Forty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas.

And for 40 years, Americans have been telling each other where they were and what they were doing when it happened.

Just for the record, I was a freshman in Art Crane's LDS seminary class. Paul Hyde, the principal, stuck his head in the door and said, "The president of the United States has been shot."

In sunny, self-contained Brigham City, the news seemed especially unbelievable. If Brother Hyde had said, "A bald eagle just carried off Brother Brandt," I think we would have been less shocked.

Just in passing, I still see some of the kids from that class around Brigham, though they wouldn't know me from Adam Sandler. I've thought I could make a few bucks as a clairvoyant by betting them I could read their thoughts then telling them exactly where they were when Kennedy went down.

It was a turning point. Ronald Reagan talked of "Morning in America." That day was "Mourning in America." It doesn't fade away.

Still, the Kennedy assassination wasn't the only thing that changed my life that day.

After class, as I walked back through the halls of the high school, all the kids seemed to move about like zombies at a wake. Except for one girl, a girl I'll call "Sheila" because I didn't — and still don't — know her from Adam Sandler.

I'd seen her many times in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes with the practiced ease of someone three times her age. She wore a great bale of teased hair ("ratted" was the term) and her eyes were as blank as black buttons. If she were young in today's world, she'd likely have a variety of her body parts painted or punctured. Then, however, she decorated herself with enough mascara to make a raccoon envious and wore white lipstick.

The adults called her "wild," the jocks called her "nasty" and skinny freshman kids like me didn't dare call her anything.

Yet, when I saw her in the hallway after Kennedy's death, she was sobbing as if her heart would break. And that startled me. I'd figured she had no heart at all. And if she did, it was made of some kind of metal alloy. The notion of Sheila with a broken heart seemed as foreign to my world as the death of a president.

But there she was, her tears black from mascara, mourning the passing of her president.

Suddenly, scary Sheila no longer fit in the little box I'd made for her. She was more than her hair and lipstick and cigarettes. She was more real than that, more alive.

Suddenly, she seemed less like a cardboard cut-out and more like, well . . . more like me.

Looking back now, I think that moment marked the first stirrings of humanity inside of me.

Now, even after 40 years, my conversations about the Kennedy assassination don't go on for long before I see Sheila again. And more than once I've had icy young girls glance at me with eyes made of coal, and wondered to myself how many tears were welled up behind them.

Nov. 22, 1963, was a pivotal day for America. It was a day that dimmed our native optimism and shook our idealism.

It was also a day when, for me personally, the child who thought as a child first began to put away childish things and see the world as a man.

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E-MAIL: jerjohn@desnews.com