The tragedy devastated our little community on the morning of Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963.

I was in bed. As a 17-year-old high school student, I was sleeping in. Dad was in the Philippines for some sort of weather conference, and Mom had gone to her job at Western Electric.

As soon as she arrived at WECO, a woman told her the president had been shot.

The date of JFK's assassination will always be Nov. 23 for me because we lived on the American missile base at Kwajalein, Marshall Islands, on the other side of the International Dateline. Draw a line from Hawaii to Australia, and Kwaj is near the middle.

Six a.m. Saturday on Kwaj was noon Friday in Utah, about the time the story broke.

Mom called us at home and we turned on the radio (no TV station for thousands of miles). But instead of news bulletins, we heard music.

(For years I wondered how my mother's co-worker could have found out that quickly. Now I know. Last week, Martin Eastburn, an old pal from high school, told me he heard about the assassination on his large multiband radio, which picked up the Voice of America on a broadcast from the States. Somebody at WECO must have listened to a similar radio.)

I rushed to the Special Services Building where our local AFRS radio station and the island's newspaper, the Hourglass, had offices. There I read bulletins that had come over the teletype, one with odd wording to the effect that the president had been "seriously wounded, perhaps seriously."

Among the few of us standing by the teletype were an English teacher from our high school, who at the time also edited the Hourglass, and the deejay, a tall, lanky man named Jim who was a folk singer.

Suddenly the teletype bell rang repeatedly. Several inches of blank paper emerged. Then the keys typed, "THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD."

Jim ripped the bulletins from the machine and went into his glassed-in broadcast booth. A record was playing on the turntable and with a sweep of his arm he knocked the armature from it. He pulled the microphone toward himself and tried to read the terrible news.

But he was gasping and crying and could not get the words out. The teacher gently moved him away, took the teletype paper and began telling the island what had happened.

Later in the day, radio signals from the States were patched into our island transmitter, and we heard events live.

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com