Life During Death Time: Night Beat Post 9

Jan 15, 2026

∙ Paid

Cross-posted by Night Beat

"What a quietly devastating piece. The “Kennedy death nights” feel like a weather system moving in, and Mikal shows how national grief seeped into the most private rooms of a life. Gary Gilmore's phone call is absolutely shattering in its plainness, and his lingering sense of “I failed him in that instant” lands with painful honesty. And that final pivot to the first ghost-sighting of the Beatles, as if wonder itself arrived under a blackout curtain, is such an eerie, perfect counterpoint."

- Liz Dubelman

Life during the Kennedy death nights took place during 1963 and 1964—my years at Rowe Middle School Jr. (then known as Rowe Jr. High School) in Milwaukie.

Junior high worked in ways I hadn’t anticipated. For one, I learned that I could be a good student. But I also learned that nothing would protect me from the turn of events.

One home room teacher, Mr. Davis, recognized that I was a reader. He often talked to me after class. Another home room teacher, Mrs. White, recognized my interest in political events. In the days after Kennedy was assassinated, once we’d returned to school, she said to us: “I’ve dreaded this moment. I don’t know how to tell you that this too, this killing, is also part of who we are as America. It hasn’t happened on this scale since the 1865 shooting of Abraham Lincoln.” She never seemed the same after that morning.

In the middle of March 1964, my brother Gary—ten years my senior—was tried for armed robbery at the Oregon City Court House. The trial lasted three day…

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