"A Weekend in November, 1963"

By November 1963, I'd been on the NBC page staff for almost a year. In August, I'd been promoted to 'key man', a uniformed supervisor with a gold key now neatly embroidered on my sleeve. I was feeling a lot more confident than when I'd started there, even did a couple of "John Wayne's" when rowdy fans showed up in the NBC lobby demanding to see a star or a show. I took a couple of classes at the New School of Social Research in Greenwich Village but college was essentially on hold.

The page staff was part of the Guest Relations Department which, in addition to the pages, handled ticket distribution and the NBC Tours, conducted by 'guides' who wore identical uniforms to ours. We held military-style inspections to see that our uniforms were clean and pressed, our shoes shined, our hair and fingernails trimmed before each shift. We lived on pride, professionalism and esprit de corps (in lieu of money). The page staff had been the launching pad of many entertainment industry careers.

I was living with two roommates, Larry Treger and Laurie Neff, in a $200-a-month apartment on West 72nd Street with only the hint of a view of the Hudson River from one bedroom window. Even with promotion and small raise, none of us was making enough money to allow for many luxuries beyond rent, food and subway tokens (which I believe were then 15 cents). It seemed a real luxury when we could afford to go to a show, get our suits dry-cleaned or have our shirts washed and starched at the Chinese laundry.

But in retrospect, these were the best of times. I could not have dreamed on a Friday morning in late November that my view of the world was about to be changed and that, in many ways, it would remain changed for the rest of my life. It started off like just another Friday, I worked a game show in Studio 6-A (across the hall from the "Tonight" studio) and was trying to decide what to do about lunch when I ran into Bob Cotton, another page who was also moonlighting with NBC News, on the fifth floor. As he ran past me, he said only three words, "Kennedy's been shot!".

This was the time of the 'sick joke' and I said something like, "Yeah, very funny!" It was at least another ten minutes before the first bulletins from Dallas were on radio and television. (There was something very creepy about having known before most of the world.) Everything after that was a blur, a brief hopeful period based on false reporting that he'd only been wounded, then the devastating confirmation that our young president was dead. And then it seemed that everyone, everywhere was crying.

The normal studio activities, apart from NBC News, stopped almost immediately. All afternoon and evening tapings, including "The Tonight Show" were cancelled and would remain so until further notice. Not knowing what else to do, a group of us gathered in the Guest Relations office where the very nice woman who handled tickets (sadly, I've forgotten her name) was sobbing uncontrollably in front of her TV set. For what seemed like a long time and probably wasn't, we watched the story unfold. (There was very little video at first from Dallas, mostly anchormen holding telephones up to microphones.) When I couldn't stand watching it anymore, I left the building.

New Yorkers are usually hard-bitten or just blase about most things, but not this day. On the street, I saw taxi drivers refusing fares, just stopping at the curb and turning on their 'off-duty' signs, openly weeping as they listened to the news on their radios. At the newsstand on the corner of 50th Street and 6th Avenue, extra editions of the Daily News and New York Post were already on the street, a super-bold headline on one of them read: "KENNEDY SHOT DEAD".

As people gathered around the newsstand to snap up copies (which I still have), the vendor would not take their money. An impeccably dressed man in a gray suit sat down on the dirty sidewalk, reading the paper in tears. Some people seemed silently distraught, watching the skies as if waiting for the bombs to start falling. And the usual horn-honking jostle and bustle of midtown Manhattan had gone eerily still.

I don't remember exactly how the next few hours played out, whether I went home to our apartment or not. I do remember walking around Rockefeller Center for a while, watching a dreamlike parade of sorrows, until I realized while staring at the golden statue of Prometheus at the skating rink that I was still wearing my page uniform and went back inside to change. I do remember that a group of us on the Guest Relations staff all felt an overwhelming need to do something, we didn't know what. I don't know whose idea it was or how it was proposed, but we were going to organize a caravan of cars and go to Washington.

Although my father had considered himself an Eisenhower Republican, we were never especially political. As I mentioned previously, one of my earliest television memories was Eisenhower's inauguration in 1952 and, from my point of view, after eight years in the White House, it seemed like he'd been president forever. If I'd been old enough to vote in 1960, I might have been expected to vote for his vice-president, Richard Nixon. But I'd never warmed to Nixon, especially after his ludicrous "Checkers speech", and the father of my first girlfriend at Atlantic City High School, Frank Caywood, was a campaign organizer for his opponent, Jack Kennedy.

But my interest in JFK had been more than a desire to impress Frank's daughter, Joyce. His message had resonated with me powerfully. "The torch has been passed to a new generation" meant something profound to me. The 'New Frontier', the Peace Corps, the space program all seemed youthful, vigorous and optimistic ideas to me. And when in 1961 the new president came to speak at the Convention Hall in Atlantic City, a high school field trip for us, both his speech and sheer star-power were dazzling. I became a Kennedy Democrat and a true believer in the dream of Camelot.

I had never been to Washington D.C. before and the three-hour trip down from New York was long, quiet and somber. We listened to the radio and talked in whispers when we talked at all. About twenty of us from NBC Guest Relations made the trip in five cars, although whose cars they were I have no idea. Certainly my roommates and I could not begin to afford to keep a car in Manhattan.

When we reached D.C., we used tourist maps to get as close to the Capitol Building as possible where Kennedy's closed-casket would lie in state inside the rotunda until the next morning. The parking situation was nightmarish but the line of people leading to the Capitol was even more daunting. Three and four abreast, the line stretched for miles.

We knew enough to dress warmly, but we were not prepared for a bitterly cold November night in Washington D.C. The line was orderly and quiet and all night long we slowly shuffled forward, many hugging one another for warmth. I spent most of the night with one young 'guidette', who I barely knew, in an oddly intimate exchange of body-heat.

At one point, I looked around and realized that hundreds more people had joined the line behind us. But as the Capitol dome finally came into view very early that morning, our anxiety grew. We knew that they would have to turn the crowd away at daybreak to prepare the casket for the trip to Arlington National Cemetery. It was going to be close.

We finally climbed the Capitol steps in the first light of dawn. The line was split into two and passed to either side of the flag-draped coffin at the center of the rotunda, braced by military guards. Our shuffling footsteps echoed off the marble floor as we passed. They said not to touch the flag, but I did it anyway. We were probably inside the rotunda for less than a minute, then found ourselves outside again, blinking in the sunrise. We were among the last hundred or so people to be admitted.

We didn't know what to do next, the first trick to find where we'd parked our cars. Part of our group became separated in the process and we had no way of contacting each other. We were cold, hungry and exhausted. We found a coffee shop and wolfed down some breakfast, then slept in the cars for a period of time I cannot estimate.

Later, we attempted to get to Arlington, but encountered roadblocks at every approach. We did a little half-hearted sightseeing, then began the long trip home to New York. I got back to our apartment in time to see Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on television.


NEXT: "International Showtime"