FORMER KBTX REPORTER REMEMBERS JFK ASSASSINATION
For the generation that is now aging into their twilight years, the baby boomers, it was this day, another Friday, November 22nd, fifty years ag that was the turning point of their collective lives.
The President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was suddenly and shockingly murdered in Dallas, Texas while preparing to run for another term.
The images of that day are particularly striking for a one-time news reporter for KBTX in Bryan.,
Bob Huffaker was one of Channel 3’s first news reporters, from 1960 to early 1963. By November he had moved on to KRLD in Dallas. Huffaker recalls the day, saying he had just seen President Kennedy pass by a jubilant and large crowd on a warm and brilliant November day.
He was doing a wrap up on what he had seen when his news director interrupted him and ordered him to rush to Parkland Hospital. Huffaker says it was there that he became one of the first to announce that President Kennedy had been killed.For Huffaker it was that weekend that changed America forever, and when he witnessed the first murder live on television. He says he was only supposed to hold the microphone for CBS news reporter Nelson Benton, while the chief suspect in the president’s murder, Lee Harvey Oswald, was being transferred from the city police station to the Dallas County jail.
Huffaker said Jack Ruby suddenly appeared, said something about mailing a letter, then stepped out and shot Oswald. He said Ruby acted suddenly and impulsively.
It was Huffaker’s voice on many of the immediate live news reports of the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. He sometimes reflects on how he continually referred to the president’s assassin as Lee Harold Oswald.
Huffaker, who is now a retired college professor living in Denton, says it was that weekend that Americans began getting their news from radio and television, instead of newspapers. He wrote about the transition and the trauma in his book ‘When the News Went Live.’
Listen to the full interview with Bob Huffaker:
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