Nov. 20, 2013: As dozens of Bronxville parents have done in years past, Janet Johnson was a chaperone on the middle school trip to Williamsburg on that Friday, November 22, 50 years ago.

"We were in Williamsburg on our bus and a man came and pounded on the door and said, 'Did you hear? The president's been shot!'"

Patty Warble was teaching reading to her second graders at PS 109 in East Harlem. The intercom suddenly came on and she could hear a radio report coming through.

"I heard something about a grassy knoll, as I remember, and you just knew something awful had happened and somehow I just knew it was Kennedy."

As soon as her students were dismissed, she headed downtown to meet her husband of three months at NYU, where he was a law student. "I got on the Lexington Avenue subway at 96th Street and people were just sitting there crying or just sitting in stunned silence."

Carlo Vittorini was working at Look magazine in Midtown Manhattan. He heard the news as he headed back to his office that afternoon. "In the office, it was mayhem, a quiet type of mayhem, grief, great sorrow, and just this terrible feeling of waste, of how unnecessary it was, how cruel."

In what was then West Germany, Dorothy Bowerman heard it on television. She was a young US Air Force wife, stationed with her husband and three small children at Ramstein Air Base. "We were very upset and decided to go for a walk nearby. As we got out of the car, there were several Germans around. They were so sad, the Germans were so sad. Just looking at them you could see it. They were afraid. They didn't want to look us in the face. They lowered their heads. They were very sympathetic and sorrowful and respectful of our loss."

This was the height of the Cold War, of course, and Kennedy had given his famous, blistering, almost triumphant "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in Germany just months before.

Bowerman, who has lived in Bronxville for eight years, said that all these years later, there is still sadness over that loss.

"I think it was one of the first real violent crimes, one of the first public atrocities in this country; that, combined with the fact that the president was so popular and it was so unexpected, I think we lost an enormous amount."

Bob Riggs, who grew up in Bronxville, agrees. He wonders about JFK and the Vietnam War.

"The whole issue of Vietnam, would he have permitted it to continue, is an open question. Some claim that JFK would have pulled out of Vietnam and I sort of sense that. If that assumption is correct, then we certainly did lose something very, very substantial, because I don't know of any experience during the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, that was worse than Vietnam."

As a young lawyer working on Wall Street the day Kennedy was shot, Riggs remembers a particular sound in the air that afternoon.

"It caused literally a buzz on Wall Street. People were walking around with radios to their ears. That was the way people could carry the news with them back then."

When a crying teacher walked into her sixth grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, that afternoon and told ten-year-old Lisa Kunstadter and her classmates the news, Kunstadter had the sense that something big had ended in an instant.

"Looking back on it, you have a sense that it was the beginning of some sea change, the sense that we weren't safe. The ground under your feet was not firm anymore. I remember being shocked when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, and when that happened you started feeling like the world was coming apart."

John F. Kennedy's family connection to Bronxville is well known. During the 1930s, they lived in a big home just off Pondfield where Crown Circle and Crampton Road are today.

Janet Johnson, the Bronxville mother of four who would serve as a chaperone on the middle school Williamsburg trip in 1963, had moved to the village in 1919 as a two-year-old. She met JFK at various holiday parties when they were both teenagers and he was home in Bronxville from boarding school. He didn't leave much of an impression on her back then except for his good looks.

But on the day of his death some 25 years later, she found herself in Williamsburg, Virginia, consoling very young Bronxville teenagers who were distraught that their president had been murdered. They piled into her hotel room that night, dozens at a time, to watch the news in black and white on the only TV available at the hotel.

Pictured here: John F. Kennedy.