A Brief Note

The death of Sentor Kennedy, today, took me back to 1968, a sad a scary time. I'd been on my first job in television for only a few weeks when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The whole place went into emergency mode and 24 hour coverage. That meant that all of the commercials had to be rescheduled. They pulled three of us off of our regular jobs to spend the day on the teletype machines typing messages to sponsers. Teletypes were sort of like early computers. They worked through a separate phone line. Some were hooked up to ticker tape machines. Text was sent over the phone lines or wires and printed out on tape on the other end. After the message was received, they cut up the tape and turned it into confetti. That stuff you see in old news footage being thrown from windows onto passing parades.