The Robert Hughes film probably shows Oswald and would have shown the rifle, but as you see, Kennedy rounded the corners first. Hughes then swung the camera back down to film the rest of the motorcade.
Speaking of telephones, back in ‘81, when I was in college, my mother called and said, “Tibby, jot down this number, it’s good for making free long-distance calls to anywhere in the world, but only today!”
Tibby: “What! Are you sure? Who’s footing the bill for all this?”
Mom: “Burt Reynolds!”
Mom went on to explain that a friend of a friend saw Burt Reynolds on the Johnny Carson show, and he explained that he won a lawsuit against Bell Telephone. As payment, he arranged for the company to give everyone in the country free long-distance calls for one day, using his personal credit card number.
Sounded legit to me, so my roommates and I made a lot of long-distance calls, and we never got billed for them.
It was, of course, a hoax.
I had…a Betamax (which I’ve heard was far superior to VCR). Also a buttload of NatGeo magazines and a full set of paper Hardy Boys books with the blue covers.
Back in the eighties when his wife was about ready to give birth, one of my cow-orkers rented a pager for a few weeks. He called it the Baby Beeper and wisely covered the phone number engraved on the case with a piece of tape – there were too man sharp-eyed funsters in the workplace.
How, exactly, do you ork a cow? 
^ Illegal in 27 states. 
When I was young my father had his office in a spare bedroom of our house. The company was too cheap to pay for a second line so there was only the one, with the phone in that bedroom. The number on his business cards went to an answering service who would then ring the house. If he wasn’t there they would let it ring three times, disconnect, and take a message. We in the house would wait until the fourth ring before picking it up and our friends knew to let it ring a little longer than usual.
One Thanksgiving we had the family of one of his long-ago college buddies over for dinner. Said buddy had gotten a job with Bell Telephone shortly after graduating and had risen through the ranks until he was pretty far up in management. As we were eating, the phone rang.
We paid no attention, continuing to jabber away and eating. “…Aren’t you going to answer that?”
“Dunno.”
~ring~
“You’ve got to answer that!”
“No, I don’t.”
~ring~ … silence … “Nope, I’m not answering,” then Dad explained the system.
That really chapped the buddy’s hide and he went on a rant about how that was costing them money. “I’m not interrupting my Thanksgiving dinner for some cockamamie business call that can wait until tomorrow or Monday – end of story!”
It’s no legend.
Squiggle contest!
I never knew he was the only one allowed to legally draw the characters. I know that Felix Chevrolet is the only one legally allowed commercial use of Felix the Cat.
A friend of mine had a Betamax. Crowed about the picture quality. Finally had to begrudgingly get VHS tapes.
Then he amassed quite a collection of LaserDiscs before giving up and switching to DVDs. And then refused to get a Blu-Ray player, insisting that HD-DVD would be the way to go (I’ve only seen those in pawn shops, in red cases).
So next time there’s a techno-choice (hmmm, a “Sub-Q” subcutaneous music player, or the new i-Brain, which beams audio and video directly to your superior temporal gyrus?)…
… I’m going to ask him which way he’s betting.
We skipped the simple experiments and went straight to explosives. Ordered the CASECO catalog, full of every chemical you’d need, and casings and fuses.
Here’s the cover… looks innocent, no?
But inside were ‘formulas’ for so many different flash bombs and Cherry Bombs. I made hundreds of M-80s for my school friends… and their friends’ friends… passed them out at 6th grade lunch hour, and never got caught!
Pretty comprehensive list of dangerous chemicals (at least, when we combined that aluminum powder with potassium perchlorate and sulfur…). I only found the bulk prices, but you could get small quart-sized canisters.
Now there’s something the Zoomers wouldn’t understand: answering services. Yes, Virginia, once upon a time people were paid to answer phones and take messages for other people. Frankly I had thought they were extinct, until I called the opposing counsel on one of our cases and had thought I gotten his office assistant…uh, no. Answering service.
Wrong! Many doctor’s offices (such as my workplace) still use answering services. Our service is local, too.
~Max
There are still answering services, although they are limited. For example my horse vet has an answering service pick up when the office (which is only open a half day five days a week) is closed-- day or night. Large Animal vets work out of their trucks at the farms, generally, and they don’t answer their phones. The answering service will take a message and get it to the vet, who’ll decide where in the queue of visits you are going to be put.
Yeah. Lawyers too, as stated above.
I believe our plumbers use an answering service after-hours, too.
~Max
How about word processors? Not the computer application, the real live person who typed college term papers and theses on an electric typewriter? You ever try to get footnotes to line up on the right page before computers? I think they made like three cents a word, but it was worth it for an important paper.
I suppose kids these days don’t even know what a typewriter is. 
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that i.d.e.a., the children’s art museum here had an exhibit just before the Covid shut down, Art of the Story that had for activities things like a puppet theater for sparking story telling. One of these was a Remington Quiet-Riter on a pedestal with a sheaf of papers in a basket so they could roll in a page and type on it. The hard part was finding ribbons.
Kids would look at it in awe never having seen a manual typewriter before. The “keyboard” was at a steeper angle than they were used to and attached to these mechanical levers instead of just being switches. They would look at it and tentatively poke a key, watching the type bar rise out of the basket.
“No, you gotta whack it like this–” and I would type out a line. I’ll have to admit after just a line or two my fingers were tired.
Well, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog only so many times before he gets tired. 
That’s called animal husbandry.
a slide rule, may they all burn in hell.