I've repeated this story several times. I was a HS Senior in '63, and had a job at a local radio station as night disc jockey. But I was fascinated by the place, and bored as shit with school, so I cut class a lot and hung out there making myself useful.
This day in November, '63, I was in the teletype room, where the AP printer ground out news stories, crop reports, stock market data and sports scores all day, when the bell on the teletype went crazy. The bell rang when an important story was going to follow. One bell was unusual; two bells were an emergency, like tornadoes; three bells was total war. Then, the damn bell rang four, five, ten times...
I scurried over to see what the story could be that was that important, and read the hed: "Kennedy shot in Dallas." The first reports didn't declare he was dead. That didn't come til later.
I was shaken. I ripped the first page of the story off the machine and took it to the booth where the AM guy--his name was Ed Bush--was on the board.
I opened the door to the booth and handed the bulletin to him. He read it and his face went ashen.
He told me to show it to Carl Goodwin, the owner. I ran to Carl's office. Carl took the bulletin, read it, his hand quivered, and then went back to the booth, moved Ed from the mic and made the announcement himself.
All this within about 10 minutes of that Friday morning (Santa Fe's an hour earlier than Dallas) that changed the course of history....
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