By mid-November 1963, early in our senior year at Cathedral, the world was setting us up for a very “interesting” time. Looking back, it may have been near the “end” of something and the beginning of something very different.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform at August 1963 civil rights rally in Washington, DC.

Martin Luther King had given his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC, that August. The Second Vatican Council was underway. President Kennedy received the final report of his “Commission on the Status of Women.” And, at the beginning of November, in South Vietnam, a place still pretty obscure for most of us, its president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was arrested and assassinated in a coup tacitly accepted by the US.

In more popular arenas, the LA Dodgers swept the Yankees in the World Series, with Sandy Koufax winning two games. New shows on TV that fall included The Outer Limits, The Fugitive, The Patty Duke Show, and Petticoat Junction. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World had debuted in theaters on November 7. Louie, Louie by the Kingsmen was very popular at the time, as was the Ronettes’ Be My Baby. The Beatles were still in England.

Check out the page “Back Then” for more on what was going on in our world in 1963-64. What about at Cathedral? In Springfield? Western Mass.? That’s harder to find, and remember perhaps. What was big at school in fall 1963? Anybody have old copies of the Cathedral Chronicle?