Saturday, November 23, 2013

Back when newspapers were a nickel......

I wish I could add to the chorus of remembrances of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated 50 years ago yesterday, but I can't. The simple reason being is that I was but an infant, 9 1/2 months old, in November 1963. I was likely sleeping in my crib when word came down that Kennedy had been shot down in Dallas.

As part of the 50th anniversary commemoration, the New York Daily News published a reprint volume of the 11/23/63 issue with yesterday's edition, filled with articles on the assassination, and how television & radio dealt with the severity of the event. All three broadcast networks pre-empted all programming up through Sunday morning, I would imagine. You've heard, I'm sure, of the controversy surrounding the NFL's decision to play on, especially in Dallas. Much like the 9/11 attacks nearly 40 years later, we turned to sports to begin the national healing process.

Let's consider the Daily News for a moment. Back then, newspapers cost a nickel, not $1 or better like most do today (the Daily News carries a $1.25 cover price, $1.75 on Sundays), and that nickel brought a lot of news and other features. The late sports columnist, Dick Young, had his piece in the back of the sports section. The New York Racing Association's season had already ended, and there wouldn't be year-round racing for several more years. And, then, there are the comic strips. Old friends like Dick Tracy, Dondi, Moon Mullins, Terry & The Pirates, Winnie Winkle, Brenda Starr, Louie (a British strip imported to the US, as I discovered via Wikipedia), Gasoline Alley, L'il Abner, & Joe Palooka. Of these, only Gasoline Alley is still being run in the Daily News. By the time I began reading the Daily News, Joe Palooka had been dropped, and my first memory of that strip came from the Troy Times Record, not the Daily News. Dick Tracy is still around, but not in New York. Go figure.

Closer to home, The Record elicited a guest piece from veteran radio broadcaster Joe Condon, who was with WTRY at the time, and more recently was doing weekends for WYJB (formerly WROW-FM). They didn't feel it necessary to go all out to mark the occasion, and their limited resources probably wouldn't allow it, anyway, although I wouldn't have minded them doing a reprint volume, too.

Today, the conspiracy theories linger on. There are those who believe Lee Harvey Oswald, who was himself killed by Jack Ruby two days after the assassination, didn't act alone. The fact that Ruby got involved pushes those conspiracy theories forward, one would imagine, since I for one never quite understood what motivated Ruby to act in the first place. In the intervening years, tabloid media has obsessed over not Kennedy's political policies, but his supposed affairs while in office. Given how supermarket tabloids today all resort to fictional headlines in a vain attempt to remain relevant in the face of cyber & social media, this is a headache that should've gone away long ago.

The point I'm making is this. Next year marks 45 years since the Mets' 1st World Series title. Would the Daily News do another reprint, or wait until that momentous event also reaches 50 years (2019)? Or neither? If you're going to go the extra mile for a news event that resonates nationwide like this, why not a sports story of equal resonance? I'd say it's up to readers and how they react to this reprint. We'll wait & see.

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