By Dick Miller
WE.CONNECT.DOTS: Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago. Most of us did not believe, however, until seeing the big bold black headline in our local newspaper.
Print technology of the day dictated when and how Americans would get the news in the manner that left no room for error. Television was not there yet. No cable channels, no 24/7 news stations.
It would be another decade before offset (cut-and-paste) composition would replace linotype machines spitting out hot metal. Digital pagination was only a figment of someone’s imagination.
The “lines of type” were rapidly packed into galleys that served as columns on a newspaper page. When the page was completely composed on a metal gurney, a rubberized mat was made of the full-page imprint and then strapped to a cylinder on a press. One page per one cylinder of huge presses that towered three stories high and occupied a city block for metropolitan newspapers.
After the process no longer had need for the lines of type, the lead slugs were fed back into the linotype machine to be melted and used again.
Big and small, all newspapers responded to the late breaking news that day in similar fashion. The shooting occurred at 12:25 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Most newspapers were evening journals, written, composed and printed around midday and delivered to homes before the evening meal. Kennedy was pronounced dead about 35 minutes later in a Dallas hospital.
The Greenville Record-Argus, in Mercer County, with about 7,000 subscribers then, faced the same hurdles as papers in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Detroit, New York and Philly. Almost a year before the assassination I joined the Record as a sports editor.
This was a typical Friday for late November. High school football had yet to include a system of state playoffs and was over. Scholastic basketball usually did not begin until first of December. That put me in a position to help on the news side to overcome temporary short staffing. The newsroom only worked a half-day on Saturday, but six-day-a-week publication meant the same amount of work was necessary. Usually by early Friday, everyone stepped it up a notch to insure that Monday morning would not begin with too much to do.
Either Associated Press or United Press International transmitted state and national news by teletype. Large papers subscribed to both. The teletypes clacked incessantly sometimes around the clock. Much of our news staff was out to lunch. Editor Earl Miller (no relation) was already working on Saturday’s paper. I was looking for early next day sports stories in the teletype room.
At about 12:45 p.m. the bell rang, signifying an important transmittal. Only seven words moved. “Dallas, Tex. — The President has been shot.” Earl indicated that if there were no immediate updates, we should go with something like a boldface box on the front page.
By that time on a routine Friday, work had begun on Saturday’s edition. Only the Friday front page remained in galley fashion on its gurney. It needed to be plated soon. Presses must hum; papers bundled by routes and loaded on to trucks to meet the schedule.
Details continued to dribble over the teletype and, by 1:20 p.m., there was adequate confirmation by the wire services that the President was dead. At that time, the same debate took place in nearly every newsroom east of the Rocky Mountains. “Should we go with just a short front page bulletin and meet printing and delivery deadlines, or should we cobble together a more informative story, re-plate the front page and publish horribly late.” If we went to press late, we risked losing news stand sales and alienating home subscribers. We made the judgment that all other newspapers would publish late, too.
Backroom foreman Charlie Lanning had the ultimate call. No doubt, that 289-word story composed that day under a nine-column banner headline was the most important of my life. But I was nervous and the article was nowhere near my capabilities. I nervously ripped paper off the teletype, rushed to my desk and typed out a sentence or two, perhaps re-write a paragraph and rush the copy to Mr. Lanning.
As happened on many other newspaper front pages, time didn’t allow us to remove other stories in that day’s edition that might no longer be relevant. In our case, the assassination ran over top of another story about how Kennedy had gone to Texas to strengthen his control over the state Democrat Party and belay talk that he would jettison Lyndon Johnson from the ticket in the 1964 re-election bid.
Bottom Line: I convinced the front office into printing 500 extra copies for Greenville newsstand sales. At ten cents each, they were gone in an hour.
