GUILDERLAND — Jon McCloskey is 71 but he remembers the day John F. Kennedy was shot — Nov. 22, 1963 — as if it were yesterday.

He was 16 years old, sitting in study hall at Johnson City High School. “The teacher told us the president was assassinated,” he recalled.

McCloskey went right from school to his job, working at a newsstand. As the papers reported the news, McCloskey kept one of each. “I had the New York Journal-American — now defunct. I had the New York Herald Tribune — now defunct,” he said.

He also saved some copies of still-existing papers like the Binghamton Press — that was his hometown paper since Johnson City is near Binghamton — and he thinks he saved a copy of The New York Times.

He’s not sure because the weekend right after the assassination, he carefully wrapped the papers in plastic and sealed the wrappings shut with tape to preserve them. He hasn’t opened them since.

The newspapers stayed at his parents’ Johnson City home as McCloskey went off to college — first to Cobleskill, then to Albany State. They stayed, there, too, when he joined the Army — he served stateside during the Vietnam War.

When he came home from his military service, McCloskey gathered up his newspapers with his other belongings and moved back to the Capital District to get a graduate degree in economics from the University at Albany.

Recently, he has been cleaning out his basement from the clutter of a lifetime and decided it was time to find a new home for the newspapers that had been stored in a trunk all these years.  “It’s not damp,” he said of his basement. “They are well preserved.”

McCloskey said he saved the newspapers all this time because, as a 16-year-old, he thought, in future years, that it would be “nifty to see what life was like” as events unfolded around the assassination. “I figured, years later, it would be historic, it would be worth something,” McCloskey said.

But he had trouble donating his trove. He tried the Guilderland Public Library but reported, “They weren’t enthusiastic.”

Then he called The Altamont Enterprise, which is dedicated to maintaining its own historic papers, going back to 1884, but has no room for more.

Then, he thought he had a lead on a Voorheesville history teacher who would use them in class but McCloskey reported this week his newspapers have found a home with the Berne Historical Society.

“We’re investigating how to keep them from spoiling,” said Sandra Stempel, president of the Berne Historical Society. The papers are still wrapped in plastic, she said on Saturday.

“We’ve never dealt with something like this before,” Stempel said. “We do respect history.”

“I just wanted to make sure they had a good home and are valued. It’s interesting to see how it was reported,” McCloskey said. “You can actually hold history.”