Sen. Bobby Kennedy's assassination foretold in grade school play

Kennedy speaking to a Civil Rights crowd June 14, 1963.

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Every year at this time I think about the June 5, 1968, killing of Sen. Robert Kennedy - and about the play I wrote on June 3, 1968.

As a budding playwright at the age of 11, I was given an opportunity at my grade school to write an original play. The story led up to the assassination of Sen. Kennedy - then running for President - and the play was to be performed at my school in the early morning hours of June 5, 1968.

That morning - the play was canceled. The play's storyline was tragic international news.

Here is the story as told in my recently published Ebook, Sacred Dialogue: Tuning into Mother Nature's Universal Broadcast Band. Premonition or coincidence?

Senator Kennedy Shot and Killed

June of 1968 was an interesting point in time. School would be out soon for the summer. I was ending my fifth grade and thinking about that three-month leave of absence. I had a lot of friends in the fifth grade and we loved to laugh and have a good time and make believe and talk about the world around us.

President Johnson was not running for a second full term after almost five years in the Oval Office. Five months from election time and it looked like either Richard Nixon or Robert Kennedy would be our next president. In my fifth grade homeroom I began talking about putting on a play.

I had been taking plays out of the school library and reading them and wanted to write my first original play.

Earlier that year a radio-style drama I had written called "Christmas In Space," was read by science teacher Mr. Brewer to all of the fifth and sixth grade classes. I talked with my homeroom teacher Mrs. Ransel and she agreed that if I wrote a play that the class could put the play on. We set a time and date for the play, during the morning of the last day of school, June 5, 1968.

On the evening of June 3, I sat alone in my bedroom at 1119 Scenic Way, a few short blocks away from the school, at my miniature rolltop desk, paper and pen in hand, and wrote a topical play. The plot involved a radioed conversation between Sen. Robert Kennedy and French President Charles de Gaulle. In the end, the radio reception went bad and Kennedy could no longer hear de Gaulle, but de Gaulle could still hear Kennedy. With that situation as the set-up, Kennedy made a bad remark about de Gaulle, and de Gaulle ordered Kennedy killed. The final scene of the play involved a "foreignish man" pulling out a gun and shooting Kennedy in the head.

I don't remember sleeping in during that school year, but the morning of June 5, my family overslept, so the normal routine of morning national news programs playing out on the television over breakfast did not happen.

We dressed and were out the door. When I arrived at school, two female teachers and several of the girls who were to appear in my play were crying at the entrance to the school. When I inquired, they explained that they could not put on my play because "it really happened."

I walked into the school building shocked, silently feeling as though I had done something bad. The cast met in homeroom. I gathered up all of the copies of the play and tore them up and threw them into a trash bin as though I had to quickly get rid of the evidence. At lunch time I told the teacher that I wanted to go home for lunch. I ran all of the way home in the hopes of finding
my mother there to tell her the news. No one was home, but the front door was unlocked – hey, it was the sixties. I ran up to my bedroom, shut the door behind me, laid on the bed and pulled the covers over my head.