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.

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.

'JFK': Stone's Docufantasy Distorts History

The Tulsa World
Ken Neal
12/21/1991

JFK,” the movie, is rip-roaring entertainment. It is also an infuriating revision of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by a paranoid director trapped in his own Vietnam time warp.

Oliver Stone’s docufantasy presents his theory of the assassination, which is that nearly every part of U.S. officialdom participated in the murder of Kennedy. Those who didn’t help plan it helped cover it up. 

The cover-up continues to this day, through the writings of the U.S. media, presumably right through this column. 

We all somehow are either willing confederates or dupes of the ephemeral “they” who killed JFK. 

And further, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy are parts of the same gigantic plot. 

Lyndon Baines Johnson, who benefited from the JFK assassination, seems to have been a willing partner in the plot.

JFK, Stone’s movie says, planned to pull the U.S. out of Vietnam. “They” wanted this war to make millions out of munitions so “they” killed him.

But “they” also wanted him dead because JFK planned to make peace with communism. And restore relations with Fidel Castro.

The theory is at best bizarre. If JFK planned - as some of his political friends later claimed - to get out of Vietnam, he failed to bring his secretary of state and secretary of defense in on the secret.

Johnson fought the entire Vietnam war with the active advice and urging of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, both Kennedy appointees.

LBJ lost his presidency because he couldn’t extricate the United States from the war. It is not an exaggeration to say that his anguish over the war shortened his life by years.

Celebrating Life: An Aunt's Funeral

By Ken Neal

Tulsa World

May 4, 2003

              

      I dreaded going to my aunt’s funeral recently, but I shouldn’t have.

  It was a marvelous experience. Not to say that I was happy. It was bittersweet. I had known her since she married into my family more than 60 years ago.

      The funeral at Sapulpa’s First Assembly of God was a classic. It was a down-home, heart-tugging gathering of an extended family. I am tempted to label it Oklahoma, but I suspect it is repeated all over the nation every day.

     The patriarch of the family, my uncle, shared the attention with my aunt, but there were brothers and

sisters, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins, second cousins, in-laws and probably a few

outlaws gathered to say farewell to the woman who had cooked countless meals, worked side by side with

her husband, changed diapers and wiped the noses of the whole brood even as she served as the family

comforter.

     Her favorite pastor, the Rev. Bill Weaver, presided. And preside he did. At 74, “Brother Bill” has

preached his share of funerals. He’s looked out at countless audiences such as this one whose deep emotions

showed in their faces, and into the bereft face of a mate who knows he’s not long for this life himself.

    Quite honestly, I don’t know how he did it, but by the time Brother Bill was through, the congregation

had joined him and a quickly assembled quartet in singing familiar old gospel songs of hope for glory. Even the morticians, who have buried several generations of this family, were moved and, quite frankly,

quickly lost control of the events.

The 'Ghost' Town

War and The Aircraft of Douglas Forever a Part of Tulsa

By Ken Neal

Tulsa World

12/12/1993

            To those of us marked by World War II, the nearly mile-long building at the Tulsa airport was "the bomber plant," and the company that ran it was Douglas.

            Years after its heyday during the war, Douglas merged with McDonnell Aircraft to become McDonnell Douglas.

              Sandy McDonnell once testily corrected me when I referred to the plant as Douglas. But then he couldn't know how deeply intertwined the plant and Douglas were in the minds of my generation.

              Or what it was like to stand on a hill in Sand Springs and watch streams of big airplanes fly off to war. Or to hear almost every evening of the work adventures of thousands of men and women who ultimately built 5,929 warplanes and modified thousands more in a few short years.

              Or to know in detail the model numbers and designations of every fighter and bomber; to imagine that every time a B-24, a B-17 or an A-26 showed up in the movie news that it probably came from Tulsa and that maybe my dad had worked on it.

              My father, while holding down a full time job, attended Spartan Aviation School eight hours a day for eight weeks for the chance to go work for Douglas, which received 10,000 applications before the plant was opened in mid-1942. Ultimately 24,000 people, most of them from Tulsa and Northeastern Oklahoma, were busy putting together a variety of airplanes.

              To a 7-year-old boy, airplanes were a wondrous thing. The war was something bad, of course, but it provided the framework for the contest between the airplanes on both sides.

              At the start of the war, local officials arranged a big ceremony at the airport to give a sendoff to a lone 4-engined bomber and six P-40 fighters. The bomber probably was a B-24, although it might have been a B-17.

              The event drew a big crowd and after a proper amount of ceremony and oratory, the pilots ran to their planes and took off. The crowd watched the ships out of sight. The bomber was huge and after that I knew exactly what my dad was talking about when he was shifted to work on B-17s being modified at four hangars called the Modification Center.

              It was these four hangars that attracted American Airlines here in 1946. My dad joined American in 1947 and worked there until his retirement in 1976.

              There were almost daily stories of work, fun and tragedy at the bomber plant. I heard in detail how this or that project was coming along.

2000 Memories

In 1953, it was good for a laugh
by Ken Neal

The Tulsa World
January 2, 2000

Early in 1953, I walked into the Tulsa World newsroom to stay, off and on, for 47 years, more or less. It was but an eye-blink ago.

There are many memories of the old newsroom of those days; that is fortunate because it exists today only in memory. Nothing, except the hard walls of the third floor of the World Building, remains of that newsroom.

And what a newsroom it was. For a high school newspaper editor of 17, the World was big time, never mind that the job I sought was the absolute bottom level of the newspaper hierarchy with a starting salary of $27.50 per week.

I was there because my high school journalism teacher and close friend, the late John R. Roberson, was a University of Missouri classmate of the late Ed Johnson, head of the department of journalism at the University of Tulsa and the man who routed TU students into part-time jobs at the World. They wanted to be sure I attended TU the following fall.

I was hired on the spot, not because of any special talent, but because the World was desperate for a copy boy and Ed Johnson had sent me.

I still lay claim to being the best copy boy in Tulsa World history, although there are those who dispute that and still others who would observe that that might have been the last job at which I was the very best. There are not as many of them as there once were, however.

This is not a story of my beginnings on the Tulsa World as such, but about a conversation on that night nearly 47 years ago that I have thought about many times as the end of the century drew near.

Lee Erhard was managing editor. Sid Steen was city editor. Both are gone now. In the cramped little newsroom, they sat at adjoining linoleum-topped desks, only a loud conversation apart in the midst of clacking typewriters, the chatter of teletypes and the cackle of the police radio.

Happy Birthday Ken Neal!!

September 26, 2012

Round the Clock

by Troy Gordon

The Tulsa World

September 27, 1975

My longtime friend and punching bag, Ken Neal, went over the hill Friday.

No, it wasn't an escape. He turned 40. And there were a considerable number of people in the newsroom who wanted to rub it in.

That's not a sign of dislike. The attitude of most newsrooms is loose and insulting. I suppose news people deal with so many different kinds of news - much of it sad - that we take it out on each other.

It's a matter of being too old to cry and too sad to laugh. So we get rid of our frustrations speaking frankly.

Fortunately, most of the people in the newsroom are reasonable, and it works well.

Herb Karner, Riley Wilson and I - three of the elder statesmen - searched the city for the worst looking rocking chair to present to the middle-aged whippersnapper.

We found it and sneaked back to the World. We took it up to the executive floor and hit it at the end of a corridor.

Later we decided we could sneak it into the women's room, on the theory that Ken probably wouldn't go in there.

By then I found the chair was in the office of our publisher, Byron V. Boone.  I offered to move the rocker and Boone said he'd rather leave it right there.

I must have registered disbelief, for he added:  "I'm having too much fun with it."

I gathered that people coming in to see him were intrigued by this eyesore in an otherwise beautiful office. So I agreed. Obviously nobody would find it.

Some years ago, employees were awarded their birthdays off. But Friday was payday too, and Ken had to come in for his check. And we were waiting for him.

In addition to the horrible rocker, there were a couple of verses.  Mine was short and to the point:

          Ken, Ken

          I Knew You When

Julie Blakely, another friend of the new elder citizen, had to leave early so she left this verse:

          Ode To Ken Neal on the occasion of his 40th, count 'em, 40th birthday.

          by Julie St. Blakely

          Happy Birthday OLD Ken Neal, 

          Oh, ancient one, minus sex appeal

          Where there's a way there may be a will

          But from now on it's all downhill.

          My mother has told me of times like this

          When you may have the urge but not the strength to kiss

          Your hair turns gray, your walk is feeble,

          Let's say you've had it, Evil Kennealvil.

          Your peers, with great effort and expense

          Brought you a gift as recompense

          For leading the way to the life beyond 40

          May you always be hale and sometimes hearty

          Now that you're revered as venerable

          Try and recall when your days were sinner able

          Sit and rock and call your youth --

          It's ancient history but tell the truth

          Next you'll be 50 and then 60 and then BINGO!

          You just have time to repent your sins before you go.

I must say it was successful, and - apparently - just in time.

Ken's over there sitting in the rocking chair with a happy look on his face.

I just hope it isn't the first symptom of senility.

In return for my use of the material created for his birthday, Ken insisted that I use his definition of a "Mature Biological Community."

"That," he says, "is when Julie Blakely stops by to visit with Troy."

Neal Family Archive Letters

To:  Kenneth W. Neal

From: Mary A. Beck (Ninth Grade English Teacher, Sand Springs High School)

Date: October 1, 1985

Dear Ken,

In the past three weeks I have written over two hundred thank you notes in long hand to express my appreciation of flowers, food, and memorial gifts. Now I can allow myself the luxury of a typewriter to express my thanks for the five or six letter that I will keep at hand and reread long after the flowers have wilted and the food is gone.

It has occurred to me a number of times in the past twenty years or so that I would like to let you know that I am proud of you; but I was afraid I would end by sounding a little bit presumptuous.