On Friday, November 22nd, 1963, President Kennedy awoke at 7:30AM. He ate a light breakfast with Jackie before going out by himself to the square in front of his hotel to address a crowd of a few thousand people.

Someone shouted, “where’s Jackie?”

He pointed to their eighth floor suite and replied "Mrs Kennedy is organizing herself, It takes her a little longer, but of course she looks better than we do when she does it."

The First Couple, together with Vice President Johnson and Texas Governor Connaly then took a short flight to Dallas. At 11:55 the President's motorcade left Love Field in Dallas. Thirty-five minutes later, history changed forever.

This is soundcheck audio from the collection of Gordon Skene. On the morning of Friday, November 22nd, 1963 Gordon was twelve years old and home from school, recovering from an operation. Out of boredom he switched on his parent’s tape recorder and tuned to KNX, CBS’ affiliate in Los Angeles.

On the air was Arthur Godfrey Time, talking from Miami, Florida with journalist Morris McLemore and commentator Gabriel Heater.

Longtime CBS journalist and host Andy Rooney remembered Godfrey’s influence.

In the late 1930s, a red-head from New York with a slight southern drawl named Arthur Godfrey was making a name for himself, hosting an all-night CBS show in Washington, DC on WJSV. He spent the overnight air-time playing records and chatting.

Audiences were drawn to Godfrey’s informal approach. In April of 1941, CBS picked up the emcee for a national broadcast. The next October 4th, he began announcing for Fred Allen’s Texaco Star Theater.

Unfortunately Allen and Godfrey didn’t mix well on-air. Allen dropped him after six weeks. Godfrey continued to appear on CBS special broadcasts. His star catapulted when he was a tearful reporter at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral in April of 1945. CBS gave him a new morning show.

Arthur Godfrey Time debuted less than two weeks later on April 30th.

Unfortunately Godfrey’s popularity nosedived on October 19th, 1953. After years of working both himself and his supporting cast to the bone, he’d begun to treat them like children. Godfrey had a falling out with singer Julius LaRosa, firing him live on the air. Many felt Godfrey was jealous of his popularity.

Once the show signed off for the day, Godfrey fired his bandleader Archie Bleyer. When Ed Sullivan invited LaRosa on his Toast of the Town TV show, Godfrey called Sullivan a dope. The reporters covering the story were “a bunch of jerks.”

Rather than back off, Godfrey fired the rest of his cast and continued broadcasting, but the press, the public, and Godfrey never forgot or forgave what happened.

His problems continued. He lost his pilot's license after buzzing an airport tower. One by one his shows folded. Then he got lung cancer and later, pronouncing himself cured, devoted much of his time to the fight against the disease. He professed to be writing a book that would tell “the whole story” of his incredible life and claimed to be working out a new deal for a TV show. In the end CBS, and William Paley, who never liked Godfrey, but liked his ratings, refused to put him on TV.

Godfrey continued his network radio show until 1972, when he finally quit. In his seventies, he still talked occasionally about coming back, but he died March 16th, 1983, in New York city.

While this exact recording isn’t the original that Gordon Skene air checked, he later said about recording that morning, “Why was I doing it? I have no idea, and to this day I couldn’t tell you exactly what made me pick this day and this hour to hit the record button.”

Suddenly, it all became very serious. What follows here is a living nightmare, now sixty years old, and not a moment of it is dated by time.

On the morning of Thursday, November 21st, 1963 President Kennedy had breakfast with his children. He said goodbye to his daughter Caroline when she left for school at 9:15.

President Kennedy arrived at his office for the last time at 9:55. The President left the White House for the last time at 10:50AM. He flew to Andrews Air Force Base where he and the First Lady departed for San Antonio Texas. John Jr accompanied them to the airport.

Once in Texas, he was at the dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health Center, Brooks Air Force Base. He then went to Houston. There he made brief remarks to the League of United Latin American Citizens at the Rice Hotel. He then addressed a dinner in honor of Representative Albert Thomas. Some of that speech was just heard.

The President and First Lady then traveled to Fort Worth where they stayed at the Texas Hotel. He had speeches set for Fort Worth and Dallas the next day.

In world news, Robert Stroud, “the birdman of Alcatraz” died while incarcerated in Springfield, Missouri.

In Japan’s general election, the Liberal Democratic Party retained a majority in the Shugiin (SHOO GEEN), or House of Representatives.

While India began its space program with the launching of a rocket at the far south end of the Indian subcontinent.

And by the time the President went to sleep, it was the 22nd in the UK. That day, The Beatles released their second studio album, With The Beatles. Produced by George Martin, it featured eight original compositions and six covers.

The famous black and white portrait on the cover, with Ringo underneath John, George, and Paul, was widely copied afterwards.

On November 19th, 1963, nine days before Thanksgiving, President Kennedy received a turkey from the Poultry and Egg Board. The President always looked forward to New England Thanksgivings.

That same day, in the concluding event for the three-day centennial celebration of the Gettysburg Address, former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the crowd at the rededication for the Gettysburg National Cemetery.

He told the audience, "My friends, Lincoln reminded his hearers that they had no power to dedicate this ground. So we, today, have no power to rededicate it. But with the playing of Taps, the soldier's farewell, we can share the grief of every family who has heard that a son or father or sweetheart has fallen. If we can do this, we will begin to do our part to solve the unfinished business of which Lincoln spoke."

That evening, Jean Shepherd signed on talking family folk stories and poking fun at WOR.

The next day, at the UN General Assembly, the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was adopted, while the deathbed wish of author Aldous Huxley was honored by his wife Laura. She injected him with two-hundred micrograms of LSD. Huxley would die two days later.

On Sunday, November 17th, 1963, Frank McGee signed on for NBC’s Monitor with a look at Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Lincoln’s famous speech was about to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary.

Meanwhile, President Kennedy was in Florida, unofficially on the 1964 campaign trail.

On Saturday November 16th, President Kennedy traveled to Cape Canaveral where he inspected the Saturn Control Center and watched a Polaris missile test launch.

The next morning he and Special Assistant Dave Powers went to Sunday Mass at St. Ann’s Church in Palm Beach.

On the day of this special broadcast, the President began his day at MacDill Air Force Base.

Photos from this trip, which would be the President’s last to Florida, which had voted Republican in the previous two Presidential elections, show Kennedy smiling brightly, as did fellow Americans, especially those who shook his hand or lined the roads alongside the twenty-eight mile path his motorcade took in Tampa Bay.

When Kennedy traveled to Miami, he addressed a democrat crowd at the airport.

That same day, a fire killed twenty-six people at the Surfside Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. During the offseason the hotel served as a convalescent home for elderly people. Ten bodies were never recovered and only two of the other fifteen could be identified.

A former mental patient and convicted arsonist would be arrested for the crime. He confessed he poured gasoline into the hotel's boiler and set it ablaze. However, an Atlantic City grand jury did not find probable cause to return an indictment.

That evening, NBC-TV’s Huntley–Brinkley Report featured a four-minute news feature on The Beatles. It was the group’s first appearance on American TV.

James Scully here. I wanted to let you know that I’m doing a webinar this Wednesday, November 8th, 2023 at 5:30PM with the New York Adventure Club on the CBS Talent Raids of 1949 and how they drastically changed the broadcasting landscape just as TV was about to boom.

Included here in the show notes is a link where you can buy tickets, which are only $10 — https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-cbs-talent-raids-a-rebalance-of-network-power-in-early-tv-webinar-registration-735611121667?aff=oddtdtcreator. I'll also send anyone who buys tix the PDF presentation deck after the webinar (if they want it).

On Saturday November 9th, fans rioted at Roosevelt Field Raceway in Long Island, battling police and setting fires. At least fifteen were hurt and the head of security died of a heart attack during the riot.

Sunday November 10th was the evening before Veteran’s Day. On NBC, Frank McGee signed on for Monitor with a salute to the holiday. Andrew Pearson had correspondence from Vietnam, while President Kennedy spent much of the weekend in New York City.

On this same day, Black Muslim activist Malcolm X delivered what would become a widely re-quoted speech to the Northern Negro Leadership Conference at the King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit.

His message was one of revolution. He heavily criticized civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., who he said sold out and added that the March on Washington was "nothing but a circus, with clowns and all... white and black clowns."

The next morning President Kennedy and his family flew to the white house. The President and John Jr. went to Arlington National Cemetery to take part in Veterans Day Ceremonies.

Meanwhile, The first interplanetary probe in the Soviet Union's Zond program, Kosmos 21, failed to escape Earth orbit after rocket misfire and a failure of proper altitude control.

On November 12th, The President met with Portuguese and Uruguayan Ambassadors before hosting an off the record meeting on Cuba that included Robert Kennedy, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. He also signed off on National Security Memorandum 271, a then-secret memo to NASA Administrator James E. Webb, telling him "to assume personally the initiative and central responsibility" to develop specific technical proposals "for broader cooperation between the U.S. and the USSR in outer space, including cooperation in lunar landing programs."

On Wednesday, November 13th, at 11:15PM, Jean Shepherd signed on from WOR talking about protests, intellectuals, and angry demagogues.

Two days after this broadcast, on Friday November 15th, 1963, seven days before President Kennedy's scheduled visit to Dallas, Democratic Party leader Baxton Bryant sent an angry telegram to President Kennedy complaining that Democratic supporters were being shut out of the planned November 22nd luncheon by Dallas Republicans who were in control of the Dallas Citizens Council. The plea was for the President to do something or face a boycott by his most loyal supporters.

A motorcade from Dallas Love Field to downtown Dallas was arranged for the Kennedys after another Bryant complaint.

That evening, the President flew to Palm Beach, Florida.

As November 1963 began, President Kennedy had emergency meetings on Vietnam. He also received members of the US Industrial Payroll Savings Committee and had meetings on the goings on in Berlin.

Meanwhile, The U.S. Secret Service concluded that the more secure and the larger of two locations for the President’s upcoming fundraising luncheon in Dallas would be the "Women's Building" at Fair Park at the east side of downtown, rather than the Trade Mart on the west side near Dealey Plaza. Despite the recommendation, the state Democratic Party leaders in Texas settled on the Trade Mart.

On November 6th, Jean Shepherd signed on from WOR talking about, and poking fun at, the 1964 World’s Fair, slated to open the next April.

Part of what made Shepherd so popular was that no one was safe from his scrutinizing eye, even himself, and his biting style was perfect for late night radio.

Perhaps Shep was wrong. Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston twice, changing his name to Muhammad Ali in the process, while the cover of the next day’s New York Daily News, Wednesday November 7th, told the story of a bartender from Connecticut who won nearly eighty thousand dollars, an all-time record twin double at Roosevelt Raceway.

That same day, Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York, announced on NBC's Today Show that he would be a candidate for the 1964 Republican Party nomination.

U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the front-runner, made no comment, but was expected to enter the race. President Kennedy was not expected to face opposition in his nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for 1964.

Support For Breaking Walls is provided by our patrons. If you like the documentaries I've been producing, you can become a show supporter for as little as $1 here — https://www.patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

By 1960, Shep’s homespun wit could be tweaked depending on what time of the day he took to the air. At that time he was broadcasting on both Saturdays and Sundays during the middle of the day for just under two hours.

On Saturday April 9th, 1960, he took to the air discussing a solitary trip to Coney Island.

The batting cages Shep spoke of were located on Stillwell avenue near the Coney Island boardwalk, just down the block from Nathans. I spent many a winter afternoon on this street taking batting practice and eating at Nathans with my grandfather in the 1990s. For more information on Coney Island’s place in radio history, tune into Breaking Walls episode 92.

Shepherd’s Sunday show was terminated and for five months he was only on Saturday afternoons at 1:15PM. His program was then shifted to weeknights at 11:15PM for forty-five minutes. On February 27th, 1961 Shepherd spoke about shifting back to a late night time slot.

This format, at 11:15PM until 1964, and then 10:15 until 1977, became what Shepherd is today most remembered for in terms of radio broadcasting.

On Monday, October 21st, 1963 he had this to say about how his peers perceived their era, as well as why some college kids were gravitating towards Barry Goldwater, rather than John Kennedy.

Jean Shepherd was born on July 26th, 1921 on the South Side of Chicago to Jean and Anna Shepherd. He grew up in Hammond, Indiana, which according to Shep was a “tough and mean” industrial city.

As an adolescent, Shepherd worked as a mail boy in a steel mill. He began his radio career at the age of sixteen, doing weekly sportscasts for WJOB in Hammond. That job led to juvenile roles on network radio in Chicago, including that of Billy Fairchild in the serial “Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy.”

One of the programs that later came to symbolize Shepherd’s childhood, thanks to his 1983 film A Christmas Story, was Red Ryder.

During World War II, Shepherd served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, installing radar equipment and furthering a lifelong dislike for authority figures.

After the war, he studied acting in Chicago at the Goodman Theatre and briefly engineering and psychology at Indiana University. He left Indiana without a degree to take a radio gig in Cincinnati, which led him to a series of radio jobs, each better than the previous.

After working at WTOD in Toledo, Ohio, Shepherd spent the early 1950s at WSAI and WLW in Cincinnati, and had a late-night broadcast on KYW in Philadelphia.

He moved to New York for WOR and debuted on February 26th, 1955. WOR is a fifty-thousand watt clear-channel AM station and was the flagship affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting System.

Mutual Broadcasting had formed on September 28th, 1934 as a cooperative of stations WOR New York, WGN Chicago, WXYZ Detroit, and WLW Cincinnati. The members shared telephone-line transmission facilities and agreed to collectively enter into contracts with advertisers for their network shows.

After a deal with Don Lee’s chain of west coast networks, Mutual went coast-to-coast on December 29th, 1936.

The other major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, were corporations. When World War II ended, domestic manufacturing restrictions were lifted. TV became a focal point as the other networks pumped their radio profits into the new medium. Mutual’s cooperative status meant it never had the resources to move into TV, although affiliates like WOR did run a local TV station in New York.

Mutual remained a cooperative until 1952 when General Tire became the parent company.

By 1955 radio was changing. Drama, which had dominated the dial for more than two decades, was on its way out due to both its and TV production costs.

More and more network programming was being turned over to local affiliates. These local affiliates employed a new generation of hosts that had grown up with Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and other observant humorists. Shepherd’s peers were Johnny Carson, Jack Paar, Rod Serling, and Steve Allen.

Shepherd was working an overnight slot for WOR in 1956. Facing a lack of sponsorship, he was about to be fired when he did an unauthorized commercial for Sweetheart Soap who didn’t sponsor his program. WOR immediately canned him.

But, listeners complained in droves and Sweetheart actually offered to sponsor him. WOR immediately brought him back.

The overnight slot allowed him to riff with little need for the kind of corporate oversight that faced daytime and primetime hosts. That year, during a discussion on how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists, Shepherd suggested that his listeners visit bookstores and ask for a copy of a fictional novel called I, Libertine by a Frederick R. Ewing.

Fans of the show planted references so widely that there were claims it made The New York Times Best Seller list. It led to an actual book deal with Ballantine. Theodore Sturgeon wrote most of it with Shepherd’s outline guiding him. Betty Ballantine finished the novel when Sturgeon fell asleep during a marathon writing session to meet the deadline. Famed illustrator Frank Kelly Freas did the cover art.

The book was published on September 13th, 1956 with all proceeds going to charity.

In Breaking Walls episode 144 we present part two of our mini-series on radio and the world in the fall of 1957.

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Highlights:

• The 1957 World Series

• Unit 99

• Sputnik, Bing Crosby, and Current Events

• The Eternal Light and The Glastonbury Cows

• Algeria Aflame

• Stan Freberg

• Bill Kemp, ABC, and More News

• School Integration Update

• Sorry, Wrong Number

• You Bet Your Life

• NATO, Syria, and Sputnik

• LIFE and The World with Carl Sandberg and Frank Lloyd Wright

• Looking Ahead to Jean Shepherd and JFK

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The WallBreakers:

http://thewallbreakers.com

Subscribe to Breaking Walls everywhere you get your podcasts.

To support the show:

http://patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

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The reading material for today’s episode was:

• I Have a Lady in the Balcony: Memories of a Broadcaster in Radio and Television — By George Ansbro

• On the Air — By John Dunning

• Network Radio Ratings — By Jim Ramsburg

As well as articles from

• Broadcasting Magazine

• The New England Historical Society

• The New York Times

• Sponsor Magazine

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On the interview front:

• Stan Freberg, Byron Kane, and Peggy Webber spoke to SPERDVAC. For more info, go to SPERDVAC.com.

• Andre Baruch, Ken Carpenter, Virginia Gregg, John Guedel, and Agnes Moorehead spoke with Chuck Schaden. Hear their full chats at Speakingofradio.com.

• Jackson Beck, Vincent Price, and Bill Spier spoke to Dick Bertel and Ed Corcoran for WTIC’s The Golden Age of Radio. Hear these interviews at GoldenAge-WTIC.org.

• Jack Benny’s snippet was recorded by CBS and played for their 50th anniversary in 1977

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Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

• Plunkett’s Lament — By George Fenton

• The Pavane and Window To The Sky — By Michael Silverman

• As Time Goes By — By Herman Hupfeld

• Road — By George Winston

• Metamorphosis 2 — By Elizabeth Hainen

• Amazing Grace — By Wind Drum Spirit

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A special thank you to Ted Davenport, Jerry Haendiges, and Gordon Skene.

For Ted go to RadioMemories.com, for Jerry, visit OTRSite.com, and for Gordon, please go to PastDaily.com.

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Thank you to:

Tony Adams

Steven Allmon

Orson Orsen Chandler

Phil Erickson

Jessica Hanna

Perri Harper

Thomas M. Joyce

Ryan Kramer

Earl Millard

Gary Mollica

Barry Nadler

Christian Neuhaus

Ray Shaw

Filipe A Silva

John Williams

Jim W.

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WallBreakers Links:

Patreon - patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Social Media - @TheWallBreakers