43/52 - The Kennedy Assassination
What's the first major news story you can remember living through as a child?
If you were born in the 1950s, this is an easy one.
The Kennedy Assassination.
I was in 3rd grade at the Central School in Glen Rock, New Jersey. My teacher was Mrs. Rohr. My brother and I had gone with my dad to Washington in August 1963 – I am not sure how my dad managed this, since my brother Jeff was only a month old – and we had toured the White House. For the longest time I had a guidebook from the White House from that trip with photos of the whole Kennedy clan.
At the time, we walked back and forth to school – or if you were really cool, you rode a bike. I can’t quite remember how one was granted this special privilege, but I never had it. I’m pretty sure my mom would have thought this an extravagance that would have softened us up, and so it was never discussed.
I realize this notion of school transportation self-sufficiency will come as a shocking notion to those in the next generation who grew up with school busses, and even more shocking to those two generations removed who seem to have grown up with the curious notion of door-to-door parent-chauffeured drop-offs and mile-long carpool lines.
But nonetheless, we walked to school. I am not completely sure, but I also think we made the round trip twice per day because we came home for lunch. I think. I was positive this trip was at least two miles each way – and uphill both ways, often in a blinding snowstorm – until I consulted Google Maps for this article.
Well, almost two miles. 0.4 miles to be completely accurate, and Google Maps projects the trip would take 8 or 9 minutes. By current metrics, if there were carpools when I was in second grade, the line itself would have extended well beyond our house.
As a Bergen County suburbanite, our paper of record was, well, The Record (catchy name). A few years later, I would be a sometimes substitute newspaper delivery boy for that paper. The Record was published six days per week. A weekly subscription was 33 cents, collected by hand each week door-to-door, and with the fervent hope that the subscribers would hand over four dimes and not want change. According to The Record, the weather on November 22, 1963, was sunny and 65 degrees.
CBS broke into As The World Turns to make the announcement that there had been a shooting in Dallas – no film, just a banner – and then shortly thereafter, anchorman Walter Cronkite made the official announcement that President Kennedy was dead and that Lyndon Johnson was to be sworn in as the United States' 36th President.
In these times of televised violence 24 hours per day, it’s hard to understand how stunning the JFK assassination was. For context, the previous successful presidential assassination was 62 years prior, in 1901 (McKinley). Just two months prior, in September 1963, the CBS Evening News made the radical transition from a 15-minute show to 30 minutes. 30 minutes. I am not sure if Mrs. Rohr dragged a TV into the room – I think she did -- but I can remember the stunned silence and the tears among the teachers.
When we got home, TV turned into something that it had never been before – a source of 24 hour, round-the-clock, no-commercial news. It became a place around which the entire country gathered in collective grief. According to Reuters, “The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a transformative live, global TV news event. It swept an industry without a playbook for covering a breaking story of such magnitude and utterly changed how people receive their news. For four days, starting with gunfire in Dallas and ending with Kennedy’s funeral procession in Washington, major U.S. TV networks went live with wall-to-wall coverage, suspending commercials.”
By the time that Walter Cronkite announced JFK’s death on Friday afternoon, 45 percent of U.S. homes with a television had their sets in use. For the funeral procession on Monday, 81 percent of American homes with a television were watching. On just three networks. Most homes had only one television. Reuters notes the stunning impact that the JFK assassination had: “Mourning and a sense of loss were visceral, with a survey at the time saying about two-thirds of Americans watching the events fell ill or felt emotional distress.”
The sense of loss was doubled for a family like ours with Irish-Catholic demographics. It was as if a member of the family had been killed. We had grown to think of the Kennedys as a family that we somehow knew, or at least were connected to. In 1962, comedian Vaughn Meader almost instantly became the most famous comedian in the country with the release of The First Family. Per Wikipedia,
The First Family is a 1962 comedy album featuring comedian and impressionist Vaughn Meader. The album, written and produced by Bob Booker and Earle Doud, was recorded on October 22, 1962, is a good-natured parody of then-President John F. Kennedy, both as Commander-in-Chief and as a member of the prominent Kennedy family. Issued by Cadence Records, The First Family became the largest and fastest selling record in the history of the record industry, selling at more than 1 million copies per week for the first six and one-half weeks in distribution and remained at #1 on the Billboard 200 for 12 weeks. By January 1963, sales reached more than 7 million copies.
I can still see this album clearly.
We played it over and over and over again until we could recite the lines from memory.
Until November 22, 1963.
I don’t think we ever played it again.
