On any other day, dozens of people dying in a nursing home fire just 60 miles from Akron would be monumental news.
But on Nov. 23, 1963, the horror was only the second-biggest story in the Akron Beacon Journal.
Sixty-three people died in the fire at the Golden Age Rest Home near Fitchville, south of Norwalk. Many were mental patients. The flames spread so quickly that most of the residents were trapped, doomed to burn with the building.
The fire did merit front-page coverage in Akron, but the story probably escaped many readers’ notice at first. Instead, their attention was drawn to the picture of the solemn young widow in the bloodstained suit, standing next to a grim Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath to succeed her husband as president of the United States.
A day after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Americans hungered for news. Regular TV programming was pushed aside in favor of nonstop coverage, which would continue through the funeral two days later.
Viewers watched as family members, friends and dignitaries arrived at the White House, where the president lay in a flag-draped coffin in the East Room. They listened to the reactions of world leaders and average folks. They got their first look at 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, his left eye bruised, complaining that a policeman had hit him.
The Beacon Journal bulged with news of the event. One story described the actions of a dazed and tearless Jackie Kennedy in wrenching detail — kissing her dead husband goodbye in the hospital and slipping her ring onto his finger, sitting beside his bronze casket on the plane ride back to Washington, clutching the hand of her brother-in-law Bobby as they followed the casket from the plane to an ambulance waiting at Andrews Air Force Base.
There was speculation about the direction of the new administration and announcement of plans for Kennedy’s public viewing and funeral. There were descriptions of tears in the White House press office and shock in Congress. There was a gripping recounting of the shooting and aftermath by UPI reporter Merriman Smith, who was riding in a press car in the Dallas motorcade and would win a Pulitzer Prize for his assassination coverage.
And in Akron, there was sadness.
Beacon Journal reporter Dan Warner chronicled the scene in City Hall. He described Mayor Edward Erickson’s secretary bursting into a meeting to deliver the news that the president had been shot, and the mayor later chain-smoking as he paced from office to office, stopping occasionally to sit and sip from a paper cup of cold coffee or bury his head in his hands.
Photos showed anxious shoppers transfixed near a bank of TV sets, people dabbing at tears and readers grabbing newspapers as they arrived on the Beacon Journal’s loading dock. The paper reprinted pictures from a campaign visit Kennedy had made to Akron — ironically, one showing the future president shaking hands with a supporter from the back seat of a convertible.
Even the sports section was dominated by Kennedy’s death. National sports figures expressed their sorrow. Canceled sporting events were enumerated. Stories described Kennedy’s devotion to sports and physical fitness, and a picture showed him throwing out the first pitch to open the 1963 baseball season.
Most of the newspaper’s advertisements would have been produced by the time the Nov. 23 paper was published, but Polsky’s department store managed to publish an ad that covered a third of a page inside the front section. It was a simple box outlined in black, containing a photo of the president and some text.
“We at Polsky’s join all the free world in mourning the untimely passing of the President, who has paid the full price for his devotion to our country,” the ad said. “We all express our sincere sympathy to the members of his family in their tragic loss.”
Canal Fulton resident Betty Doyle, who was living in Akron at the time, found herself unable to talk about the sadness that welled within her as she watched the coverage of the president’s death. So she sat down and wrote her feelings in a letter to the Beacon Journal, which was published Nov. 27.
The text was simple:
“That which is done, cannot be undone.
“Now let our tears bind us closer together as Americans.”
Later, she said, a letter arrived thanking her for her words and telling her they would be kept in a historical file of the events of November 1963.
Her copy of that letter has since been lost, she said recently. But she can still picture the envelope, a simple design with a black border.
At the upper left corner was just a handwritten name:
Jacqueline Kennedy.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com.