Among the things found in the stash of VHS tapes I picked up recently is a copy of the NBC coverage of the JFK assassination. This was reaired at least a couple times-the one I have was done by PBS in 1993. It is 6+ hours, uninterupted, starting shortly after the special coverage began. A truly amazing time capsule; I was particularly surprised at how much information they were able to get out-by the end of the recording they were able to air a recorded interview that Lee Harvey Oswald had done with a Louisiana TV station. There are all sorts of technical problems they encountered throughout the day but overall they made excellent use of their facilities.

Some questions, for those "in the know":
The recording is primarily b/w. I'm assuming the NBC news studios were not color equipped at the time? They do numerous remotes from WBAP-TV, the earliest ones in color. There was another remote later on in color from somewhere else. I wonder, were these broadcast live (and recorded) that way, or were they initially bw to the network, with color recordings edited in later?

I've always thought they looked like they were made in a different century. (no pun intended) The cameras were obviously primitive, even for 1963 standards, w/many "artifacts" & distortion. I don't remember "live" programs from then looking so bad. Kinda looks like they drug the oldest junk they had out of the storage barn, slapped it on the side, & made do...

For anyone living at the time, will never forget the week. You may have heard, " I remember exactly what I was doing when the news broke" It's true, I was 17 at the time and the announcement came over the PA system in study hall. I was living with my parents and they did not have a color TV.

Back then (1963) color TV was limited to a few hours in prime time, so I suspect most or all live remote broadcasts were B&W. I remember that the networks went mainstream with all day color telecasting in 1966-67. That was a big incentive to buy a color TV which were expensive then. My first was a 67 RCA purchased late 1966. :-)

My mom was laid up in bed with a slipped disc in her back. My dad bought her a brand new GE 19" portable B/W set with a stand that morning so she could watch TV. Then, the assassination happened, and we all watched the events unfold at the foot of my parents bed for the next few days.

I still think the networks did an incredible job with coverage of the event.

I was in 1st grade. It was a GLORIOUS fall day, that "chrome-blue" it only gets that time of year. We had just come from Recess into the school cafeteria. They had the radio playing over the lunchroom PA, I remember my 1st grade teacher, Lois Armstrong, her eyes got big as saucers. We went back up in the room & prayed for him. Seems like they let us outta school early that day, & the kids outside were eerily quiet...

I have that 1993 tape somewhere that I taped myself. BTW, one of my co-workers was a young kid at the time and he told me that he remembers getting angry because they cancelled the cartoons in the afternoon.

some questions, for those "in the know":
The recording is primarily b/w. I'm assuming the NBC news studios were not color equipped at the time? They do numerous remotes from WBAP-TV, the earliest ones in color. There was another remote later on in color from somewhere else. I wonder, were these broadcast live (and recorded) that way, or were they initially bw to the network, with color recordings edited in later?
Yes, most broadcast TV was B&W prior to about 1965-1966. 1966 was the big changeover year, when prime-time went pretty much 100% color for American networks.

NBC did showcase color specials and some limited color programming (like Wonderful World of Color and Bonanza on Sunday night), but most of their news was B&W. I'd say 100% of the assassination coverage was B&W.

Like some of the older farts here, my memories of November 22nd, 1963 are pretty much seared into my brain. I was 9 years old, and had just seen Kennedy 3 times in the motorcade parade through Tampa, Florida four days earlier on November 18th. It was a huge shock for everybody in my home town when Kennedy was killed.

I often say, the 1950s really ended when Kennedy died, in terms of innocence and pop culture. And the 1960s really began in January of 1964, when the British Invasion exploded.

Note that 2013 will be the 50th Anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of TV coverage about it. We keep waiting for the smoking gun, some guy on his deathbed to finally confess the whole story... but it hasn't happened yet.

Wasn't JFK's funeral in color?

I remember hearing from a tech at a tv station I worked at telling me that the cameras of the day took so long to stabilize that the networks and their news affiliates had to go to air really quick, which meant that the b/w cameras had to be used and even those took a long time to fire up.

[QUOTE=colorfixer;2997860]Wasn't JFK's funeral in color?

I remember seeing the CBS black & white videotape coverage on a special in 1993. The only color footage I've ever seen from the JFK funeral has been film sourced, probably 16mm Kodachrome. So far I've not ever been aware of color videotape. But if there WAS any, even limited amounts of it, I'd expect to see it come from NBC since they'd been doing colorcasts since 1954.

I was in 1st grade. Principal stepped in the room and told us right after lunch. Old school and had no PA system. We had B&W set so I dont know if any of the coverage was in color. My memory is the footage was standard quality for the day.

There were not enough color remote units in the day available on the east coast and on short notice to cover the entire funeral route in color. B&W on all the archives is what was broadcast of the route via the pool of
DC networks and local stations.

The few remote trucks of the day only had a handful of TK-41 (the camera of exclusivity) on-board. NBC did baseball in color with only four or five cameras from the NYC truck. Probably all they owned in the remote trucks of the day.

NBC had one remote truck in NYC, perhaps a second on the west coast. Not sure about DC. CBS was 1965 or so for color and only in studios, and ABC was the same.

There were a handful of independent remote trucks like Red Skelton but that was only four more cameras out west.

The end result is that there were a handful of color remote trucks and not enough to do the coverage. B&W is what we saw.

Most any presidential event is a pool situation, but the pool looks awfully low in 1963 for color. The pool would have been all the nets and locals in B&W.

The archive footage we can see will confirm the paucity of color at the network end. Steve D is invited to correct my remberance of color history with my apologies.

RCA kept selling color sets anyway.

"Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story". Richie Ashburn

Wasn't JFK's funeral in color?

I remember hearing from a tech at a tv station I worked at telling me that the cameras of the day took so long to stabilize that the networks and their news affiliates had to go to air really quick, which meant that the b/w cameras had to be used and even those took a long time to fire up.

I also seem to remember that the funeral, or at least part of it was in color on NBC. I assume they just set up a side by side with the pool gear. I also watched a replay of the coverage, I think on CSPAN. I remember that the early reports from WBAP in Dallas were in color... mainly because the videotape unlocked verytime the color source was placed on the air. Not too much later the same reports were in black & white. Someone at NBC must have told them to shut off the color.

The events of that depressing weekend seem like yesterday. I was in my last year of high school.

I had a 17-inch console Philco black-and-white set that my aunt had given me. It had razor-sharp video and the color subcarrier (a crawling cross-hatch pattern) could easily be seen on color shows. I was "into" color at the time and usually watched for this. (I wanted a color set so bad and in December of 1963 I finally got my Heathkit color set.)

As far as Los Angeles television was concerned, when the Kennedy news coverage started, as I recall, all the stations, even non-network stations, dropped their normal programming and provided wall-to-wall network coverage, so color just completely disappeared.

Normally we had NBC on channel 4, of course, and ABC on channel 7 with a small amount of film color ("The Jetsons" and "The Flintstones") along with KHJ-TV channel 9 and KCOP channel 13, both of which had color film capability.

It wasn't until the last night of that event, either on Sunday night or Monday night (I think the funeral was on Monday) that KHJ aired a religious film program in color. As I remember they got some criticism for breaking away, but after almost four days of non-stop coverage, I, and I'm sure a lot of other viewers were completely burned out.

Yes this is quite sad........

I have a 24-hour replay of NBC's coverage,as aired during the early days of A&E and recorded to several SuperBeta tapes. I remember just two studio inserts as being in colour, the rest is black and white.

I used to work at a public broadcasting station in Morgantown, West Virginia, when A&E aired 5 hours of NBC's coverage. At the time, Bill Ryan, on of the anchors of NBC's coverage, was working at our station as the host of a talk show. Bill was one of the most incredible people I have ever met, total professional.
He was getting ready to do the top of the hour radio network newscast when the first bulletin came over the wires. He went to what NBC called a flash studio that had two black and white cameras up and ready for emergencies. At that time during a weekday afternoon, most of the local affiliates were running their own shows or weren't even on the air. It was amazing hearing him talk about that day. He ended up being on the air for 11 hours. If you notice, Chet Huntley left just after Kennedy had been declared dead. Bill said all he could think of when he was on the air was "everything I say has to be correct." William Manchester's "Death of a President" details more of the coverage. My favorite part is when Robert McNeil is phoning in his report from Dallas, and Frank McGhee is relaying what he is saying because of audio problems. To me the thing to take away from this wondering if there are enough network reporters working today that could handle a situation like this. I don't think there are.

I was home from school early that day (due to a faculty meeting) and was at my paternal grandmother’s house. She was watching “As The World Turns” (she was a soap and quiz addict since the days of radio!) and I remember seeing that “BULLETIN” slide come up, Cronkite, etc., on the CBS-TV affiliate. My grandmother started crying and was very upset about this as she was so excited that a Roman Catholic had been elected President. While I understood the religious importance, I also found it interesting as she’d never been able to vote for a President, although she was a natural born citizen. I suppose that I should mention here that I was born and spent my early years in a territory of the U.S., as opposed to a state.

For us, it was a wild afternoon trying to get my mother home from her office at 19th & Pennsylvania Ave. Driving up 18th St next to the EOB and the White House was where traffic started getting hairy and there were cars from CBS, NBC, ABC, Mutual, and several of the local radio stations. The only TV truck to be seen was from WRC-TV. The traffic was held for a bit as a motocade came roaring out of the White House onto Pennsylvania Ave, heading to Andrews AFB. In one of the limos, I distinctly remember seeing Bobby Kennedy and his wife. Of course my Civil Service mother was among those released from work early, but we still didn’t get back home until about the time AF1 had landed at Andrews. I distinctly remember seeing President Kennedy’s casket being lowered from the VC-137 and loaded into a Pontiac ambulance belonging to the Navy.

There was no local color on WRC-TV that weekend as I recall. I remember my Aunt Frances being very upset about that (they “had to be first” in the family with a color set) as she dearly loved President Kennedy.

I’ve also seen the NBC tapes as telecast on A&E. The scene with Frank McGee and Robert McNeil doing a phone patch was a hoot! That crude device looked more like an Arvin or Zenith pocket transistor radio than anything else!

It was indeed a different time compared with what we have today. Back then, the Secret Service had the Presidential Lincoln serviced at O’Brien & Rohall, the Lincoln-Mercury (formerly Edsel, too) dealer in Rosslyn, VA. Which was also the dealership where my parents bought their ’62 Mercury Meteor. You’d see the Presidential limo in their shop periodically. No guards around it or anything. I even got to sit in it once. In the back seat. The same spot where JFK was sitting that afternoon…

As for the “quality” of broadcast journalism being able to competently report impartially and factually a smiliar event today, is a matter for debate. I think a worthy academic exercise in that regard would be to compare coverage of the “Challenger” and “Columbia” shuttle accidents.

I think for my generation, the assassinations of the sixties, Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon, and 9/11 will be the “Pearl Harbor” in terms of “I remember where I was…”

I think they did as good a job reporting as could be expected during extremely difficult circumstances...Nobody had tried to take a shot at the President since, what, 1933 or so ? There was the incident in 1950 w/Puerto Rican nationalists, but that was stopped at the White House gate.

wondering if there are enough network reporters working today that could handle a situation like this. I don't think there are.

Have they all retired since 9/11?

Murphu222, thanks for sharing that story...I was certainly impressed with Ryan's work that day.

Note that 2013 will be the 50th Anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of TV coverage about it.

And I intend to tape as much of it as I can onto VHS (I don't trust PVR's still as they seem to fail at the worst of times).

I'll also chime in and say that the coverage does seem to have some heavy artifacts, even by 1963 standards. I agree that they did a great job with covering the incident, but those cameras seem to be of terrible quality

The JFK events broadcast live looked okay on our '62 Silvertone 23-incher! I saw Oswald take it in the belly through the eyes of an 8-year old! 50 years is a long time for a recording - film or videotape - so some degradation is to be expeted. I have seen some old Dick Clark footage of bands on the beach just 3 years newer where the camera had very bad horizontal linearity. Video quality became better over time, now we're so darn spoiled if it's not in HD we have a cow...

I think I mentioned this in another forum at VK. Never forget that day, was 17 and in study hall when the first news came over the P.A. system. Damp windy fall day in Milwaukee. Watched the coverage after school, was a Friday, I think. Watched the killing of Oswald live on TV over the weekend. Monday was declared a national day of mourning, no school. Watched the entire funeral like everyone else at the time. The nation was in shock, as I was. My parents had a black and white TV so don't know if there was color coverage. If there was, it had to be limited in 1963.

I to rank the Kennedy assassination, the first moon landing, the Challenger accident and 911 as the most memorable events in my life time. I have vague memories of Queen Elizabeth's inauguration on TV. First images from Telstar was a big deal. After this post will probably remember more events ...

I think I mentioned this in another forum at VK. Never forget that day, was 17 and in study hall when the first news came over the P.A. system. Damp windy fall day in Milwaukee. Watched the coverage after school, was a Friday, I think. Watched the killing of Oswald live on TV over the weekend. Monday was declared a national day of mourning, no school. Watched the entire funeral like everyone else at the time. The nation was in shock, as I was. My parents had a black and white TV so don't know if there was color coverage. If there was, it had to be limited in 1963.

I to rank the Kennedy assassination, the first moon landing, the Challenger accident and 911 as the most memorable events in my life time. I have vague memories of Queen Elizabeth's inauguration on TV. First images from Telstar was a big deal. After this post will probably remember more events ...

For me, the memories that stick in my mind was the attempted assassination of President Reagan, The Moon Landings, the Space Shuttles Columbia and Challenger and of course, 9-11. BTW, I remember the words "live via satellite" meant a great deal as well as "in color." I even remember "In Stereo <<< where available >>>" :)

Besides the September 2001 attacks (which can probably only be compared to the Pearl Harbor attack), the biggest news event I remember was the day Mayor Daley died, in 1976. That is an indication of how powerful he and his political machine were in Chicago, where I was a teenager at the time.