Gary Reeder
speaking of the Kennedy shooting, I was in radio at
Friday, November 16, 2018, 17:19

the time in McCook Nebraska. I had just turned 18 and had been in radio since mid summer. In radio all news, weather, local stories etc come in over the teletype machine. It is a big machine that types 24/7. We cleared the machine every 30 minutes or so, saved the good stuff and chucked the rest. The ribbon on the teletype machine was a standard typewriter ribbon, typing purple in color. We got them in boxes of dozen or so. We also used them on our regular typewriter (manual, no electric typewriters at that time, at least not in our station). The girls up front in the front office liked to type up weird stories and bring them back to the control room and hand them to me as a bulletin. After being caught a few times I learned to say thanks and when they walked out of the control room, I would throw it in the trash.

The day Kennedy was shot in Dallas, one of the office girls brought it back to me and quietly slipped it on the control board as I was in the middle of giving the hourly news (DJs did that back then, 5 minutes of news every hour). Anyway, after she left, I read it, laughed and pitched it in the trash. A bit later I walked up front to refill my coffee cup and both office girls were crying. I asked why and they said because Kennedy had been shot and they thought at the time he might have been killed. Real quick I shuffled my young ass back into the control, broke in over the middle of a record and mentioned "As we mentioned earlier President Kennedy was shot today in Dallas. More Information as we get it". And that saved my bacon as the story was close to an hour old when I broke in with the "bulletin".

Later that afternoon one of the girls up front was young and had the hots for me, (only because I was a DJ) and I told her what I did and really made it sound like it was all her fault. She started crying and I told her it was all OK that I had covered up the whole thing and wouldn't let anyone know what she and the other girl had done, so their jobs were intact. She was quite thankful and expressed her thankfulness that evening in my apartment (or pad as they called it back them).


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