<(wgrz) --="" on="" october="" 8th="" folks="" in="" niagara="" falls,="" ny="" gathered="" at="" the="" hard="" rock="" cafe="" to="" watch="" an="" episode="" of="" the="" nbc="" television="" show="">The Office, parts of which had been filmed in the Cataract City. Unbeknownst to most was that a few generations earlier and long before the Hard Rock was built, there was another occasion where people made plans to gather and celebrate the showcasing of the Falls in the national television spotlight. However, those celebrations were not to occur due to a sudden and tragic quirk of fate. In October 1963, the cast and crew of the CBS drama Route 66 came to Niagara Falls to film three episodes, including one which was shot entirely on location called: "I'm Here To Kill A King". The storyline centered around a plot to assassinate a fictitious Arabian Potentate by gunning him down while he visited the world famous waterfall. Hours before the episode was originally set to air on the night of November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was himself assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Due to continuing news coverage, networks pre-empted their prime time lineup and the Route 66 episode was bumped to the following Friday, November 29th. But faced with an all too real episode of life imitating art, it was decided that airing even a fictional account of a national leader felled by an assassin (wielding a high powered rifle while standing on a grassy knoll, no less) wouldn't be prudent before a still wounded American public. And while some internet sites list the episode as having aired in March 1964 after the series concluded its original run, an article from the March 15, 1964 Niagara Falls Gazette, titled "Falls Filmed Rt. 66 Episode Is Dead" quotes a CBS Television executive as saying it had been "definitely decided not to air the episode" and that it would be "buried" in a storage vault. Niagarans would have to wait 25 years to finally see if for themselves. At Long Last,...
In 1988, the New York State Parks Department - eager to show off its brand new Niagara Falls Visitor's Center - was able to procure an original print that never aired. Paul Colangelo, now retired, was the public relations man for the Parks Department who got his hands on it by writing to Columbia Pictures. "We had no idea if they'd actually give it to us or if they had actual possession of the film." Colangelo now recalls. "The thing came one day in the mail, and they just said this was on permanent loan, ...never to be reproduced for sale, or never to be charged a fee for entrance if we wanted to show it." Shown several times during a single weekend in April 1988, it drew hundreds the the Visitor's Center Theater, all of them eager to see the long lost episode themselves. "We filled it, and they lined up out the door for each showing," Colangelo recalled. Colangelo also remembered that while it may have been
25 years after the fact, many left the theater chilled by the haunting irony of what they'd waited so long to see. Uncanny Similarities,...
"The silence was deafening. People watched and were just shocked by some of the irony in this thing. If you follow this thing through you'll find five or six weird ironies that could be translated to the JFK assassination, " he said. They include parts of the dialogue from the show, particularly when the King's bodyguard, conspiring against his leader, advises the hired assassin: " ...he wears body armor, at my insistence ...but a high velocity bullet," -- only to be cut off mid-sentence by the assassin who assures him he's got that covered, because:
"I'm shooting him through the head." "When I heard that the first time, I got tingles up my spine," Colangelo said. In another part of the program, the main character remarks to the assassin, "my father's name was Lee." "Of course in my mind I'm thinking, ...Lee Harvey Oswald," Colangelo said. Scenes in the episode also bear haunting familiarity to the real life assassination of JFK. The King steps off a plane at the Niagara Falls Airport in much the same fashion JFK did during his final de-planing in Dallas. And the motorcade scene, where the King waves to adoring crowds while riding in a limousine down a crowded Falls Street, is not unlike President Kennedy's final trip along similarly crowded streets in Dallas. Colangelo also noted that when the King first arrives in Niagara Falls, he is alerted to a potential threat on his life and while discussing it with a character portraying a members to the State Department suggests that perhaps they could divert to, of all places, Dallas. "It was just, ...Dallas, ...assassination, ...November 22nd 1963,.. it's spooky."/>
