I certainly remember where I was. I was a radio student at my local community college (which had a radio station) and it was the first day of the quarter. We were starting a class on news reporting. As a visual aid, I turned on the station’s teletype to bring some news copy into the classroom. (Yes, I have played with a real, actual “clack-clack” teletype, hooked to the AP.) to get a couple feet of teletype stories to bring into the class.
Well, as I turned it on, the t-type’s alarm bell started ringing, a little ‘ding-ding’ like you’d hear with one of those desk bells you’d tap on to get a clerk’s attention.
(As a side note, the AP had the follwing alarm-bell code: 3 bells= ‘Urgent’, 5 bells= ‘Bulletin’, 10 bells= ‘FLASH’ or ‘EBS Test or Activation’)
As I started reading, it came to me just what was going on. I ran into the classroom and yelled to everyone “Hey! The president’s been shot!”. Massive exodus to the teletype closet. Only a couple people could even fit into the space that the t-type was in, so they kept ripping off copy and passing it back to us. Class started a bit late and the teacher brought in a radio as we listened to the coverage as he commented...not on the political situation, but on how the correspondants were covering this massively huge news story. It was surreal.
According to Michael Reagan, the president woke up
and found himself surrounded by figures in white,
whom he took to be hospital staff—except, that the hospital staff in that section wore green, not white.