‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ Star Larry Mathews Recalls Learning of JFK Assassination ArticlePure

Dick Van Dyke Show actor Larry Mathews says he and the rest of the iconic sitcom’s cast learned of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination while rehearsing an episode.

Mathews played Ritchie Petrie, the son of Rob (Dick Van Dyke) and Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore), in the series. He would have been just 8 years old on Nov. 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot and killed while traveling in a presidential motorcade in Dallas.

In a recent interview with Remind, the former child star recalled that the show’s cast was rehearsing a season 3 episode centered on his character’s 8th birthday party on the day of Kennedy’s assassination.

“I remember it vividly, honestly, like it was yesterday,” Mathews, now 69, said. “[Series creator Carl Reiner] came in and said, ‘Everybody stop. Just stop everything.’ And we were all like, ‘What?’ And he goes, ‘The president’s just been assassinated.’ ”

Mathews described the silence that followed as “deafening.”

“Basically, everybody gathered in the Petrie living room, and Carl turned on a prop radio, which we just had in the back of the set,” Mathews recalled. “We basically listened to Walter Cronkite’s newscast on the assassination. And then Carl told everybody to go home. ‘We’re done. We’re going to shut down. We’ll pick it up next week. Everybody needs to go.’ And that’s what we did, and we picked it up the next week.”

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According to Remind, the episode the cast had been rehearsing, “Happy Birthday and Too Many More,” was the show’s first to film following Kennedy’s death, and one of only a handful that were filmed during its five-season run on CBS without a studio audience, coming so soon after the national tragedy. While the Dick Van Dyke Show’s third season had already premiered in September 1963, the episode didn’t air until the following February.