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The events of that depressing weekend seem like yesterday. I was in my last year of high school.
I had a 17-inch console Philco black-and-white set that my aunt had given me. It had razor-sharp video and the color subcarrier (a crawling cross-hatch pattern) could easily be seen on color shows. I was "into" color at the time and usually watched for this. (I wanted a color set so bad and in December of 1963 I finally got my Heathkit color set.)
As far as Los Angeles television was concerned, when the Kennedy news coverage started, as I recall, all the stations, even non-network stations, dropped their normal programming and provided wall-to-wall network coverage, so color just completely disappeared.
Normally we had NBC on channel 4, of course, and ABC on channel 7 with a small amount of film color ("The Jetsons" and "The Flintstones") along with KHJ-TV channel 9 and KCOP channel 13, both of which had color film capability.
It wasn't until the last night of that event, either on Sunday night or Monday night (I think the funeral was on Monday) that KHJ aired a religious film program in color. As I remember they got some criticism for breaking away, but after almost four days of non-stop coverage, I, and I'm sure a lot of other viewers were completely burned out.
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