Photographs From CBS
Clockwise from top left, Helen Wagner and Santos Ortega in the episode of “As the World Turns” that was interrupted by a CBS News Bulletin, as Walter Cronkite began reporting on Kennedy’s assassination. Cronkite’s updates were followed by commercials, like one for Nescafé.
As usual, on that Friday afternoon, Mable Snodgrass, a 19-year-old first-time mother, was at home in Echols, Ky., watching “As the World Turns.” Ten minutes in, at about 12:40 p.m., the soapy drama was bubbling. Nancy Hughes, played by Helen Wagner, had just told Grandpa (Santos Ortega) that her son, Bob, had invited his ex-wife, the scheming Lisa, and their young son, Tom, to Thanksgiving dinner.
After his initial shock, Grandpa ventured, “That was real nice of the boy.”
“And I’ve thought about it,” Nancy said, “and I gave it a great deal of thought, Grandpa ——”
At that instant, Nancy and Grandpa were wiped off the screen, replaced by the words “CBS News Bulletin” slide and the urgent voice of Walter Cronkite.
“I was fixing to get angry because they were screwing up my show,” Ms. Snodgrass recalled. “And then I found out it was about the president.”
Americans of a certain age remember where they were when they learned of the shooting of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. But no group was united in quite the same way just then as those who were tuned to “As the World Turns.”
Fifty years ago, “A.T.W.T.,” as it came to be known, was not merely television’s most popular daytime drama. 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. 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.
Today, the live telecast of “As the World Turns” No. 1,995 (there was no title) remains frozen in time as a last semblance of normalcy before the face of television changed permanently. The very ordinariness of Wagner’s scene — “my dubious claim to fame,” the actress once called it — underscores the day’s nightmarish events.
“Look at that conversation between Nancy and Grandpa,” said Lynn Liccardo, the author of the e-book “as the world stopped turning …” “They’re dusting books. And then he gets a cup of coffee.”
Was that conversation between Nancy and Grandpa important? No, said Sam Ford, a great-nephew of Ms. Snodgrass’s and co-editor of “The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era.” “There’s rarely one scene in a soap opera that’s ever pivotal, because there is so much redundancy built in.”
An uninterrupted version of the episode is preserved at the Paley Center for Media, in New York and Los Angeles. In it, Nancy boldly predicts that Bob and Lisa will reunite.
But it is the fragmented version, available on YouTube, that has gone down in TV history. 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 those first few frantic minutes, CBS programmers were scrambling. So were those on the soap opera set at the Hy Brown studios on West 26th Street in Manhattan.
Don Hastings, who played Bob Hughes, knew something was amiss as he prepared for a restaurant scene with Henderson Forsythe after the Nancy-Grandpa exchange.
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. We got our cue and we just kept going, because no one else knew what to do.” Mr. Hastings was unaware that the news was already blacking out the first half of his scene.
The show’s last act, with Eileen Fulton as Lisa Hughes tensely phoning her mother, Alma (Ethel Remey), about a deposit on an apartment, as well as her and Bob’s mutually lingering love, was pre-empted entirely. By then, the crew had heard about Dallas. Ms. Fulton hadn’t.
‘As the World Turns’ Interrupted by Kennedy’s Shooting
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