When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963

Author Introduction: Bill Mercer

Meet Bill:

BILL MERCER stood vigil at Dallas Police headquarters and confronted Lee Oswald in a bizarre press showing on the midnight after the assassination, and he informed the assassin that police had charged him with the president's murder. Mercer remained a gentleman among the rowdy mob of reporters.

Mercer walked among flowers at the assassination site and reported words of sympathy on wreaths--and on the minds of those who gathered to express spontaneous emotion at JFK's murder. His respectful and articulate reporting was dignified and moving in that atmosphere of crisis and grief.

In a career that spans a half-century, Mercer has been a sports broadcast pioneer, serving as the voice of the Dallas Cowboys, Chicago White Sox, Texas Rangers, University of North Texas Eagles, and the Cotton Bowl. He is also a versatile journalist, professor, and author of a history of the Navy LCI: combat landing craft on which he served in the Pacific during World War II.

Mercer is a member of the Texas Radio Hall of Fame, baseball's Texas All-Pro's Hall of Fame, and the University of North Texas Athletic Hall of Fame, to name a few halls that honor him. He is still professor of radio and television at the University of North Texas.

He and his wife, Ilene Hargis Mercer, live in the North Dallas suburban home where they raised four children. They have five granddaughters.

Mercer is active in amateur theater, and one claim to his fame is his prominent career as announcer of professional wrestling. He joined KRLD in 1953 to broadcast live television wrestling, and that peculiar role went on for decades, earning him a large and enthusiastic following. As quirky as it may sound, Bill Mercer's wrestling broadcasts became the most popular television show in, of all places, Israel. And for a while, Bill and the Von Erich wrestling family were Israel's leading television personalities.

Mercer was a regular on Comment, Dallas' first radio talk show--one of the nation's first to accept listeners' calls and feature prominent guests: from Dr. Edward Teller to Colonel Harlan Sanders.

Author Introduction: Bob Huffaker

Meet Bob:

BOB HUFFAKER broadcast the JFK motorcade, then the sad scene at Parkland Hospital. He broadcast television's first murder on CBS from the police garage when Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald, then interviewed the slain assassin's mother and other principals in the case. He was a Warren Commission witness, and he covered Ruby's murder trial and finally his death. Huffaker's courtroom interview with Ruby won the Texas Association of Broadcasters award, among others, and he was editor of his and his colleagues' broadcasts that won the RTNDA's 1963 national award for on-the-spot reporting.

Huffaker produced an early documentary on Texas Black Muslims that drew national attention. A former Army officer and policeman, he specialized in investigative reporting.

He left broadcasting in 1967, earned the Ph.D. and taught as an English professor until 1980, when, as investigator for the Texas Legislature, he exposed his former department at Southwest Texas State University for falsifying class records. In 2004, that university, now Texas State University, inducted him into its University Star hall of fame for his defense of press freedom when he taught there and headed its student publications committee from 1974 through 1980.

In the 1980s, Huffaker was a Texas Monthly editor, having served as an editor of Studies in the Novel, Studies in American Humor, and The Modern Humanities Research Association Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. His book John Fowles (G.K. Hall & Co, 1980) is still cited as seminal scholarship about the novelist's work. In addition to Texas Monthly, Huffaker's work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, The Dallas Observer, True West, Senior Beacon, and Texas Parks & Wildlife.

Huffaker lives with his wife, Veva Vonler, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where they both write and study nature, history, literature and cinema. Their son Kevin Huffaker is a sculptor and specialist in greenhouse design near San Marcos, Texas, and their son Zachary Vonler, a computer programmer and software designer, is serving in the US Navy.

The Authors

The four authors of this blog and of When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963, L-R, Bob Huffaker, Wes Wise, Bill Mercer and George Phenix.

Proper introductions to follow....

This is an act of shameless self promotion; Or, the birth of a blog

We are four older guys who, when we were fourty years younger, happened to be thrown into the task of reporting the assassination of President Kennedy. Reporting it to our hometown Dallas, to the nation and to the world. It was a tough job. We were so busy that we didn't have time to mourn ourselves until days later.

Back then, news was different. Most people didn't believe it until they read it in the local newspaper. But when the President was murdered, people were hungry for more and more information. Television news came into the living room -- and stayed.

Television was young. Our station was only ten years old. Hell, we were young. I was twenty-four and was probably the newest reporter in Dallas. I'd been hired only six weeks before the assassination. My buddies were more experienced: Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer and Wes Wise were already veteran broadcasters.

While we think of ourselves as media-savvy, this is our first go at a blog.
Take a look at our stuff. Buy the book. You tell us what you think about
whether there was a conspiracy -- and we'll tell you what we think.

-GeorgePhenix