Gayle King, television news anchor, age 8 on Nov. 22, 1963
I was living in Ankara, Turkey. And back then, people didn’t have TV in Ankara, Turkey. My memory is gathering around the radio from the States—I think it might even have been a ham radio; it didn’t look like a regular radio, it was a big, clunky thing. We had it so my dad could get stuff from the States. He was an electronic engineer who worked for the government, so he had all sorts of equipment in the house.
So we were gathered around the radio and it was the first time I had ever seen my father cry, and that was so jarring and traumatic to me. I said, “Why are you crying?” And he said, “The president of the United States has been shot—John F. Kennedy.”
