Tony Conigliaro Forty Years Later: A Remembrance

Tony Conigliaro Forty Years Later: A Remembrance
By Shaun L. Kelly
Forty years ago. 14,600 sunrises have come and gone. And yet, for those of us who resided in the Boston area in the early spring of 1964 – the times then seemed to scrape our collective hearts. After all, we had only recently experienced a cataclysmic tragedy that had cast a tangible aura of gloom over the Bay State and beyond.
After President John F. Kennedy had lost his life in the glare of Dealy Plaza in Dallas, a genuine pall set over the region that winter. Political reporter Mary McGrory, a rapid Bostonian – and Irish to her very core – was supposed to have said on Air Force One, “We’ll never laugh again,” as the president’s plane flew back to Washington from Texas.
For those of us residing in the president’s home state, it seemed as if our beloved Commonwealth was in a perpetual state of purgatory; our parents walked around in unyielding, comatose stares as they attempted to sort out the meaning of Jack Kennedy’s murder. Truly, the assassination hurt most to the people of Massachusetts – the martyred president was, after all, “one of our own.”
Happily, the communal melancholy was somewhat diminished – at least in the minds of the young – by the advent of a quartet of musicians from Liverpool, England who d