A sad 60th anniversary

The 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy reminds us of that terrible day when everything changed. I was still living in England at the time. The news broke on the TV, and it was devastating. Nowadays the satellite TV trucks would have headed to Dallas and we’d get minute by minute updates.

Back in 1963, there were no satellites. TV stations in the UK had no way of getting direct news, so they ran what was essentially a test pattern, only with funereal music. They broke in from time to time with updates. We all sat by our TVs waiting for updates.

Fast forward to when I worked for the Sun. Editor Peter Worthington, a reporter at the old Toronto Telegram, was standing next to Jack Ruby when Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in an underground parking lot. As Worthington told the story to me, it was all quite by accident. He’d flown down to Dallas as soon as the tragic news broke. He knew an arrest had been made and they were making a transfer the following morning. He went to scout out the territory and find out where the cops would bring in Oswald. He took the parking lot as a short cut. When he saw the group of people gathered around he went over. And the rest was history.

His coverage of the assassination was legendary. The Tely was way ahead of the Star. I was told the story of how that happened by a person who was once a neighbour. Thelma was the hat check girl at the Cork Room, a restaurant in downtown Toronto favoured by both the executives at the Tely and the Star. (And yes, hat check girl really was a job back in the day when every well-dressed man-about-town topped off his sartorial splendour with a fedora. Or whatever.)

There were two tables of newspaper bigwigs lunching that day. One from the Tely, one from the Star.

An alert editor at the Tely called the Cork Room and asked to speak to the Managing Editor. He went back to the table, quietly told the others what had happened. They settled the bill with very little fanfare and one by one they left, as if nothing had happened. They didn’t want to all get up and rush out at the same time for fear of tipping off the Star that something was up.

They got Worthington down to Dallas that afternoon and put out an extra “Bulldog” edition with the sad news. By that time, JFK was dead.