Still in Iowa City, still getting a scary amount of work done. Which is good, as I have a scary amount of work to do.

Because of the novel in progress, I've been doing a lot of research about the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Specifically, sad as this sounds, I've been researching television schedules, to check my memory that I learned about King's death from a bulletin right before the 8:30 pm. broadcast of "Bewitched."

Now, here's Keith Olbermann, from a transcript, in which he was discussing Obama's speech on race: "And one night, I was nine years old, my parents were out to dinner, [my grandfather] was baby sitting me, television‘s on, and, you know, the middle of Hawaii Five-O or (INAUDIBLE) et cetera, whatever the show was, on comes the news bulletin from Memphis, Martin Luther King assassinated. And my grandfather who was a good man says, why did they interrupt my show to tell me about some “N” word getting shot?"
(Just to be safe, I'll provide the context that Olbermann was connecting his experience to Obama's, whose speech included some discussion of his white grandmother's biases.)

He's right to clarify his memory. My research -- web-based and, therefore, imperfect -- shows that Hawaii Five-O didn't start until the fall of 1968. At any rate, it's not on the '67-68 television schedule that I have, but I can't be definitive until I do some more research.

I found the Olbermann story in Todd Purdum's blog at Vanity Fair, who says he remembers learning of King's assassination from Cronkite. A website devoted to the history of broadcasting says that Cronkite announced King's shooting at the end of his broadcast, which is plausible; King was shot at 6:01 p.m. Central Time. (I assume the given time is local.) He was pronounced dead an hour later, so the shooting could have made the end of Cronkite's newscast (assuming it ended at 7:30 EST, something I've yet to ascertain), but not the news of King's death, which wouldn't have happened yet.

The same website says networks pre-empted programming, but that's not my memory and the 15-minute CBS clip available from the site has the reporter saying that King was shot four hours earlier. So what was pre-empted? And when?

The point of this, I hope, is how tricky memory is, how the vividness of a memory doesn't mean it's accurate. Olbermann threw out the name of a television show and while he qualified that it might be wrong, other blogs didn't necessarily include the qualifier, so this errant "fact" is now roaming the Internet. Purdum, eight at the time, seems right about hearing the news from Cronkite, but I'm still not sure if I watched "Bewitched" that night or not, or if the announcement actually came before "The Flying Nun."

Luckily, I'm writing a novel about a memoir writer who doesn't worry about getting things right.