Show notes
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.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
