Surely it is ironic that I and my fellow high school journalism students—theoretically the news hounds of the future—were among the last to get the word on Nov. 22, 1963. Because our classroom’s intercom unit was on the blink, we blithely wandered into the cafeteria for lunch, puzzled by the atmosphere there that was somewhere between frenzy and dumb bewilderment, with no clue that President John Kennedy had just been shot.

Even now, 60 years later—sixty!—what transpired then feels a bit like a teenagers’ warped gag: Whaddya think about Kennedy being shot? (Yeh, right.)

This was in Hobbs, N.M., my junior year. A Friday. Even more surreal than the day’s unsettling news, it shortly was determined—not too long after Walter Cronkite solemnly removed his spectacles and confirmed on national television that Kennedy had died—that the evening’s football game between us Hobbs Eagles and the visiting lads from nearby Roswell would go on as scheduled. We were told that Kennedy would have wanted it that way, though it occurred to me that Hobbs High School officials could not have discussed this with the President either before, and certainly not after, his demise.

We lost the game. I didn’t play a down and went home to watch TV reports on the day’s events as well as historical references to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 98 years earlier. Then, weirdness squared, I was among the millions of citizens watching the tube two days later when Kennedy’s accused killer, a U.S. Marine veteran and defector to the Soviet Union named Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered by strip-club owner Jack Ruby in the Dallas police station garage as the cameras rolled. All of this, it should be noted, long before America’s growing embrace of the gun culture.

Now, with another anniversary of that spooky weekend upon us, and with Kennedy’s fact-challenged nephew Robert Jr. currently attempting a nonsensical Presidential campaign, a vague mood of disbelief endures. (A related moment of disorientation happened in early June of 1968, when I was wakened by a radio report that Bobby Kennedy had been shot dead after a political appearance. “Dummies,” I remember thinking, half-conscious, “that was John Kennedy—and it was five years ago!”)

It now has been 30 years since a business trip to Dallas facilitated my visit to the orange-brick Texas School Book Depository, where the sixth-floor corner window was still ajar above Dealey Plaza. From that window, Oswald—using a scope on his rifle in his so-called “sniper’s perch”—fired as the Presidential motorcade, creeping toward him up Houston Street, slowed to take a sharp left turn below, onto Elm. Just 265 feet away.

I was with a journalism colleague that 1993 day, determined to trace some key movements of Nov. 22, 1963. From the sniper’s perch, by then transformed into a museum, we took the short drive to the hospital where Kennedy had been whisked and, like Oswald two days later, was pronounced dead; then to the city’s Municipal Building where Oswald, like Ruby two days later, was locked in the same cell. (A kindly policewoman, who gave us a tour of the place, asked if we were interested in seeing where Ruby was shot. Her sly answer, pointing to her stomach, was “right here.”)

I naturally had seen the Zapruder film, the silent 8mm color home movie shot by a Ukrainian-born American clothing manufacturer who accidentally captured the instant of the President’s assassination. I had heard the conspiracy theories about the grassy knoll and a second shooter. Whatever; Kennedy was long gone and there was no going back.

Except it was natural enough to think what the country and the world might have been like if Kennedy had lived. And in 2011, I read Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63, drawn to it not such much as a hard-core history buff but curious about possible new insights into yet another day in infamy.

King’s tome, almost 900 pages, proved to be as phantasmagorical as the happenings in November ’63—which should have occurred to me, given King’s art form: horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, fantasy. It’s far too late for a spoiler-alert review, but King’s plot involved an English teacher who travels back through time in an attempt to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

I won’t tell how the book came out. Except to affirm that Kennedy is still dead. (Sixty years!)