My father was a reporter at the Oakland (CA) Tribune and told me (in later years) that at about 11:30 that morning (1:30 Dallas time) the news wire teletypes (UPI, etc.) all went off almost at once, a rare occurrence. No phones rang in those days, the teletypes usually started running. The staff looked over the reports and suddenly it was mayhem as they had to actually stop the presses (afternoon paper) and get the story written, edited and sent down to the basement printers. He called my mom at home to tell her that Kennedy had been shot and pretty soon the news followed that Kennedy had died. My mom, in shock, turned on the TV and actually saw Cronkite's announcement on CBS. She then started off walking (with me, one year old, in a stroller) for the elementary school where my two sisters were in Kindergarten and 3rd Grade and as she walked to the school other mothers came out of their houses and headed to the school to get their kids. My oldest sister, the 3rd Grader, remembered that the principal came on the PA system in her classroom and announced that the president had been shot and had died. (K-6th Grade school.) My sister said her teacher gasped and literally collapsed into a chair. School was let out early and everyone walked home. Later that evening my mom went to pick my dad up at the Tribune since we only had one car in those days. My dad would usually ride with our neighbor, the paper's sports writer, but my mom wanted to go get dad and drive him home and hear what had gone on at the paper as the news came in. While my dad was waiting for mom, the Tribune's senior photographer was down in the street-level foyer taking pictures of people as they left for home. The photo below is of my dad as he waited for my mom to arrive.
The back of the photo is ink-stamped NOV 23 1963 since Mr. Crouch, the photographer, went in the next morning to develop his photos.
Back to the hour the news broke over the teletypes. As the news room learned the gravity of the situation they hurriedly started gathering photos and information to get the story--stories--written quickly. The city editor placed an engraving (for the printing press) of Kennedy's face in front of my dad and said he needed a caption quickly. My dad, writing later about that moment, in the third person, said it this way,
"John F. Kennedy was dead now, actually and officially. A little copy girl went about her duties in tears. The city editor brought an almost life size engraving of the face of the dead president to the desk of a reporter [my dad] and held it before him and said, "I need a caption. Look at it for one minute because that's all the time we have."
My dad quickly decided on a sentence from Kennedy's inaugural address from January 20, 1961:
"...ask what YOU can do for your country..."
Dad died in 1989 but he put together a fascinating scrapbook of his 29 years at the Tribune. There is a page from 11-22-63 and a copy of the front page image with my dad's caption:
The "Kennedy myth" has been fairly well beaten-down and broken into pieces since that day, both by the national media and various other organizations--even by Mrs. Kennedy's own private tapes recently published for sale to the public. Regardless of the truths behind the myth, that day was a terrible day for most Americans. Some celebrated his murder but the vast, vast majority of Americans just, as my dad wrote, wept.