1966

One piece of news this month. Coupled with all the attention paid to the movie "JFK," it brought back poignant memories. Terry Ruggles and I were in our basement dorm room in Gile Hall at about 2:00 p.m. on November 22,1963, when WDCR interrupted its afternoon music show with a bulletin from Dallas. Something terrible had happened. We both headed for Robinson Hall—Terry to the radio station, where he was a D.J. and news reporter, and I to The Dartmouth offices. There was a small crowd already gathered around the AP news ticker.

Terry helped WDCR cover the tragic news on the air all day, and I was enlisted to be part of a group that set to work on an extra edition of The D. I was dispatched to the Valley News office in Lebanon, where they had UPI and Reuters news tickers. (It was one of only two "extras" in our few years at Dartmouth. The other was when Bob Blackman turned down a big-time coaching offer and decided to stay, for a while).

At midnight, with our single-page, two- sided extra finally printed, I carried copies of it into Spaulding Auditorium, where hundreds of students were gathered watching live TV coverage of the event on large screens. As soon as it was discovered I had printed news, the first anyone had seen all day, I was mobbed. We all stood in stunned silence at the stark headline that seemed to verify the awful events of a day we all had hoped had been a bad dream, "Kennedy Assassinated."

Terry is, happily, alive and well in his lovely and beloved hometown of Greenfield, Mass. He and Vanna have two sons. After years in printing sales, Terry has recently joined Magnani & McCormick based in Enfield, Conn., as sales representative in Western Massachusetts and Southern Vermont and New Hampshire.

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