November 18, 1978 in the San Francisco Bay Area

NOVEMBER 18, 1978: A day many of us will not forget; Dateline: Jonestown, Guyana, where a mass-murder/suicide took place. Media reports back then referred to the Jim Jones horror as a mass-suicide but later it was learned most of the people that died were in fact murdered by Jones and some of his aides.

*It was, appropriately enough, a grey day in the Bay Area. A Saturday. In Berkeley at Memorial Stadium the Big Game was taking place, Stanford vs. Cal and it began to rain toward the end of the game. I was 16 at the time. Came home and the initial reports came out of Guyana and they were grim. Congressman Leo Ryan and others, including his aide, Jackie Spier, and some media members, were gunned down in a remote airstrip near the compound. It was captured on video by NBC News and as grim as it looked, we still had no idea what had taken place in the Jones compound hours earlier.

Ray Taliaferro, yes that Ray Taliaferro, was on KGO Radio reading in detail from an AP Report out of Guyana that a "mass-suicide" had taken place; hundreds of bodies laid out in the jungle compound. Taliaferro began taking calls and was completely shaken. We didn't see the carnage yet but we had eyewitness accounts.

On KCBS, the anchor fielded live interviews from the capitol, Georgetown, including an official from the American Embassy (I don't remember the name) that something fairly profoundly disturbing had taken place across the country and confirmed the mass murder/suicide.

Local TV News that Saturday led with the Jonestown massacre but had no pictures other then the airstrip assault and reports of the gravity in the jungle. We knew that Jim Jones was dead and that several hundred of his followers drank cool-aid laced with cyanide --we still had no visual of the carnage --there was no video then and only truncated reports from the radio and TV.

The ensuing Monday brought forth the entirety of what had happened. It was disturbing, grim, shocking and absolutely devastating and it is still that today 40 years after it happened.