[W3XWT]

I was home from school early that day (due to a faculty meeting) and was at my paternal grandmother’s house. She was watching “As The World Turns” (she was a soap and quiz addict since the days of radio!) and I remember seeing that “BULLETIN” slide come up, Cronkite, etc., on the CBS-TV affiliate. My grandmother started crying and was very upset about this as she was so excited that a Roman Catholic had been elected President. While I understood the religious importance, I also found it interesting as she’d never been able to vote for a President, although she was a natural born citizen. I suppose that I should mention here that I was born and spent my early years in a territory of the U.S., as opposed to a state.

For us, it was a wild afternoon trying to get my mother home from her office at 19th & Pennsylvania Ave. Driving up 18th St next to the EOB and the White House was where traffic started getting hairy and there were cars from CBS, NBC, ABC, Mutual, and several of the local radio stations. The only TV truck to be seen was from WRC-TV. The traffic was held for a bit as a motocade came roaring out of the White House onto Pennsylvania Ave, heading to Andrews AFB. In one of the limos, I distinctly remember seeing Bobby Kennedy and his wife. Of course my Civil Service mother was among those released from work early, but we still didn’t get back home until about the time AF1 had landed at Andrews. I distinctly remember seeing President Kennedy’s casket being lowered from the VC-137 and loaded into a Pontiac ambulance belonging to the Navy.

There was no local color on WRC-TV that weekend as I recall. I remember my Aunt Frances being very upset about that (they “had to be first” in the family with a color set) as she dearly loved President Kennedy.

I’ve also seen the NBC tapes as telecast on A&E. The scene with Frank McGee and Robert McNeil doing a phone patch was a hoot! That crude device looked more like an Arvin or Zenith pocket transistor radio than anything else!

It was indeed a different time compared with what we have today. Back then, the Secret Service had the Presidential Lincoln serviced at O’Brien & Rohall, the Lincoln-Mercury (formerly Edsel, too) dealer in Rosslyn, VA. Which was also the dealership where my parents bought their ’62 Mercury Meteor. You’d see the Presidential limo in their shop periodically. No guards around it or anything. I even got to sit in it once. In the back seat. The same spot where JFK was sitting that afternoon…

As for the “quality” of broadcast journalism being able to competently report impartially and factually a smiliar event today, is a matter for debate. I think a worthy academic exercise in that regard would be to compare coverage of the “Challenger” and “Columbia” shuttle accidents.

I think for my generation, the assassinations of the sixties, Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon, and 9/11 will be the “Pearl Harbor” in terms of “I remember where I was…”