“Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?”

On June 5, 1968, I was home from my first year in college, and had just started working for the summer at Big Boy’s Restaurant in Webster Square, Worcester. I was on the lunch shift that day, so that morning I was just lolling around, getting up the energy to go iron my company-issued hideous waitress outfit: dark brown heavy cotton skirt, white light cotton pleated short-sleeved shirt, and orange heavy cotton apron. (This ensemble – which couldn’t have been duller and more boring if they tried – was completed by the addition of white waitress shoes and a hairnet. We also had to wear lipstick, something I’d never worn. I experimented with white, but landed on some shade of pink – a nice complement to the pale yellow eye-shadow I favored. Oh, yes, and a nametag that we were instructed to wear well above the breast so that no wise guy would ask “Maureen, eh, what’s the other one named?”)

My family didn’t watch late-night or early-morning television, and I always envied my friends who knew what Johnny Carson was up to on Tonight, and who were familiar with the stars on The Today Show. These friends always seemed so much more worldly, knowing and sophisticated than I was. What was up with my parents? Way too mired in Ellery Queen mysteries and Book of the Month Club selections I guess.

Anyone, on the morning of June 5 1968, no one had turned on the radio, either, so we didn’t know until my father got to work and called home that Bobby Kennedy had been shot in the wee hours in California, and was clinging to life.

On with the TV, but there was nothing like the coverage you get now. There was some information, but I pretty much watched a bit and then chugged off to Big Boy’s from my 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift.

My parents were Democrats, but not fanatically so. (I think they both voted for Ike over Adlai.) They liked JFK, but they weren’t Kennedy fanatics by any means. I don’t remember the candidate they were supporting in 1968. They actually didn’t talk politics all that much. But I imagine they were more Hubert Humphrey Democrats than anything else.

Personally, I had adored JFK, swooning for him when he was elected just short of my 11th birthday and going into full-scale mourning when he was killed just short of my 14th. But I wasn’t a big supporter of Bobby Kennedy. Earlier in the year, I’d rung doorbells in Jamaica Plain and in New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy. And I was on my way to being soured on the pack of them.

I will admit that at the St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston in March, I’d been excited to see Bobby whiz by in a car – could it possibly have been an open convertible? the day was cold and rainy…

Mostly though, I was pissed at Bobby Kennedy for jumping in after McCarthy had done the heavy lifting to get LBJ out. Kennedy privilege… I was fuming.

But hearing that he’d been shot was a gut punch. Medgar Evers. JFK. Martin Luther King. Why were the good guys always getting killed?

Bobby Kennedy hung on that day, June 5, 1968, but we woke to the news on June 6 - the TV on for once in our house in the morning – to learn that Kennedy was dead.

There wasn’t the same shut down of life there’d been when JFK was killed, but things slowed down.

Between shifts at Big Boy’s, I watched the coverage on our black and white TV.

I choked back tears when Teddy Kennedy gave his eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and let the tears flow when I watched the people lining the tracks as the train carrying Bobby’s body made its way from New York to Washington for his burial.

People amass for all sorts of events these days, as everything has become a “thing.” But all those people – in the city, great crowds; in the country, oneside-twosies. Black and white, mostly in appearance working folks. Spontaneously appearing to pay tribute ;to a man who had clearly connected to them. (Here are two Paul Fusco pictures, which were included in a recent New Yorker article.)

And for everything else he was and wasn’t – ruthless opportunist? sainted hero? -  Bobby Kennedy had two tremendous capacities: the capacity to evolve from a nasty little Joe McCarthy pal to someone who spoke to our better angels; and the capacity to connect with people. 

I don’t believe that the world would be a perfect place if Bobby Kennedy had lived. But there sure are a lot of ‘what-if’s’, starting with the greater likelihood that we would have made a speedier exit from the Vietnam debacle.

A few months after Bobby Kennedy was killed, there was a popular song, recorded by Dion (he of “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue”) called “Abraham, Martin, and John.” It couldn’t have been cornier, but it was plenty catchy (and timely). And it’s been rattling around in my brain the last few days.

Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham,
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he's gone.
Has anybody here seen my old friend John,
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he's gone.
Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin,
Can you tell me where he's gone?

He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young
But I just looked around and he's gone.
Didn't you love the things they stood for?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?
And we'll be free,
Someday soon it's gonna be one day.
Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby,
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin and John.

Well, this conflation of Lincoln with JFK is pretty absurd. Lincoln was arguably the greatest president of all time. JFK, well…Not terrible, but no Lincoln either. And “freed a lot of people”? The Civil Rights Act was passed thanks to LBJ, not JFK.

Bobby Kennedy? Who knows…

Still, it’s worth remembering a time when a song like this could make it to nearly the top of the charts and sell a million or more copies to become a golden record. And when a million or more people – black and white - would line the railroad tracks on a hot summer day to bid farewell to a politician who connected with them.

Fifty years. Hard to believe. Seems like just yesterday…