As it happened on 22nd November 1963...
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The Day the World Stopped Turning
‘As the World Turns’ Interrupted by Kennedy’s Shooting
By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
NOVEMBER 22, 2013
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.
“I had a very emotional scene,” the actress, now 80, recalled. “When we finished, my cameraman, Joe Hallahan, had tears running down his face. I said, ‘I’m good, but I didn’t know I was that good.’ ”
When the show wrapped shortly before 2 p.m., “the studio went absolutely dark, which must have been some security thing,” Mr. Hastings said. “The monitors went out, and we had no communication with CBS except through a guard on the floor who had a radio.”
The soap’s scheduled episode was canceled on Monday, Nov. 25, amid CBS’s continuing news coverage. One line of that episode’s unused script holds special poignancy: “A dream can be aborted before it’s even born.”
Edward Trach, the supervising producer of the soap opera for the sponsor, Procter & Gamble, said, “When we were able to get back on the air, we tried to do so in a coherent and dramatically effective manner.”
But on that Monday afternoon, when the cast assembled to read through and time Tuesday’s segment, it was hard to focus. Mr. Hastings ducked repeatedly into the control room to watch the funeral cortege. “They kept coming to get me, because I was just destroyed at that point,” he said.
Rosemary Prinz, who played his sister, Penny, hoped for some on-air reference to the killing. But Irna Phillips, the show’s all-powerful creator, wanted no outside intrusion on the make-believe of Oakdale. “She was the meanest bitch on the planet, and you can quote me,” Ms. Prinz, now 82, said.
Ms. Prinz, who still wells up when recalling the assassination, eventually saw her chance during a scene with Mr. Ortega.
“I was supposed to go on about Tom and his father,” she recalled, “and I said instead: ‘Oh, Grandpa, here we are talking about little Tom. My God, after what the country has gone through, it seems so out of proportion. But, of course, we have to go on.’ Santos had very, very round eyes, which he always opened wide as Grandpa anyway, and he opened them even wider.”
An infuriated production team promptly descended on Ms. Prinz. She was unfazed.
“I said, ‘I just went blank and said the first think I could think of, and then I got back to the script.’ Everyone knew I was full of it. But I made the point.”
