to be awake before late, late morning or noon. He hadn't slept. Only I. Nobody else had slept. I may have asked what was going on. What I remember my father saying was this: "Somebody should take the guy who did this and machine gun him against a wall."
That's how I learned what had happened. Senator Kennedy lived 25 and a half hours after being shot. He died at 1:44am, 6 June, 1968. He was 42 years old.
Be glad you weren't there.
