I am old enough to remember where I was. In an American history class. How ironic. The school secretary pushed a button that caused the incomprehensible news coming across the radio to be broadcast on the school’s public address system. The first sentence I remember hearing was, “the President is dead.” As I and the rest of my class struggled to understand what was being said, what it meant, exactly, on so many different levels, my teacher put her head down on her desk and sobbed. I think I was just as traumatized by the sight of the legendary Dorothea Brown crying as I was by the historical bomb ricocheting off our eardrums. After she retired at the end of that year, the school cannon was named after her. Cannons don’t cry.

The world felt different. Because it was. We huddled in corners. We stumbled dazed and confused through the events of the next few days, seeking some kind of order in the chaos. And I made a scrapbook. As everyone I knew moved zombie-like through the days following the assassination and the High State Rituals of public grief and intense emotion, I found a task with purpose. For more than a week, I combed and clipped every paper and magazine I could lay my hands on, which in a small town on the Texas border, wasn’t so many. Occasionally, I was able to locate a copy of The Houston Post . The scrapbook morphed into my semester history project; the task took on heightened importance. And the venerable Dorothea Brown rewarded my externalized angst with an A+.

I woke this morning thinking about that scrapbook. After digging through a few closets, I found the right box. Fifty years and several lifetimes later, I sat on the floor and held all of the memories of those three days in my hands. It’s not in very good condition; on the other hand, it’s amazing that it has survived at all. Being kept in the dark has helped. Not being handled lo these many years was a good thing. But, here’s a lesson — if your intent is to preserve history for the ages, don’t use rubber cement to stick newspaper to rough paper pages. It won’t stand the test of time. But it was a long time.

So, this morning, as I turned the scrapbook pages, the news clippings mostly slid off the pages into my hands. I read some, turned them over to see what was on the back, and wondered if my DNA was there embedded in the remnants of the rubber cement. Fifty years ago, we had never heard of DNA. But I quite liked the thought that I might be part of the molecules of that rubber cement. Actually, I quite liked rubber cement and used a lot of it in my artistic career until it lost favor in the interest of archival longevity.

From rubber cement it is a giant leap across the technological divide to the iPhone. With my brand spanking new 5S, I photographed a few of the pages that are still more or less intact. I’ve also included the back of two clippings that caught my attention. The first is a Sears ad for “exquisite” pegnoir sets — because, well, every woman was wearing them in 1963, including Betty Draper. Exquisitely.

And, in the second, as my eyes focused on a yellowed and rubber-cement-stained piece of newsprint, I stared in disbelief as these words jumped out at me like a flashing CNN banner — Iraq. Kuwait. Oil. Afghanistan. Pakistan. Soviet. Because, apparently, half a century is not long enough.