Friday, November 22, 2013
50 Years Ago Today
The first TV reports that day were on Dallas' local networks. This was the very first. WFAA's broadcast studios were about a block from Dealey Plaza where the shooting happened. Two reporters ran from the Plaza to the station and breathlessly announced the grim news.
I was acquainted with the reporter Eddie Barker here (I knew his kids way back when). Dr. Dickinson who leads the assembly in prayer was the pastor at my childhood church, Highland Park Methodist in Dallas, then and now a very large and prominent local church. Dallas was a much smaller town in those days.
A major event in history preserved in the weirdly vivid amber of early videotape.
EXTRA:
Erich Leinsdorf interrupts a concert by the Boston Philharmonic to announce the President's death:
[You're a couple of years older than me, right Doug?]
ReplyDeleteDo you remember it? Not quite 2 myself then, I don't. I wonder if being a young child surrounded by crying adults would have left (unremembered) emotional scars on young me/us.
I was 5 when it happened. I don't remember it much except that my parents watched the funeral, all of it, in silence.
ReplyDeleteI lived in Dallas at the time with my folks in a rent house near Southern Methodist University. My mother worked as a physical therapist at Parkland Hospital at the time. By sheer luck, she was off the day Kennedy was shot and they brought him to Parkland.
My father hated the Kennedys so we were not among the crowds watching the motorcade. We found out about it the same way most other people did, on TV.
My dad may have hated the Kennedys, but he was horrified by JFK's murder, and doubly horrified that it took place in his hometown in places that he knew, and among people that he knew. He deeply resented the stigma assigned to Dallas for the rest of his life ( and frankly, I remain mystified by it).