Juanita Salas was a sophomore at Robertson High School, immersed in her social studies class, when the principal got on the P.A. system to announce the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Everybody was just shocked for awhile. They dismissed school right away,” said the retired teacher assistant with the Las Vegas City Schools. Like several others interviewed for this column, marking the 43rd anniversary of Kennedy’s death, Juanita has crystallized the events, “just as if it happened yesterday.”
Community grief immeasurable
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    Trying to keep from choking up, a member of my congregation, a soccer mom, announced Sunday what many of us didn’t know — and what some of us had just read — about the deaths of five Las Vegas residents whose minivan collided with a truck going the wrong way.
Hoops crown eluded I.C. Colts
    The letters, e-mails and phone calls probably won’t come this time, or if they do, they’ll be mild and courtesy of people my age whose memory banks are keen, if not a bit biased.
    A while back, a Work of Art column addressed the perils of being a sports editor, a condition being felt by current Optic sports editor Dave Kavanaugh and previous sports eds Khushroo Ghadiali, David Wesner, Jesse Gallegos and a host of others, all the way back to Vince Rivera, a couple of decades back.
Epic film made here in 1913
   Whose attic would the stuff be in? Perhaps a more relevant question would be, “Whose grandparents’ attic would the stuff be in?”
   A recent visitor to the Optic made a highly unusual request, and he may have been 50 years late in making it. David Lindblom, a filmmaker living in New York, showed up with Judee Williams, a local movie and history buff, to ask for anything that might help him with some compendious research he’s doing on Romaine Fielding, an actor, director and producer who filmed what was then the most expensive movie ever made in America, “The Golden God,” in 1913.
Did Lawrence lust after Martha?
   Did Lawrence lust after Martha? He must have, since he as much as admitted it to his friend Roger. Or was Roger interested only in clear communication?
    I’m referring to the closing graphs of a recent column, in which Lawrence and Roger met in a nightclub and Roger asked Lawrence, “What do you think of Martha and I as a potential twosome?”
    And Lawrence replied, “Martha and me would be more like it.”
Dialogue became a monologue
    A class reunion is a great opportunity to get caught up on one’s classmates.
    It wasn’t exactly my classmates who caught me up, but rather those of the Springer High School classes of 1961-64, of which my wife Bonnie was a member. Bonnie’s class, which graduated 30-plus students, had the largest showing, around 20, of four consecutive classes, quite a feat inasmuch as the class of ‘61 is the oldest of the four.
    Bonnie told me she’d completely forgotten a couple of the attendees, and in fairness, said a different couple of classmates couldn’t place her either.
    She needn’t feel bad. At the 20-year reunion of that class, in 1981, attended by roughly the same people, I wanted to test their sincerity.
Is proposed ban ‘waste of time’?
Four of us Trujillo siblings got together over the weekend after they’d arrived in town to attend a Calcutta program, a fund-raiser-dinner for the Immaculate Conception Church.
    Several of us gathered for breakfast at the Spic and Span Saturday, a repeat of what we may have done 30 or 40 times for 30 or 40 years. And because of what’s been in the local news lately, it struck me that the missing ingredient at the tables was cigarettes; years ago, several of us would have lit up — along with most of the patrons there.
One carrion per passenger
What would happen if someone were to call a major airport and say, “I have an exploding suitcase”?
    If someone were to make that call, immediately, the Transportation Security Administration would find ways to ban all luggage from flights.
    And even though we read about how the TSA had begun to ease up on some of the draconian measures for screening passengers, apparently word hadn’t really gotten around.
Who teaches whom how to speak?
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — An article a few years back in Psychology Today attempted to explain why the much-discussed “middle child” differs from the others. One of the reasons, the writer posited, was that the parents teach the first-born to talk, whereas the second child and subsequent children acquire most of their verbal skills from the older sibling.
Other skills, painstakingly taught to the elder by the parents, get passed on through the older-sibling conduit.
Denmark pushes sex envelope
    COPENHAGEN, Denmark — In addition to spending time with our first-born, Stan, a key reason for traveling to this part of Scandinavia was to explore ways in which people communicate and how one country influences another.
    My admittedly sparse familiarity with German, which I studied under Jean Johnson and the late Jose Pablo Garcia, hasn’t been enough to get me by, although we hear more German than English.
    Months before the trip, I’d been hearing about American influence on countries such as Denmark — some may call it “corruption” — and observing and listening to the natives let me find out how much and in what ways.