BRUCE HORNSBY

It was a Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963. The classroom had an intercom where they’d call the buses. They put the microphone up to the TV where we heard someone, maybe Walter Cronkite, saying President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

Almost every kid in the class cheered. I was shocked because they cried, “Hooray, now Nixon can take over!” Our teacher, Miss Nimmo, excoriated the class. And I think Miss Nimmo was a reasonably conservative woman, but she had great empathy as well. That gives you a sense of the air in my town, Williamsburg. The lightbulb joke is – how many Virginians does it take to screw it in? Three. One to screw it in and two to talk about how good the old one was.

Virginia lives in the past. But I grew up as liberal Lois Hornsby’s son. My