THE DAY THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT

 

I remember well just where I was and what I was doing on Friday, November 22, 1963, because I was involved with reporting the tragic death of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. I was working at the time as assistant news director at KYTV in Springfield, MO. It was during the noon hour and I was in my car heading for a local diner. Luckily, I had my radio on because we always monitored the other media in town. When the bulletin came on about the events in Dallas I immediately turned around because I knew we in the newsroom had a job to do. 

In 1963 news providers didn’t have the satellite communications of today. News gathering was still pretty low tech. When the shooting happened in Dallas, there was no remote live telecasting to report what was going on. Even the networks were relying still on movie film as there main source of news. other than from those sites where the president’s visit was already being covered. Television cameras were too bulky to move around and there were no minicams. Much of the news coverage then was on film which took time to process. The brunt of the reporting on the assassination of President Kennedy was borne by reporters in network newsrooms.

There were live telecasts from the area but few visuals initially of what was happening. Many of the first visuals from Texas were still photographs which, of course, still had to be developed. At the beginning of the crisis in our news room we were relying on Associated Press photos which came to us via a photo-fax machine. As those photos came in we would grab them off the machine (as reporter Wally Alexander is doing), staple them to a piece of cardboard called a flip card and rush them down to the studio. There they were captured by a studio camera and cut in over the NBC feeds which at the time had few visuals.

There was little time to mourn. That came later in the day when the network finally started providing live feeds. That mourning didn’t cease for weeks as we covered church services, private mournings and public displays of sympathy.

I finally broke down (as I’m sure did many) while watching the televised funeral procession. As I look back now even after all these years I realize what a service our news staff did for our viewing audience who were hungry for news of what was happening in Dallas, an event which not only changed our lives but the life of our country.