In 1954 my father was stationed at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and we lived on the now-defunct South Post of Fort Myer. My friends and I had a grand time romping through the nearby Civil War battlefields, taking turns being Yankee and Rebel. I couldn’t decide whether to favor the Blue or the Gray. At the age of eight I’d really never thought about the issues that fueled the fighting.

Then, one day in the first week of September 1954, at the beginning of the year for our small military elementary school at Fort Myer, there were new faces in my class—and reporters from United Press and Army Times taking pictures. They were photographing the class while I led the Pledge of Allegiance for the first integrated class in the formerly Confederate state of Virginia. The two new students were black, and to me and the rest of my third-grade classmates they did not seem any different from the rest of us kids. But 1 was very proud to have been chosen to lead the Pledge of Allegiance on that day.

The event would help shape this nation’s future, and my own. It brought home to me the idea that all men are created equal and have the right to equal opportunity. Much of my life as an individual and a social worker has been based on the premise I learned in that classroom in 1954.

—Bruce Killebrew lives in Altamonte Springs, Florida.

From November 17 to 22, 1963, I was in Dallas to cover a soft-drink convention for a trade magazine. That fateful week produced some unusual coincidences for me.

One of the Tuesday speakers was Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who had been lined up by his friend and later aide Cliff Carter, a 7-Up bottler from Bryan, Texas, whom I knew professionally. I was with the reception group when Johnson arrived more than a half-hour late. He made it clear that if he was not put on to speak immediately, he would leave. The presiding officer reluctantly stopped Charles Brower, president of BBDO advertising agency, in mid-sentence, after which Johnson made a decidedly political talk. Mr. Brower got a tumultuous ovation when he returned to the podium with the opening comment “Some of our best programs are interrupted by commercials.”

On Thursday, the day before President Kennedy was to address a luncheon in a nearby building, I was given a walking tour of the facilities, which by then were under Secret Service surveillance. We saw men who looked like agents, but we were not challenged.

That night, after a barbecue ending our convention, a friend took several of us to a gaudy nightspot, the Vegas Club, on the outskirts of town. We were greeted at the door by a slight, balding man who collected a buck from each of us as admission. It was a slow night, and we stood around shooting the breeze with this fellow for quite some time. I didn’t know his name then, but three days later I figured out that it was Jack Ruby.

On Friday I was in the crowd on Market Street waiting for the Kennedy motorcade. My time ran out, and I had to leave to catch a 12:30 taxi to Love Field. On our way there, between 12:35 and 12:40, sirens were screaming and unmarked cars raced past at high speed with emergency lights flashing. My taxi didn’t have a radio, so as we drove past Parkland Hospital, we had no idea why people were running frantically toward it from all directions.

It was pure pandemonium at the airport. In addition to shouts that the President had been shot, an attendant told us that Governor Connally and others were dead. Nobody knew anything for sure.

I checked in at the airline counter for a two o’clock flight to Louisville. I was carrying a rolled-up flip chart wrapped in brown paper, a slim package that could easily have been mistaken for a rifle. After a short delay we boarded our flight and taxied out. We sat at the end of the runway for a few minutes until the captain tersely announced that the President was dead. He then began our takeoff, and I have a vivid memory of roaring by the suddenly somber sight of Air Force One parked on the ramp.

It has occurred to me many times that Kennedy’s assassin or conspirators could have been aboard our plane or any other flight that left Dallas in the hours immediately after the tragedy. And I have wondered if the authorities ever thought about a fellow who had been within arm’s reach of Lyndon Johnson early in the week, who walked through the Kennedy luncheon site, who talked with Jack Ruby Thursday night, who was standing along the parade route Friday, and who left downtown about the time the shots were fired, flying out of Dallas with something that sort of looked like a gun.

—Willis Johnson is vice president for corporate communications for an Atlanta banking company.