A study in catastrophe

Sixty years ago, the usual Friday afternoon television programming was interrupted to announce there had been an assassination attempt on President John F. Kennedy. Local stations scrambled to get the feed on air, then went still as the story grew graver. And inside Richmond’s CBS affiliate, WTVR, two Spiders were among the staff.

Leonard Sandridge, B’64, and Larry Boppe, B’64, worked in the control room and as a camera operator respectively, student employees learning from seasoned professionals during one of the most shocking news stories to be televised in American history. They would witness firsthand the impact of the Kennedy assassination on a local news station and walk away with the skill set to work under pressure at a level few can comprehend.

THE SCENE

The year was 1963. President Kennedy had taken over the oval office nearly three years prior, though the election had been frightfully close. The reported national popular vote had leaned in his favor by a scant 0.17 percent. To put that in perspective, consider this: Of the 10 closest U.S. presidential races to date, 2016’s Trump vs. Clinton ranks No. 10. Kennedy vs. Nixon comes in first.

“The country was pretty divided back then,” Boppe said. “Some still believe that election could have possibly been stolen.” Eric Yellin, a history professor with a concentration in 20th century American politics, agreed: “The 1960 election was incredibly close. It was a time not unlike our own where half the country was against this guy, and Nixon will still say he won.”

And like any good historian, Yellin underlined why this informed how the Kennedy assassination impacted the nation. “Kennedy and Nixon were surprisingly similar on some issues. [The race] came down to foreign policy. It was about the Cold War and how the United States would meet what Americans view as the threat of the Soviet Union.”

This laser focus on the nation’s reputation as a world leader made Kennedy’s assassination not just a shock, but a reason to fear for the country’s safety. “That’s the first thought: What does this mean for the foe who is all the way in the Soviet Union, sure, but also right next door in Cuba?” said Yellin. “If the president has been gunned down, what happens next?”

There was no internet or social media, but television was becoming integral to Americans’ lives. So while news couldn’t spread as rapidly as it does today, televised broadcasts updated the nation at an unprecedented pace. “Americans know really fast,” Yellin said. “Schools are dismissed. Kids are sent home. There’s mourning, but there’s also fear. Who was it? And what does this mean for our standing in the world?”

The Kennedy administration hustled not only to swear in Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson as the new president, but to publish photographs and announce that the United States still had a strong leader.

Back at the station, Richmond seniors Sandridge and Boppe had all of the same fears and worries as other Americans. Are we under attack? Will our families be OK? But with those concerns, they carried something else — a job that had turned from routine to unprecedented overnight.

THE PLAYERS

“I would love to tell you it was my lifelong ambition to be involved in television,” Sandridge said. “That would not be true.”

Sandridge and Boppe drove school buses to work their way through college, but an 8 a.m. class meant they weren’t available for the shift their senior year. “A faculty member referred me to placement services, and in that process, I learned that WTVR was looking for a student employee.” At a pay rate of $2.25 an hour, Leonard Sandridge took up a post in the control room. It was his era’s version of an internship, allowing him to learn hands-on beyond the classroom. And while neither he nor Boppe continued into careers in broadcast television — Sandridge is now a retired executive vice president and chief operating officer at the University of Virginia, and Boppe is the former president and CEO of plastic container manufacturer Toter Inc. — the lessons stuck.

“I learned so much about operating under pressure,” said Sandridge. Before automation transitioned the station between feeds — for example, from local newscast to national programming — Sandridge would load 16-millimeter film reels he’d sequenced and spliced together. At that time, television stations also went dark overnight, playing the national anthem before signing off each evening. Sandridge would keep the station on air from 4:30 p.m. until sign-off on Saturday, then return bright and early on Sunday to bring the station back on air at 7 a.m. with the test pattern announcing “WTVR Richmond Virginia” to viewers. “I had no experience. I was scared to death. But since then, I’ve spent most of my life learning by doing and assuming responsibility for it.”

On the day Kennedy was assassinated, Sandridge wasn’t the only one feeling as though he lacked experience. “All of a sudden, everyone at the station was in the same sort of position. They’re going through something for the first time. WTVR had never dealt with anything like this.” 

Sandridge and Boppe watched as Walter Cronkite cut across their afternoon programming, the crew witnessing the live CBS coverage only seconds before the breaking news reached people’s home television sets. Every monitor in the control room had Cronkite on it, announcing that President Kennedy had been shot.

“I think it’s fair to say the industry did not have the ability to quickly respond like they would today,” Sandridge said. “There wasn’t the infrastructure or the technology.” Where today a field crew would capture live footage of ongoing events, CBS could only show Cronkite in the newsroom, video of the event hall Kennedy had been en route to, and photographs Cronkite held up to the studio camera. It was the nation’s first look at these now iconic images of a smiling Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy in the motorcade just prior to the assassination.

On the day Kennedy was assassinated, Sandridge wasn’t the only one feeling as though he lacked experience. “All of a sudden, everyone at the station was in the same sort of position. They’re going through something for the first time. WTVR had never dealt with anything like this.” 

Sandridge and Boppe watched as Walter Cronkite cut across their afternoon programming, the crew witnessing the live CBS coverage only seconds before the breaking news reached people’s home television sets. Every monitor in the control room had Cronkite on it, announcing that President Kennedy had been shot.

“I think it’s fair to say the industry did not have the ability to quickly respond like they would today,” Sandridge said. “There wasn’t the infrastructure or the technology.” Where today a field crew would capture live footage of ongoing events, CBS could only show Cronkite in the newsroom, video of the event hall Kennedy had been en route to, and photographs Cronkite held up to the studio camera. It was the nation’s first look at these now iconic images of a smiling Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy in the motorcade just prior to the assassination.

“You could argue we were a much smaller, tighter country at the time of the Kennedy assassination,” said Steven Herman, adjunct lecturer of journalism and chief national correspondent of Voice of America. “With 9/11, we had live coverage of it. It was basically broadcast live. That was not the case with the Kennedy assassination. Bulletins came over the radio, and then Walter Cronkite breaking in and removing his glasses, very emotionally announcing that the President was dead.”

The bulletins Herman mentioned arrived in newsrooms as they always did in those days, announced by the mechanical clatter of the teletype machine as it punched out messages letter by letter. These slips of paper were given to Cronkite, one eventually leading to the announcement: “From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.”

Inside WTVR, Sandridge, Boppe, and the rest of the television crew were in shock. “It was a mirror image of what the country was going through,” Sandridge said. Fear. Confusion. And a powerlessness to do anything but maintain the national feed from CBS so the nation heard every word.

“I remember coming into the studio that afternoon, and it was really different,” said Boppe. “I felt like people were sober. It was grim. One of my most vivid memories was the control room with its wall of monitors full of live pictures from wherever there were network cameras being televised. And I thought, ‘I can’t believe that I’m standing here able to see what’s going on behind the scenes of all this.’ That made a really big impression on me.”

“There was certainly an intensity to everything,” Sandridge said. “You didn’t know exactly when you would be going to the network [for breaking news].” Sandridge was working on the day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. The teletype printed the report — THE ACCUSED ASSASSIN OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY WAS SHOT A FEW HOURS AGO WHILE BEING TRANSFERRED FROM DALLAS CITY JAIL TO THE COUNTY JAIL — and Sandridge switched the feed to the live coverage about to cut in.

“I don’t think there is really anything a reporter can do to prepare themselves for such an event,” Herman said. “It’s moment by moment by moment. And it doesn’t necessarily sink in, even though you may be reporting live on air what has happened to your community, or to a nation, or to the world. It’s only later that you have an opportunity to decompress.”

And truth be told, the only subject I could ad lib live was sports at the University of Richmond.

BACKSTAGE

Decompression, however, would be a slow process when it came to the Kennedy assassination. The president’s sudden death shocked everyone, a trauma that would embed itself in American society for years to come. President Kennedy’s was the first televised presidency, and viewers were used to seeing a formidable and passionate leader on their screens. Witnessing his death and the reactions that followed obliterated that pristine image.

But that image had less authenticity than people realized. “We know now that Kennedy was terribly ill and in pain all the time,” Yellin said. “But he gets pictured as vibrant and strong.” As an increasing number of households obtained television sets, the Kennedy administration learned how to portray the White House not just in words and photographs, but in footage.

Not unlike today’s carefully curated social media feeds, the stories that arrived in newsrooms like WTVR were similarly crafted. “There’s something remarkably plastic about it,” Yellin said. “[Kennedy’s image] was designed to be attractive and in some ways impenetrable. And one of the reasons Kennedy squeaked out ahead of Nixon was that he absolutely understands [the importance of] image and image-making.”

Those images arrived at WTVR ready to air, with the station’s contribution limited to the Richmond community’s reactions to the shooting. “There wasn’t the ability to quickly respond and get people on the scene like they would today,” Sandridge said. “We learned these things the only way we could: a bulletin comes in on the teletype, and you get a piece of paper, and that’s what the station knew.”

“I remember thinking that if the assassination took place out on Broad Street, we would not have been able to cover it,” Boppe said. “We didn’t have remote capabilities at the time [that would have allowed the station to go live on the scene].”

 As the norm of the time, Americans took these limitations in stride. “This was a period when the state, government, and Walter Cronkite were the authorities for the vast majority of Americans,” Yellin said. “And you believed them. When Johnson said, ‘We’ve got this, I’ve been sworn in, I’m president,’ most Americans went, ‘OK, good. Done.’” Even on a local level, anyone appearing on television was placed on this pedestal. “These people were celebrities,” Boppe said. “Newsmen, reporters, weathermen, they were celebrities to us.” But that was a belief that would fracture during the subsequent presidencies. “It really takes the revelations of the lies of Vietnam and the lies of Watergate to really shake that and produce the kind of moment we have today where we don’t necessarily know who to believe,” Yellin said.

According to a 2023 Associated Press poll, “Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults say the news media is increasing political polarization in this country, and just under half say they have little to no trust in the media’s ability to report the news fairly and accurately.” The plasticity of public appearance that began with the first televised presidency, combined with the exposure of events like Watergate, created an increasing level of distrust in authority that Yellin categorizes as conspiratorial thinking.

“For example, when the polio vaccine came out. The majority of parents lined up their kids to take the experimental shot. Why? Because the government said to. Because the government said this will help. And millions of parents just handed their kids over,” Yellin said. “Today? We had the CDC tell us 10 times over that the FDA had looked at every inch of these COVID-19 vaccines and saying we should take them.” At the end of 2021, barely 63% of the population was fully vaccinated.

And yet, despite the uptick in conspiratorial thinking, there are moments that still have the power to unite the American people, even if only for a short while. Sept. 11, 2001, was one such example, the event bringing the nation to a standstill before television sets. Boppe recalled the hours and days following Kennedy’s assassination as “not being about politics at all. When I came into the studio [that day], everyone was somber. I had not been a Kennedy supporter, but it was really sad, and I felt the country come together for those few days.”

SUPPORTING CAST

In May of 2023, Boppe and Sandridge returned to WTVR in an interview that touched on the most memorable moments of their experience. And although they worked through a dark time in American history, they also had plenty to look back on fondly. 

“It’s like that station’s a part of your family,” Boppe said, chuckling as he reflected on a day when the station had several minutes of time to fill. Dal Burnette, a member of WTVR’s production staff and the first major children’s programming host, turned to Boppe and said, “Larry, grab a puppet.”

“I was scared to death,” Boppe said. “And truth be told, the only subject I could ad lib live was sports at the University of Richmond. So we had the puppet Al the Alligator talking about the next game the Richmond Spiders were going to play. Anyone watching must have thought we were crazy. Afterward, I went over to Leonard, and he just shook his head like, ‘You both really got some guts.’

“I expect it’s still the sort of place that creates a lot of excitement,” Boppe said. “Being there boosted my confidence coming out of college. It was educational. It was impressive. It was one of the best experiences during my four years of college.”

Sandridge took a step further back in his recollection: “It was a unique opportunity, and one you probably couldn’t have planned. I was a school bus driver in Albemarle County while I was in high school, and I ended up at the University of Richmond not because I knew anything about it, but because the supervisor of bus operations was an alumnus of the University of Richmond. He took me to Richmond for a visit, arranged for me to apply for financial aid, and later introduced me to those responsible for bus operations in Henrico County.” This led to Sandridge’s job driving school buses to work his way through college — a job he helped Boppe to get as well — and ultimately to placement services when their 8 a.m. class prevented them from continuing in those roles. “[We] would never have gotten to WTVR if it had not been for that.”

This trail of small moments built the foundation for Sandridge’s and Boppe’s Richmond educations and their careers to follow. And had it not been for an alum bringing new Spiders into the fold, this story would never have been told. Perhaps Boppe put it best: “I’m very, very indebted for the experience.”