Jack Kennedy's Funeral, via 30th St. Station and the PRR

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

A friend writes:

When you undergo a traumatic experience, especially at a young age, you remember details of that experience for the rest of your life.

And so it was for so many on the day of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on that fateful Friday – November 22, 1963.

I was an eighth grader at Akiba Hebrew Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania.

The day before, we had discussed in our current events club about how JFK and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s recently resigned prime minister, had a vociferous argument over Israel’s nuclear weapons program, just six weeks after JFK pushed through the nuclear test ban treaty – for the entire world to sign.

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We know a lot more about that day now, but in any case it was a terrible day in Dallas.

3

Thanks David.

I was ten years old on November 22 1963, and I remember it as if it was yesterday, and that’s no idle cliche’ on my part. Those of you who were around at the time know exactly what I mean.

And I remember thinking how angry the drums sounded on the day of the funeral.

4

7th grade, Tamanend Jr. Hi, Warrington, PA. Many years later married at Overbrook Presby. My wife’s best friend lived in Overbrook Park, father was the Airport director.

5

I, too, was in junior high - English class to be exact. We were release early, as were most school kids. The walk home was surreal. Getting out of school early was cool, the reason why was not.

It seems like every generation has it’s moment. For my mother’s generation it was Pearl Harbor. My kids will likely remember the Challenger disaster and/or 9/11.

Who knows what’s next…

6

Thanks Dave. You have a great way of telling the story. I would suspect that you received a good grade on your report. Yes, I think all of know where we were that fateful day. I was working in an electric utility 138,000 volt substation preparing to run some tests with the telephone company to verify that the telco phone circuits would operate during a high current fault on the transmission system. Four thousand amps into the ground can make copper pellets of a 24 gauge telephone wire unless there is protection for that possibility. Someone came up the driveway and shouted that the president had been shot. Everyone looked stunned and I dove for the operators radio to learn what the news was. It was not long before orders came down to secure everything to its normal state. The telco employes were hardening all their facilities. No one new what might be coming next.

But the earth still revolved and fortunately life continues. Thanks for the memory.

7

It is an anonomous friend’s memory, not mine. A friend who also moved to Israel.

But I can inform you of my memory. I was working at a Baptist church somewhere in Virginia, N. or S. Carolina. It may have been the River Road Baptist Church in Richmond, VA. The head of the Building Committee provided dinner or supper for me at his home before driving me to the railroad station to board a sleeper to NY. His wife informed both of us when we arrived at his home from the church. We were still on the porch, had not yet entered the house. On hearing the news, all my strength drained from me, and I sat immediately on a swing sofa on the porch. My host said that I was taking the news harder than he was. Thinking about some of the emnity that at the time existed between some Baptists and some Catholics, I did not comment further, but we did eat in silence, since I had already discussed my preliminary acoustical evaluation and more detailed discussion would need to await analysis of the recorded data. Thank the Eternal that the emnity has dissapeared nearly comnpletely.

8

I was 7 on that day, in elementary school in a suburban cleveland. I remember that day as clear as a bell. We were sent home, the walk home as surreal as the rest if the day would become. The day mark the beginning of a trio of violent shooting that would leave JFK, his brother and MLK dead.

The sixites was a decade of so many good things, but defined by violence, protests and change.

Thanks for your rememberence of that tragic day David, you told it well.

Rest in peace JFK, and your brothers who fell after you.

9

I was a senior in high school, in the language lab when the announcement was made by the principal that the President had been shot in Dallas. Since our school was overcrowded and it was my last class, I left with a friend (who had a car) and drove home and turned on the TV. A cold, dreary day in Chicago. A real turning point for my baby boomer generation.

10

I was in class, 7th grade, Catholic school in Gulfport, Mississippi. The news came via the principal on the intercom.

Some of my classmates applauded and exclaimed, “They got the n!gg*r-lover.” I wish I were making this up. Although to actually hear them was shocking, at the same time it wasn’t very surprising. Such was Mississippi at that time.

On the other hand, JFK was revered in our household. And if one of my parents ever heard me or my sibs use the N-word, we were in deep s#!t. Once, much younger, I had mimicked what I’d heard at school, and I don’t remember if I got spanked or just confined to my room, but I never made that mistake again.

There was a decade or so when I was convinced that JFK was killed by a right-domestic conspiracy. I probably read twenty-five books on the conspiracy side. I was CONVINCED. Then I read all 1400 pages of Vincent Bugliosi’s anti-conspiracy book. That book is an amazing accomplishment, written over ten years or something, and ruthlessly, exhaustively researched. I did a 180 on the subject. It doesn’t make as good a story, but LHO was apparently indeed a lone nut.

The thing that had most made me think it was a conspiracy was that LHO was immediately murdered, and in the basement of the police station, no less! But apparently Jack Ruby, although not a loner, was another brand of nut. Not a nut really, but an extremely emotional character who desperately wanted to “be somebody.”

If you are interested in this, I highly recommend the Bugliosi book.

I lived in Gulfport then, but we had moved there from Dallas.

In those days Secret Service procedures were pretty slipshod compared to now. People were allowed to be in windows of buildings all along the parade route. Crazy.

I don’t idolize JFK as some do, but still, he was a great man. That was a terrible, terrible day. I will never forget where I was then, or for the Challenger disaster, or 9/11.

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L-O, I’ve heard all the conspiracy theorys over the years, right-wing, left-wing, CIA, FBI, Mafia, you name it, some that sounded plausable, some that were just plain nuts.

We don’t hear too much about them anymore, I suppose it’s because of the “Boomer” generation aging and the generations that came after us look on the Kennedy years as ancient history.

I think that what kept the conspiracy theorys going for all those years was the inability of many people to accept that a young, dynamic, charismatic president was done in by a common, everyday punk. And that’s all Oswald was, a punk.

He certainly didn’t change anything for the better. It seems like the 60’s were all downhill after that.

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Yes, the books I read covered all brands of conspiracy. Some of the books were real junk, but several were very convincing. And really, really fascinating.

But VB’s book trumps them all. He refutes all the conspiracy theories, step by painstaking step. He was a California prosecutor, and he wrote the book Helter Skelter, about the Manson murders.

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There are those who feel that, had he not been martyred, JFK’s presidency would have been lackluster, at best.

But, we’ll never know. I was too young to form such an opinion at the time.

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As a counterpoint to Bugliosi, try reading Lamar Waldron’s meticulously researched and footnoted tome.

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The sixties had some high points, the moon landing brought the nation and the world together. Well accept those conspiracy theoriest as well. I watched the space program Thur out the sixties.

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Thanks. I might do that, as I find it all so fascinating. The only problem is that I might get sucked back in! It was kind of an addiction there for a while. It was SO hard to not believe there were dark things going on out of sight. And there were for sure, LOTS of odd coincidences …

But I have not read Waldron’s book, despite seeing many references to it.

CH, have you read the Bugliosi book? It’s a great read. But the damn thing is so heavy, I read it all lying down, with it propped up on a pillow on my stomach! I know of one guy who read the whole thing standing up, with it propped up on a counter, like a library dictionary. If you drop this book on your foot, you will get injured.

I think as an introduction to the conspiracy side, it’s hard to beat Jim Marr’s Crossfire. I couldn’t put it down.

17

The bridge in front of the JFK motorcade (the infamous “grassy knoll” was next to it) was the SP railroad’s “Triple Overpass”:

https://bridgehunter.com/tx/dallas/bh58240/

From the “Description” on that webpage:

This bridge is “Debatably the most famous roadway feature in America” according to the 1993 NRHP application for Dealey Plaza. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 while his motorcade was approaching this underpass on Elm Street. His motorcade then sped through the underpass en route to the hospital.

This handsome art-deco structure was built with particular civic pride in the Texas centennial year of 1936. Other than realignment of the RR tracks on its deck, it is unchanged since construction.

This webpage appears to claim that a railroad worker and a railroad detective were on the bridge at the time of the assassination:

https://jfkfacts.org/eyewitness-in-dealey-plaza/

(Note: I express no opinion on the validity of these assertions, or on the various conspiracy theories surrounding this event.)

  • PDN.
18

I slightly knew Lamar. I started Bugliosi, but found it tedious and too much of a hit job on any information that didn’t correspond with the Warren Report. The Senate and House committees in the 70s both agreed that there were a lot of flaws and gaps in the quickly researched Warren Report, largely put together by Allen Dulles.

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I do agree that there were some flaws in the Warren Report, and I know that Dulles was the primary author, but nonetheless I found the bulk of VB’s book very convincing.

Is the Waldron book a good read? Some of the books I’ve read were not. And some were total junk in every way.

The well-known anti-conspiracy book Case Closed has some serious flaws, IMO.

20

Death of a President by William Manchester is worth reading too. My brother and I were on our way to our cub scouts meeting that Friday. I was eight, he was ten. We left school and walked through downtown Amityville where all the cars were stopped on the streets. A church ball rang slowly. It reminded me of “The Twilight Zone.” A woman came out of the bank crying.

We didn’t know what was going on. We got to the meeting place, the lady there was crying and waved us away so we went home. Our mother was crying in the kitchen, listening to the radio and she told us the news. As far as I’m concerned, everything that happened since then was not supposed to happen thanks to that worthless punk.

But, in the folowing spring when the Beatles came to the USA, I think that was the thing that finally took people’s minds off Dallas.