History, like politics, is local. So while the collective national memory of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 has been distilled to several seconds of color home movie footage of the motorcade in Dealey Plaza and Walter Cronkite choking up on CBS, a whole set of local memories is fading away.
Friday, November 22, 1963, was chilly and damp in Seattle, where the temperature had dipped to 39 degrees that morning. As elsewhere in the rest of the country, housewives (as they were unabashedly called then) were making preparations for Thanksgiving, now less than a week away. The Huskies and the Cougars were set to compete in their annual cross-state face-off, first dubbed “The Apple Cup” that year, at Husky Stadium the next day.
As the clock ticked toward 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time and JFK’s Lincoln came into sight of a sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository, a young Bryan Johnson got ready to deliver the news on KOMO Radio, local deejay Mike Phillips held forth on music powerhouse KJR-AM, while dimming star Arthur Godfrey – who had first come to national attention describing FDR’s funeral procession 18 years earlier on radio – strummed his aging ukulele via CBS over on KIRO-AM.
On television, it was “Movietime” on KOMO (actual movie now forgotten), the final moments of the game show “Concentration” on KING, a rerun of the old sitcom “The McCoys” on KIRO, and over on KCTS, eerily, something called “Julius Caesar, Part IV,” about another leader assassinated long before anyone had heard of Jack Kennedy.
