Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony. It's the same old cry.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television, where for 100 weeks that started in October 2025, we are going to recall the top 100 mil milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown will culminate on September 7, 2027. That's the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television television system.
In the last episode, the impending doom of the Cuban Missile Crisis was laughed off in the British satirical series that Was the Week that Was Today is countdown number 52.
We interrupt this program for a special bulletin.
November 22, 1963 started much like any other day in the fictional town of Oakdale, Ohio, when television's most popular daytime drama, as the World Turns, went on the air at 1:30pm Eastern time on CBS.
In the second scene of the episode, veteran actress Helen Wagner, playing series matriarch Nancy Hughes, has just sat down for coffee with her father in law, the avuncular Grandpa Hughes, played by Santos Ortega.
They are discussing arrangements for Thanksgiving dinner when suddenly Oakdale is wiped off the screen by a bolt of static and a black card that said simply, CBS News Bulletin.
In Columbus, Mississippi, Beth Blasingame, like millions of other children across the country, was playing on the floor in front of the TV while her mother was making lunch in the kitchen.
Only four years old, Beth did not understand what was happening. I thought we were watching real people in Oakdale, beth recalled decades later. I didn't know that was possible. This is my first real memory.
Beth Blasingame's first real memory was experienced through television and quickly became a collective national memory, one of just a handful of do you remember where you were? Moments in modern history.
What Beth and her mother heard next was the voice of CBS News anchor
[00:02:54] Speaker C: Walter Cronkite saying, here is a bulletin from CBS News.
In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.
United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: The whole bulletin lasted about 45 seconds. When it was over, the screen returned to a commercial for Nescafe Minute Brew.
[00:03:28] Speaker D: It takes more than an instant to make a real cup of coffee. That's why Nescafe has come up with a new kind of coffee. It's more than an instant. It's new. Minute Brew. Nescafe. Anyway.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: Here is a bulletin from CBS News.
Further details on an assassination attempt against President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. President Kennedy was shot as he drove from Dallas airport to downtown Dallas. Governor Connally of Texas, in the car with him, was also shot. It is reported that three bullets rang out. A secret serviceman has been was heard to shout from the car, he's dead. Whether he referred to President Kennedy or not is not yet known.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: This bulletin continued for nearly three minutes before the screen returned to yet another scene of domestic normality from Oakdale, Ohio.
That placid scene was followed by a cocker spaniel and her puppies chowing down on a bowl of Frisky's dog food.
But the canine feast was interrupted by the CBS News bulletin card. Again, for several minutes. In voice only, Cronkite recapped the events unfolding in Dallas.
[00:04:43] Speaker C: President Kennedy has been the victim of an assassin's bullets in Dallas, Texas. It is not known as yet whether the president survived the attack against him.
We'll be back in 10 seconds to allow all our stations to identify themselves and to join the network.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Ten seconds later, Cronkite himself finally appeared in shirt sleeves, surrounded by telephones behind a desk in the CBS newsroom.
That was the end of the normal day in fictional Oakdale, Ohio, and in all of America, if not the world.
For the better part of the ensuing hour, the screen switched between Cronkite's newsroom and scenes of the crowd milling about at the Dallas trademark with where Kennedy had been scheduled to speak that afternoon.
Back at the news desk, Cronkite faced the camera with unconfirmed reports that the president was dead.
Finally, nearly an hour after Beth Blasingam tried to make sense of what had happened to Nancy and Grandpa Hughes coffee break Cronkite put on his thick dark glasses and read another bulletin from Dallas, Texas.
[00:06:00] Speaker C: The flash apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1:00pm Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38
[00:06:12] Speaker B: minutes ago, Beth Blasingame recalled what happened next.
My mother gave a gasp, wiped her hands on her apron and ran to the phone on the wall. She called my sister's school to ask if they had heard. They said yes, and they were calling the bus drivers to come get students.
My daddy was a salesman traveling in another State. He said he did a U turn and headed home. He said every church was lit up and parking lots were full as he drove home. My parents were not Kennedy fans, but they wept with the rest of the nation.
Similar scenes were unfolding all over America, and for the next several days, the entire nation was, as the saying goes, glued to their televisions.
By the time Walter Cronkite made his pronouncement, all three of the major networks had dropped their regular programming and switched to their newsrooms.
NBC had been airing a filmed sitcom, Bachelor Father, when its first bulletin interrupted the program.
The network soon switched to Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, anchoring from New York.
Abc, still the smallest of the three networks, was airing a rerun of Father Knows Best. When it cut away to new bulletins, ABC lacked the depth of resources of its larger rivals but nonetheless committed to uninterrupted coverage with anchor Ron Cochran.
Once Kennedy's death had been officially confirmed, all three networks went with wall to wall coverage. Estimates suggest that a cumulative audience of between 100 and 150 million Americans tuned in sometime during that afternoon and evening, while this largest ever audience tuned in over the ensuing weekend. Kennedy's assassination demonstrated both the cultural reach and the technical limitations of television in the early 1960s.
The catharsis demanded immediate coverage, but there were no satellite feeds and only limited microwave links between Dallas and New York.
Television cameras were still enormous and immobile, so video from Dallas was limited.
The closest the networks could come to real time was 16 millimeter film that had to be shot and processed before any footage could be put on the air.
On Saturday, November 23, the networks focused on the deceased President lying in state, first at the White House and then under the dome of the Capitol Rotunda.
Reactions were conveyed from foreign leaders and correspondents offered analysis and extended studio discussions.
Nielsen estimated that more than 120 million Americans watched television at some point that day.
By Sunday, authorities in Dallas had a suspect in custody. Lee Harvey Oswald was being held at the police headquarters in downtown Dallas.
Word leaked out Sunday morning that Oswald would be transferred to the Dallas County Jail.
The route required Oswald to pass through the basement of police headquarters and all three networks mounted cameras to provide the country its first look at the man accused of murdering the President in cold blood and in broad daylight.
At 11:21am as Oswald was being led toward an armored car, a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby stepped out of the shadows, fired a pistol and suddenly Oswald himself was murdered in cold blood in broad daylight and this time in front of a nationwide TV audience estimated at some 80 million people watching in real time.
Again, television united the nation in disbelief.
The televised collective national state of shock continued the following day.
John F. Kennedy's funeral procession and internment in Arlington Cemetery on Monday, November 25, remains one of the most watched events in television history.
Conservative estimates count the audience at upwards of 100 million viewers in America alone.
In Western Europe, much of the funeral was carried live or near live via the Eurovision system, which linked national broadcasters by microwave and cable relays.
Britain, France, West Germany, Italy and others cleared their schedules much as the US Networks had.
Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and parts of Africa mostly saw the funeral hours or days later via kinescope films or videotape flown overseas.
In all, the total audience for the funeral has been estimated at 600 million worldwide.
Life in fictional Oakdale, Ohio returned to some semblance of normal on Tuesday, November 26, when as the World Turns resumed its regular schedule.
But something fundamental had shifted in the real world. For Beth Blasingame, her family and the entire country, the weekend of the Kennedy assassination not so subtly redefined the relationship between television and the nation's perception of itself.
For the first time, history was not something conveyed after the fact that it was experienced simultaneously nationwide. And a nation conditioned by the sight of fictional murder and mayhem on TV got to see the real thing firsthand.
The coverage of the Kennedy assassination brought television into a new era.
Today's continuous coverage of breaking news can trace its origins back to Dallas in 1963.
Later, crises from Vietnam and Watergate to 911 refined the formula, but a new template was set. When history turns violent or unstable, the cameras stay on.
In many respects, the Kennedy assassination marked the end of an age of post war innocence reflected in white bread, status quo programming. Like Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best, the assassination also marked the beginning of a challenging time when the first generation of children raised on their shared television experience would begin to question that status quo and much of the turbulence would unfold on television.
This brings us to the end of number 52 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when television becomes a machine that can go backward in time.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more aim a gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin and is a Production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:13:36] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy they laughed at us and how but how we got to laugh at now?
