Actually, it was the weekend before Thanksgiving weekend of 1963. Kennedy was shot on Friday 22 November 1963, the funeral being on Monday 25 November 1963. You still had three more days until
1963's Thanksgiving on Thursday 28 November 1963.
The assassination occurred at approximately 12:30pm (afternoon) Central Standard Time, in Dallas TX (same time zone as Chicago), give or take a few minutes.
The radio and television networks started breaking into local programming (or in the case of CBS Television, broke into the live network presentation of "As the World Turns" for the Eastern and Central time zones, CBS-TV breaking into whatever network reruns were airing earlier in the morning (clock time) on the Pacific Coast along with whatever NBC-TV and ABC-TV were also airing on the West Coast at 10:30am PST), with the first bulletins, approximately
1:35pm EST, 12:35pm CST, 11:35pm MST, 10:35pm PST, give or take some minutes.With the technology of the day, the first news bulletins on the TV-side were simply "slide-cards" for the video (CBS NEWS BULLETIN, etc), with a voice-over (newsman Walter Cronkite for CBS-TV, perennial announcer Don Pardo for NBC-TV). Vacuum tube technology was still in use to a great extent (even though the three Bell Labs physicists who won the Nobel Prize has invented the transistor back in 1948), and the TV networks didn't keep the newsroom live cameras warmed up until about a half-hour before their evening newscasts, although they did have a small studio for their afternoon five-minute newscast updates following "To Tell the Truth" (CBS) or "The Match Game" (NBC). They did have "slide cards" set up being scanned by live video-cams specifically designed for 16-mm or 35-mm motion picture film or slides. But it wasn't until later on into the incident, after the first slide-card/voice-over bulletins, that the three TV networks could go fully live with video of a newsman or announcer, and even later until they could get everything hooked up to have reports live from Dallas TX.
Some of NBC's "we switch you now to our NBC-TV affiliate, WBAP-TV Ft.Worth/Dallas for another report", were actually telecast and fed in living color. NBC-TV's own reports from New York and Washington DC were in Black & White, but the pick-ups from WBAP-TV Ft.Worth/Dallas (at least the first few) were in color.
A lot of credit has to be given to the newsmen with the three TV networks, the four radio networks (don't forget about Mutual), the wire services (AP, UPI, etc), and... AT&T and its Bell operating companies (and various independent connecting carriers) for their fast work in gathering the news and reporting it to the best of their ability considering the technology of the day, and for the technical resources (co-ax, microwave, etc) as well. And not to forget the local radio and TV stations (both network affiliates and independent stations), as well as the staffs of the major newsmagazines and local newspapers throughout the country for their newsgathering and reporting, based on what we "knew" at that time.
- Anthony Bellanga