SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Men and women of a certain age can tell you where they were when they saw John John Kennedy salute his father's casket in 1963 or when Princess Diana died in 1997. Even now, when the internet has diverted American viewing habits into many streams, the funerals last year of John McCain and former president George H.W. Bush continued the tradition of national communal mourning.
That tradition began on April 4, 1931, almost without anyone realizing it, when CBS Radio broadcast the funeral of Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, who died four days earlier in the crash of a commercial airliner on a Kansas prairie.