DALLAS -- Gary Mack, a former television news producer whose interest in the death of President John F. Kennedy helped set up a museum at the warehouse where Kennedy's assassin opened fire, died Wednesday. He was 68.
Mack died after a prolonged illness, according to a statement issued by the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The Dallas museum's statement did not provide additional details about his death.
Mack was an announcer, camera operator and news producer for KXAS-TV in Fort Worth and Dallas from 1981 to 1993. Privately, he was a student of Kennedy's assassination, developing a reputation as a leading expert.
Mack served as a consultant in planning "John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation," the exhibit that opened the Sixth Floor Museum in 1989. The museum is in the former Texas School Book Depository, and its sixth floor is the vantage point from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot at Kennedy as the president's motorcade made its way through Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.
Mack joined the museum staff in 1994 as an archivist and was named curator in 2000.
"I doubt if anybody anywhere knew more details about all aspects of the JFK assassination and aftermath than Gary," author Hugh Aynesworth, a frequent writer on the assassination, told The Dallas Morning News.
Mack had long professed at least the suspicion that Oswald did not act alone in the assassination. Yet he was active in debunking many conspiracy theories, and even those confirmed in the belief that Oswald was a lone actor revered Mack's expertise.
Trailblazing female television journalist
NEW YORK -- Marlene Sanders, a veteran television journalist for ABC and CBS News at a time when relatively few women did that job, has died of cancer. She was 84.
Sanders also was the mother of CNN and New Yorker journalist Jeffrey Toobin, who announced on his Facebook page that she died Tuesday.
"A pioneering television journalist -- the first network newswoman to report from Vietnam, among many other firsts -- she informed and inspired a generation," Toobin wrote. "Above all, though, she was a great mom."
Sanders was a producer for the late Mike Wallace in the early stages of his career. She wrote, reported and produced news and documentaries for WNEW-TV in New York before joining ABC News in 1964. She worked there for 14 years.
She was the first woman to anchor a network evening newscast in 1964 when she filled in for Ron Cochran. She reported from Vietnam in 1966 and later became the first woman to be a vice president at ABC News, where she was head of the network's documentary unit.
In 1978, Sanders moved to CBS News, where she also wrote and produced documentaries. She often reported and wrote on the women's movement and closely followed the status of women in her own industry, said James Goldston, ABC News president.
Sanders co-wrote a book, Waiting for Prime Time: The Women of Television News, and taught at New York University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Metro on 07/17/2015