Remembering the Kennedy Assassination...

Conservation Tour of Western States,
Duluth MN 9-24-63: JFKlibrary.org

By Jim Heffernan (as printed in the Duluth NewsTribune on November 24, 2025)

Last Saturday (Nov. 22) the News Tribune published an excellent retrospective on how some Upper Midwest newspapers covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on that date in 1963.

 

Emanating from Fargo, N.D., where Forum Communications is headquartered, the compendium of that newspaper company’s papers’ coverage showed how the tragedy was reported on the day the assassination occurred in Dallas, Texas. Since Forum firm did not own the Duluth newspaper at the time, the story largely featured its publications of that day. Forum now owns this paper.

 

Thus, how the Duluth newspapers covered the assassination was largely missing from the story. Here are some memories of how the assassination was covered by the Duluth Herald (evening) and Duluth News Tribune (morning), owned at the time by Ridder Publications.

 

I was a newly hired reporter on that momentous date, having worked in the newsroom on the night shift (3 p.m. to 11 p.m.) for about a month. I was at home when the news broke about 12:30 p.m., with CBS’s Walter Cronkite in shirtsleeves somberly narrating unfolding events, culminating a short time later with confirmation that the president was dead.

 

My first instinct was to call the paper, although I thought better of it when I realized they’d be the first to know through their wire services.

 

The Duluth Herald was the evening paper at the time, staffed by the “dayside” crew. Its first deadline was about 11 a.m. and the presses started rolling a short time after that. Thousands of copies had already been published when word of the assassination came through. It was the only time that I can recall that breaking news stopped the presses that abruptly.

 

The Herald newsroom staff — a copy desk responsible for putting the paper together and perhaps a dozen reporters and editors — immediately went about starting over with the Herald with news of the assassination. I didn’t report for work until after the Herald coverage was done and the presses were rolling again with the bold headlines above accounts of the assassination together with “wire photos” of the shooting.

 

When I arrived, work was beginning on the morning paper, the News Tribune, with follow-up coverage of the tragic event, including local accounts of the recent visit to Duluth by Kennedy. He had been here in September to address a “Land and People’s Conference” at UMD. He arrived the evening before — a very rainy evening — and was driven to Hotel Duluth (now Greysolon Plaza) from Duluth International Airport in the dark blue Lincoln limousine that he was murdered in two months later. The car arrived here before the president and was stored in the St. Louis County garage at Fourth Avenue West and Second Street in advance of the president’s arrival.

 

Much of the frantic local coverage of the breaking national event focused for the next morning’s paper on recalling the president’s recent visit. Wire services provided the copy for the unfolding events in Dallas — including the swearing in of Vice President Lyndon Johnson — and Washington.

 

It was the most momentous news event I ever experienced in more than 40 years of employment at this newspaper. My assignment that day was to telephone as many area mayors as I could reach to get their reactions to the assassination. I reached perhaps half a dozen and managed to get a story into the historic paper the next morning.

 

Late in the afternoon, chatting with the copy desk editor — called the slot man — who had been responsible for making over the Herald, I mentioned that I had watched initial coverage of the assassination on television, starting about 12:30 p.m. I mentioned that I’d considered calling the paper but thought they’d have already received the urgent news.

 

“I wish you’d called,” the news editor said. The news wires didn’t alert editors until perhaps 15 minutes later, an eternity at such a time. 

 

As with the rest of the country, Duluth went into collective mourning with everything public canceled, including that evening’s Christmas City of the North Parade.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.

How I missed reciting vows throughout my entire life...

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewTribune/11-01-25

It seems like you see a lot of public officials being sworn in to various high-level offices on TV these days. Most of it occurs in Washington, D.C.: Presidents, congresspeople, cabinet members, court witnesses, others swearing to do this and that to uphold the Constitution or seek justice.

 

It always gives me pause when I view a swearing in or other vows being recited because I missed out on much of that in life. All of those important moments with the one hand raised, the other on a Bible (sometimes), or reciting traditional vows standing before a clergyman at a wedding to sanctify a marriage.

 

Let me explain, largely in chronological order. I don’t recall if I was sworn into the Boy Scouts, pledging on my honor to do my best to do my duty to God and my country and so on and so forth. I might have made it to that one, but nothing since.

 

When I reached military draft age, after passing the Army physical with flying colors in spite of being stone deaf in one ear but not having bone spurs, I scurried down to the old Duluth National Guard Armory, where Bob Dylan once attended a concert, and joined the Minnesota Army National Guard in order to avoid being drafted and having to serve two years of active duty.

 

After they signed me and several other draft-dodgers up, they apparently assembled them all for the big swearing in. I don’t know where I was but when it came time to raise right hands (no Bibles though) to solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and so on and so forth, I must have been in the can (a.k.a. latrine in Army parlance) or somewhere else in the Armory.

 

So I missed being sworn in to military service but they took me anyway. About the time my service obligation ended, some six years later, I got married. The wedding vows are the most important a person can take, but I missed them too. At my wedding!

 

What? How could that be? Let me start at the beginning. I was raised in the then Swedish branch of the Lutheran Church (there were several ethnically oriented Lutheran branches in those days, even Norwegian and German, right here in Duluth). But by the time I came along, services were in English, thank heaven. (Where else?)

 

As a child I had witnessed the wedding vows being taken more than most kids did because my mother was the organist of our church and sometimes I had to attend weddings with her.

 

I heard them often.  Preacher: “Do you (groom’s name) take (bride’s name) as your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death you do part?”

 

Groom: “I do…yup I do, by yumpin by yimminy I do.” (As I said, this was the Swedish branch of the Lutheran church.)

 

However, I wasn’t married in the Swedish Lutheran church. The wedding was in a Greek Orthodox Church, the faith of my bride.

 

This all took place more than 50 years ago, when the Greek service contained mostly the Greek language, which was Greek to me. But in rehearsal, we asked the priest if he would include the traditional wedding vows in English, and he agreed.

 

So we had the lengthy service, which shortly before had been described in news coverage of the wedding of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, but no promised English vows. When it was over we asked the priest what happened to the traditional vows. “I forgot,” he said reverently.

 

But we nevertheless felt very married, and still are these nearly 57 years later with two kids and six grandkids to show for it,

 

Of course, I’m at an age now where the traditional rites “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” loom pretty large. I wouldn’t mind missing them, too.

 

Come to think of it, I will.  

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.