I was just in touch with another Catter who is Far away from the USA. He was quite surprised that there were so many songs in my collection of John Kennedy songd that were from Afro Americans. Blues about the assassination by Otis Spann, Blind Jim Brewer, Big Joe Williams, Avery Brady, Son House, Big Walter Horton, Rick Von Schmidt, and MANY others.   I told this fellow that from here on 2003 it is hard to look back and not cloud the memory of JFK with all that has gone down in history since November 22, 1963. Womanizing was simply what was done back then. It was seen as O.K. and was accepted by men and women alike. ----- John Kennedy was the one who gave the first speech by an Amnerican president that was in favor of real civil rights and equality. It took Lyndon Johnson (Kennedy's veep) to pass the Civil Rights Bill and to try to foment his War On Poverty (a nice try)----but Johnson was destroyed by the Viet Nam War and the challenge of Senator Eugene McCarthy --- (the peace candidate -- NOT Joseph McCarthy). --------- In those days it was common to find a framed picture of John F. Kennedy proudly displayed in every Afro-American home. To Afro-Americans, and to much of the Caucasian youth population of the U.S.A. in the early 1960s, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a youthful, energetic, handsome, leftish, pro-Negro, all-American guy from the Ivy League who even had longer hair than any politician in our memories. He went after the Mafia too. We thought he was for the good and against the bad. As a young person then, for us he was pretty much a mentor. It was a time of looser sex mores. It was a time before "raised consciences" on many issues and causes, and it was a time before AIDS. It was also a time before Political Correctness !! Sex was O.K. and fun---so we did it. The president did it too and the media didn't talk about it because that is just the way things were then. Not right. Not wrong. Not good. Not evil. Not moral. Not immoral.------------------ It just was the way it was.

Personally, I'm glad I was young and alive then.

Art Thieme