We got our cue and we just kept going, because no one else knew what to do.” Mr. Hastings, 79, recalled: “Phil Polansky, our cameraman, said, ‘Don’t tell the actors what? The president’s been shot?’ He had headphones on, and he was talking to the control room. So were those on the soap opera set at the Hy Brown studios on West 26th Street in Manhattan.ĭon Hastings, who played Bob Hughes, knew something was amiss as he prepared for a restaurant scene with Henderson Forsythe after the Nancy-Grandpa exchange.
In those first few frantic minutes, CBS programmers were scrambling. Among other things, it offers the bizarre sight of Cronkite’s dire updates being followed by cheery commercials for Nescafé instant coffee (opening, ominously, with a slowly swinging pendulum) and Friskies puppy food. In it, Nancy boldly predicts that Bob and Lisa will reunite.īut it is the fragmented version, available on YouTube, that has gone down in TV history.
The very ordinariness of Wagner’s scene - “my dubious claim to fame,” the actress once called it - underscores the day’s nightmarish events.Īn uninterrupted version of the episode is preserved at the Paley Center for Media, in New York and Los Angeles. 1,995 (there was no title) remains frozen in time as a last semblance of normalcy before the face of television changed permanently. Today, the live telecast of “As the World Turns” No. In Washington, the NBC and ABC affiliates were scheduled to present “TV Beauty School” and “Divorce Court.” In Dallas, a discussion of winter coats with hidden zippers was the focus of “The Julie Benell Show,” a local effort by the ABC affiliate WFAA.
At the moment of the assassination, the slow-moving series about personal and professional goings-on in fictional Oakdale, Ill., was the only regular program being broadcast nationally by a major network - specifically, throughout the Eastern and Central time zones. But no group was united in quite the same way just then as those who were tuned to “As the World Turns.”įifty years ago, “A.T.W.T.,” as it came to be known, was not merely television’s most popular daytime drama. Americans of a certain age remember where they were when they learned of the shooting of John F.
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