November 22, 1963
by Ken Neal
I was the newly minted State Editor at the Tulsa World the day Kennedy was assassinated. I had just turned 28 and was overwhelmed by the editor’s job, having had no desk experience.
So I showed up
for work early to get a jump on the mountain of wire copy and news events of
the day, preparatory to putting out the State edition of the paper, my
responsibility.
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| Tulsa World, November 23, 1963 |
As I walked into
the lobby of the World building at 315 S. Boulder Ave., Nita Connors, our
newsroom receptionist, told me shots had been fired at the President.
I hurried to the
third floor World newsroom. I am sure every newsroom in the country was
beginning to come alive with the breaking news.
The wire room
was dinging and chattering when I walked in. In those days, the wire services
would ding several times before an important item. The more important the
coming flash, the more dings.
United Press
International was still a competitor to the Associated Press, owned by newspapers
and of course the dominant news service.
Even I knew of
the famous Merriman Smith, who stole the story of the Kennedy Assassination
from Jack Bell of the AP. I later learned how Smith had the telephone in the
press car, got off a flash and held onto the only telephone until the car
arrived at Parkland hospital.
I digress. My
memory is that the first flash, from UPI, was “shots fired on Kennedy” or
something similar.
We huddled
around the teletype machines, which clacked out the story. By about 1 p.m., our
time, we knew President Kennedy was dead.
We had no
television in the newsroom so we had to see the famous Walter Cronkite announce
the death later on our home televisions.
