Fifty years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, the president of the United States was gunned down in Dallas, Texas, the fourth president to be assassinated in our country's history.

Those old enough to recall that day have frozen it in time. As with all cataclysmic events, we tend to remember where we were, even what we were doing when we first heard the news.Two weeks before the assassination, I had changed professions. I left my job as French and English teacher at a Washington, N.J., high school and had begun my duties as program, news, sports director at WVPO, a small daytime-only radio station in Stroudsburg.I recall having gone home over the noon hour it was a Friday afternoon, six days before Thanksgiving. I had cod fish cakes for lunch (back in the days when Catholics observed Friday as a meatless day).I was poring over the bills that were coming due at the end of the month and trying to figure out how to rob Peter to pay Paul. The telephone rang. It was the on-air announcer at the radio station."The president's been shot," he shouted with panic in his voice."It took me a few seconds to process what he had just said. My first reaction was that he was pulling my leg. "I'm not kidding," he insisted, "this is for real."I had interviewed President Kennedy not even two months earlier on Sept. 24, 1963, when he visited Milford, to dedicate the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies.I asked whether the president was alive. He didn't know; the only information the wire services had transmitted was that he had been taken to a hospital in Dallas for treatment."Did you run a bulletin?" I asked. "Yes," the announcer replied, "just a minute ago.""I'll be right there," I said and hung up. "President Kennedy's been shot," I mumbled in a stunned voice to no one in particular.In a flash I was out the door.The seven-minute trip back to the radio station was a blur, because I was trying to block out my emotions and imagining how we might cover this as a news event. I was also concerned that as a rookie, who was on the job for only a couple of weeks, whether I was capable of handling something of this magnitude. The last time a president of the United States had been assassinated was in 1901, when William McKinley was shot in September at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. He died eight days later.When I arrived at the radio station, several of the business office employees had gathered around the United Press International Teletype machine. Some were crying; everyone was concerned about the president's health and what the shooting signified. Several employees told me later that I appeared more ashen and shaken than they had ever seen me.In the early moments, amid all the confusion, there was fear that the shooting may have been tied to a Soviet attack or invasion. This was during the height of the Cold War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war just 13 months earlier was still fresh on many people's minds.There were a number of internal advisories from UPI to news editors indicating that there was total confusion in Dallas and that it was very difficult to get authoritative information.We also learned that Texas Gov. John Connolly, who was in a limousine with the president, also was shot and seriously wounded.I grabbed our general manager, who was mesmerized watching the Teletype clack out sketchy information, and pulled him into a nearby recording studio where we roughed out strategy for handling the crisis.I had never encountered anything even remotely close to the magnitude of this news story. Whatever we decided to do would be by trial-and-error. For the next four hours 75 minutes beyond normal sign-off time we broadcast classical music interspersed with news bulletins and reaction from community leaders.Since we made a judgment call that this was an emergency, we decided to stay on the air until 6 p.m. Being a daytime-only radio station, we had to sign off at sunset, which the Federal Communications Commission said is 4:45 p.m. in November.As the general manager and I were agreeing on our game plan and returning to the Teletype for the latest information, the UPI Teletype clanged 10 rapid-fire bells."My God," I said, "It's a flash."It was the first time in the four years I had been working at the radio station as a part-timer up to two weeks ago that I had heard 10 bells under real conditions. Once a week, UPI tested the Teletype and rang 10 bells on those occasions.UPI designated top, world-changing, unplanned news stories as "Flash," "Bulletin" or "Urgent." "Bulletin" and "Urgent" were characterized by five bells. "Flash," news of the most monumental and extraordinary nature, was accompanied by 10 bells.I feared the worst."President Kennedy dead," read the flash.I ripped the yellow piece of paper from the machine, dashed into the control room, pushed our announcer aside and told our listeners that our president was dead, the victim of an as yet unnamed assassin.At that point, we cleared commercial messages from the station for the remainder of the afternoon and the entire next day. We stopped playing our "quality sound of music light, non-brassy, vocal or instrumental standards and put on somber classical music of the Bach and Mozart variety.I strung a long power cord from our control room board to the Teletype machine so I could report new information instantaneously. In between, I ad-libbed and updated new listeners. Our telephone lines were swamped. Many people were crying; others were panicky, asking whether they should take cover in shelters in case the Soviets bombed us. We told them to stay calm and stay tuned, that we would tell them everything we knew as soon as we learned it.At 3 p.m., a little over an hour after President Kennedy had been pronounced dead, I dismantled the microphone at the Teletype and began giving news updates every 10 minutes.That freed me to make phone calls to ministers and other community leaders so they could share words of comfort with our grieving listeners.We aired public service announcements from churches which had begun scheduling special prayer services to honor the slain president. We also broadcast a number of cancellations of community events scheduled for that evening and for the rest of the weekend.After we had signed off that evening, I was finally able to deal with my own grief. Until then, my concern had been in making sure our listeners were getting the timeliest information possible.Now, for the first time, I had time to reflect on what had happened in Dallas. Now it was time for me to join millions of other grieving Americans in praying for this young president and his family. I recalled the incredible opportunity I had had to interview the president, one-on-one, in Milford the thrill of a lifetime for a 24-year-old aspiring communicator. I remember how warm and cordial he was to me and how forthrightly he answered my questions.It was also on Nov. 22, 1963, that I knew for sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Although until then, I wore three hats program, news and sports director.It was on that day that I knew I wanted to wear only one the hat of a news journalist.(Bruce Frassinelli is a 1957 graduate of Summit Hill High School. He teaches a state and local government class at Lehigh Carbon Community College.)