May 29, 2013. John F. Kennedy would have been 96 years old today. He was the first president that I knew. Well, I knew who Eisenhower was, but I watched JFK's inauguration on TV, and I even remember watching the debate between Kennedy and Nixon on TV with my Dad. TVs were black and white then.

Eisenhower? I remember a news clip on the TV news with Ike signing the documents that made Hawaii a state -- that was in 1960.

But JFK I remember well. I remember the Cuban missile crisis and I almost got thrown out of school when I brought a comic book into my class that described what would happen in a nuclear war and my teacher said I was trying to disrupt the class with fear.

I remember when JFK was shot and my teacher in sixth grade -- a man who was a Korean War vet -- with tears in his eyes.

I remember Mr Abt our elementary school principal at the Highview Elementary School in Nanuet, New York, tell us at the end of a school assembly and play by another class that "the President of the United States has been shot." I remember gasping, and then I remember a classmate -- Alan Veltidi -- yelling out "it's a coup!" and everyone yelling because Alan Veltidi was a "leader" and when he yelled "it's a coup" you thought it was a coup.

Coups were "big" then because banana republics were being toppled every week it seemed.

On this date in 1960 I carved my initials and the date and the words "JFK birthday" on a big tree on the property of the house where I grew up. The tree is still there -- my sister drove past the old house a few months ago. I don't know if time has removed my carving.

Nothing will remove JFK's impact on me or our lives or what he did in history.

He would have been 96 today.