Act still senseless

What’s most striking — looking back over 50 years — is how different the media environment was.
On that Friday in late November of 1963, news seemed to come through a straw, rather than the firehose we deal with today as media consumers.
The first word that something had happened came over the school public address system.
Someone in the principal’s office at Portland High School, maybe Principal Harold Brubaker himself, had decided to turn on the PA and relay a live radio news broadcast to every classroom.
I was in a typing class. A sophomore at PHS, I’d turned 15 the weekend before. Twenty or more typewriters were hammering away at “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” when someone heard what was coming out of the speaker on the wall.
One by one, our typewriters became silent.
The scraps of information made no sense.
The news announcer said the president had been shot. But for some reason, I heard him as saying the president had been “shocked.”
The announcer mentioned the school book depository in Dallas, and for a minute or two I imagined scenarios in which President Kennedy had been touring some building site in Texas and had been given an accidental electric shock.
And then the reality sunk in.
Something we’d never believed possible had happened. Something that we associated with our American history classes had occurred in our lifetimes. The president of the United States had been shot.
I’m not sure when we learned he had died from his wounds, but I suspect it was before we were dismissed for the day.
The scene at The Commercial Review must have been chaotic. The newspaper was a subscriber to United Press International in those days, and the teletype report came in at a numbingly slow 50 words a minute.
Deadlines were exploded. Phone calls were made to alert carriers that the day’s papers would be late. My father sat down in front of a Royal typewriter and hammered out an editorial that would run on page one when the day’s edition finally hit the street.
I was a paper boy in those days, which should come as no surprise.
And when the bundles arrived with headlines nearly three inches tall reading “Kennedy Killed,” I knew this would be no normal day’s delivery. All along my route, which took me until about 6:30 p.m. to finish, people were waiting at the door to get the grim news.
They’d heard about it via radio and TV by then, but still it seemed unreal.
Television amounted to — at best — the big three networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. PBS didn’t exist as we know it today. Fox News, CNN and all the rest lay in the future.
At every household, the bluish glow of black and white TV sets could be seen as I passed my papers. On every set, the handful of announcers repeated the same handful of facts, facts they didn’t want to deliver, news they wished were not true.
All other programming disappeared. As I recall, TV commercials disappeared as well.
At our house, we’d watch one network for awhile, then switch to another, then another, then back to the first, searching for scraps that would help us make sense of something that made no sense.
It was total immersion, but the actual amount of information was shallow.
On Saturday, exhausted by the news coverage, I went to the movies with a couple of buddies to watch a truly lousy movie. We laughed at it and made fun of it, finding some kind of catharsis and release in our laughter. The moviehouse was virtually empty except for the three of us.
On Sunday, pastors all over America did their best to help their congregations through. But when we got home from church, we were greeted with the sight of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot in our living rooms as he made his way through a Dallas corridor. And before we could begin to process one event, still another had landed in our laps.
The days went on after that, of course. The years went on. The decades went on. But those who lived through it are still trying to make sense of something that made no sense.[[In-content Ad]]