On the 19th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy '40 yesterday, the Associated Press--the nation's largest news service--devoted five paragraphs to a story about a memorial service held at the Statehouse in Boston. More than twice that amount of space was used to predict today's weather.

At Arlington National Cemetery, outside the nation's capital, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), visited JFK's grave with several other family members, including Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy '48, a spokesman said.

At the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library on Boston's Columbia Point yesterday, the huge white and black monument to the nation's 35th President was mostly empty, as it is most days, with only a few more visitors than usual, the director said.

At the Brookline home where JFK was born on May 29, 1947, about 50 people--an ordinary number--toured the seven-room, wood frame house where Kennedy lived until he was four years old.

In Cambridge, professors at the school where the three Kennedy brothers received their undergraduate degrees, disagreed about Kennedy's effectiveness as a leader of the executive branch. A majority of the 13 Harvard professors interviewed said, however, that while JFK may have appeared at times as a strong leader, few of his substantive contributions have survived.

At the other end of the city, where Kennedy won his first run for office--to the U.S. House of Representatives--and was re-elected two times, Cambridge's elder politicians reflected emotionally yesterday on Kennedy's life and time describing him in terms dominated by superlatives.

Resul Gunasta, eight years old, was throwing a tennis ball yesterday to a few of his friends on a playground in front of the Edward Devotion School, where JFK attended his first year of school about three blocks from his 83 Beals St. birthplace.

Gunasta was asked if yesterday meant anything special to him.

"Yes, our teacher told us President Kennedy came here and that he was a good President and that he died today," he answered. "I think he died because someone killed him but he could have died from a heart attack."

The third-grader was then asked why Kennedy was a good president. "I don't know. Do you know how he died?"

Gunasta was told that Kennedy had, in fact, been shot. "Can I go back to my game now?" he asked.

Here is how a widely-used encyclopedia describes Kennedy's assassination (the text was written by Warren Professor of American History Emeritus Frank B. Freidel Jr. '55):

In Dallas on November 22, [Kennedy] and his wife were cheered enthusiastically as their open car passed through the streets [on a speech-making tour]. Suddenly, at 12:30 in the afternoon, an assassin fired several shots, striking the President twice, in the base of the neck and the head, and seriously wounding John Cannily, the governor of Texas, who was riding with the Kennedys. The President was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about a half hour later. Within two hours, Vice President [Lyndon B.] Johnson look the oath as president.

Ten months after JFK's assassination, a special commission--appointed by President Johnson and headed by Chief Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, reported its findings: Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old ex-marine who had lived for a time in the Soviet Union, fired the shots that killed JFK. The committee stated that it had "found no evidence" that either Oswald of his own assassin, Jack Ruby, "was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy."

Oswald was killed two days after JFK's assassination in the basement of a Dallas police station where he was being held.