Fifty six years and two days ago marked the day that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Jack Kennedy in Dealey Plaza from a window of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas Texas. I can remember in vivid detail how I learned of the shooting and death of our 35th president.
It was two weeks to the day since I had done the first radio show of my career at WUSC-AM which was located on the third floor of the Russell House Student Union of the University of South Carolina. I was walking back towards my dorm room in the “Honeycomb Dorms” crossing Davis Field next to the Russell House after a meeting with my German professor when I heard a student yell out of a window of Preston Dorm that the president has been shot and that he had died. My first thought was to hurry to the dorm and turn on the radio to find out what was happening.
“Wait a minute,” I thought, “I can get the news faster than the local radio stations or even the networks could get it.” There were three teletype machines just outside the news booth at WUSC, two of them were the United Press International and the Associated Press machines and the third was connected to the US Weather Service. WUSC like most college stations of the day ran an abbreviated broadcast day and wasn’t scheduled to begin broadcasting until 4:30. I checked my watch and it was just after 2 PM EST. I turned around and ran over to the Russell House and up the ramp to the second floor across the lobby to the stairwell and up the steps to the third floor. At that time I didn’t have a key to the station so I was hoping that there would be someone there to let me in.
I needn’t have worried. There was already a handful of students reading the teletype as it noisily clacked the bad news out character by character. It seemed that the teletype alarm bell was ringing incessantly between each paragraph. 10 bells meant that the message coming was a “flash” message that needed immediate attention. That day, the bells were ringing in groups of 15. That raised the blood pressure, I can tell you.
There was not enough room in that small booth for all of us. So we took turns reading each word aloud to the rest of the gathering as it came across the wire. As each story completed, the person at the machine would carefully rip it off the machine and hand it to the folks in the office so they could read the printed copy. Normally, the story would be hung on a 4 “ long steel spike driven into a board on the wall behind the machines but in this case, they were carefully laid out on the news director’s desk sorted by story line and the order in which they were received. The oldest story was on the bottom.
Around 3 PM Eastern Time, a story crossed the wire about a Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit who had spotted a man walking along a sidewalk in the residential neighborhood of Oak Cliff three miles from Dealey Plaza. Officer Tippit had earlier received a radio message that gave a description of the suspect being sought in the assassination, and he called that man who fitted the description of the assassin to the patrol car. After an exchange of words, Tippit got out of his car and the man shot him four times before ducking into the nearby Texas Theatre without paying. The theater's ticket clerk telephoned the police at about 1:40 PM Dallas time. In short order the assailant was arrested for the murder of officer Tippet. This created a buzz of speculation that the man who was arrested might be the man who shot the president. It was the first time that any of us saw the name Lee Harvey Oswald. Our suspicions were confirmed when Oswald was charged with the murders of President Kennedy and Officer Tippit later that night.
Our General Manager, Program Director and Chief Announcer held a hurried meeting our Faculty Advisor (Now called the Director of Student Media) to discuss how the station was going to react to the Kennedy Assassination. Would the station sign on at 4:30 as scheduled or remain dark. If we were to sign on, what would we broadcast?
Clearly broadcasting our normal schedule would not be appropriate. Besides, like the others who had shows scheduled for that evening, I was not up to going on the air with a regular light hearted show. The decision was made to go on the air as scheduled at 4:30 with a half hour newscast then Join the Mutual Radio news for their coverage at 5 followed by programming somber music with no DJ Voice work except to announce that we were interrupting normal programming due to the death of the president. Our special programming consisted of somber music interspersed with our local newscasts and the top of the hour newscast from the Mutual Radio network.
The outcome of the meeting was that we would not resume normal programming until after the president’s funeral scheduled for November 25th the following Monday. So, my third show, scheduled for 11 PM – 1 AM that evening was cancelled. It was a pre-recorded show that never aired. We had to sign off at 11 PM that evening because we could not be in the station during the hours that the Russell House was closed; 11 PM - 6 AM. As soon as we could get back into the third floor studios, we went back on the air about 6:15 the next morning and would do so on the following Sunday and Monday mornings. Several of us took on the extra slots in the schedule and I wound up working four three hour shifts; two on Saturday and one each on Sunday and Monday. Our music director gleaned appropriate albums from the music library next to Master Control and left us a cardboard teletype paper box full of albums under turntable #1 to the left of the Gates Master Control mixing console.
By noon on Monday, November 25th, President Kennedy’s state funeral was over and we resumed normal programming. My next scheduled show was coming up that Friday and even then, that show was a little more subdued than normal.
Fast forward 5 years and I would face similar situations in 1968 at WCOS-AM. I was doing the evening shift from 8 PM until 1 AM. On April 4th, as I was about to go on the air at our remote studio at Doug Broome’s Drive in Restaurant that I heard Mike Rast, our news announcer, broadcast that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis an hour earlier. When the next newscast came on at 8:30, Mike announced that Dr King had died at 7:05 Memphis time, 8:05 our time, after emergency chest surgery. Two months later almost to the day, came the news that Robert F Kennedy had been shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy was hit three times, and five other people were wounded. Since this was during the overnight hours, 3 AM in Columbia I was not aware of the shooting until the next morning when my buddy and fellow DJ, Scotty Quick called me during his midday show to let me know to come into the station early for a meeting. By this time, the show was back in our main studios as the remotes from Doug’s were cancelled during the curfew after the MLK assassination.
On October 26, 1968 Dion’s “Abraham, Martin and John” debuted at # 66 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, It would peak at #4 on December 14th and stay on the chart for 14 weeks, On the Cash Box charts it would peak at #2. “Abraham, Martin and John” was written by Richard Louis "Dick" Holler who from August, 1962 until May 1965 along with his band “The Holidays” was based and performed in and around Columbia, South Carolina after a planned tour gig was cancelled leaving them with no funds to continue the tour schedule. Their 1964 third single release "Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)" become a hit in 1966 by "The Swingin' Medallions". Don’t be surprised if you hear both of those songs during my Backbeat Show on WUSC-FM tomorrow in honor of the memories. Oh MY!
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