I was a first grader right here in Springfield MO, but I was home sick. We had the local CBS affiliate on (KTTS-TV Ch.10, now KOLR) with "As the World Turns" running (this was between 12:30 and 1pm Central time). My mom had just gone to the bathroom when the CBS "Special Report" slide came up and Walter Cronkite's famous "We interrupt this program..." message ran. When mom got out of the bathroom I immediately relayed what I'd heard to her. My only other memories of that weekend were that all regular programming on Saturday morning was pre-empted (no cartoons that week, an important point to a 7-year-old)... and I remember Ruby shooting Oswald on Sunday. Again, Im pretty sure we were watching CBS coverage with Harry Reasoner anchoring, which did NOT have the Oswald shooting live--that was NBC. I managed to find somewhere on the web--I think it was on Jeff Miller's old website--audio from both NBC and CBS's TV coverage of the shocking happenings in the Dallas police station basement. Also from Jeff Miller's old site (which he took down because it got too expensive to have all those audio files up on the web, or something like that) I downloaded lots of radio coverage of Nov.22, nearly all of it from Mutual, CBS and ABC. It certainly makes fascinating listening: the way the major networks had to rely so heavily on AP and UPI wire copy, as nobody was actually covering Kennedy's Dallas speech and motorcade live; the utter confusion on nearly everybody's part--is he alive? Is he dead? Who else got shot? ABC Radio kept reporting that LBJ had also been wounded in the shooting, but he wasn't even in the same car... they (ABC) even ran a later report claiming Johnson had suffered a heart attack! The one thing that kind of makes me chuckle is the difficulty reporters had getting Oswald's name right, calling him "Lee Harold Oswald" and so on. Of course, they only had 72 hours to even figure out who the guy was before strip-club owner Ruby took him out on live TV.
Randy Stewart Battlefield MO
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