Just outside the Fort Worth Hilton - formerly the Hotel Texas - there's an elegant commemoration of President John F. Kennedy's visit to Fort Worth before he was assassinated in Dallas 50 years ago. But don't call it a memorial. Kennedy's visit to Fort Worth was a triumphal event. But it would be overshadowed by the assassination of the youthful president just a few hours later as his motorcade sped through the streets of Dallas. "It is a tribute to his ideals, to his life, to his visit, but it is not a memorial to him," says Shirlee Gandy, who, with her husband Taylor, co-chaired the committee that brought the decades-long dream to fruition with its dedication in November of 2012. "There was not anything negative about the president's visit to the city of Fort Worth."
Fort Worth was the third stop on what was to be a five-city swing through Texas in an attempt to unify the state's feuding democrats to ensure Kennedy would carry Texas in the 1964 presidential election. He visited San Antonio and Houston before arriving in Fort Worth and planned to end the tour in Austin after the Dallas visit.
Fort Worth Welcome "In Cowtown, the Kennedys were treated like rock stars," says Scott Grant Barker. "All of this was forgotten in an instant, of course, when [Lee Harvey] Oswald fired the first shot."
Barker is a consultant and catalogue contributor for Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy organized by the Dallas Museum of Art in association with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. The exhibit opened at the DMA in May and moved to the Amon Carter for exhibit Oct. 12-Jan. 12.
The Secret Service rejected the Will Rogers suite on the 13th floor of the hotel because of security concerns about an office building across the street, and the Kennedys were switched to the much less elegant but much more secure Suite 850 on the eighth floor.
Just five days before the visit, Barker said, Owen Day, a display designer for Bell Helicopter Co. and a part-time art columnist, suggested dressing up the bland room with original art. Sam Cantey III, a bank vice president, and Ruth Carter Johnson, later Stevenson, the daughter of Star-Telegram founder Amon Carter and founder of the then newly opened Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, agreed.
"Drawing from Fort Worth's two art museums - that's all we had back then - and five private collections, including their own, Cantey and Johnson picked an exhibit meant to hang for only 24 hours and be seen by just two people," Barker said.
The current exhibit reunites almost all of the art objects on display for the Kennedys.
Speaking, Meeting and Greeting President Kennedy spoke twice in Fort Worth that day, once outside the hotel in drizzling rain to a crowd that police estimated at the time at 2,000 people and later to a Chamber of Commence breakfast inside to a similar number of invited guests. In both speeches, he stressed the role Fort Worth had played and would continue to play in national defense and especially in aviation. In the Chamber speech, in a comment eerily prophetic in hindsight, he reminded the audience: "This is a very dangerous and uncertain world."
The Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce is recreating the breakfast at 7:30 a.m., Nov. 22, in the Fort Worth Hilton. Featured at the breakfast will be former Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, assigned to the Kennedy family. "He has a unique, behind-the-scenes perspective of that day's events and the days following President Kennedy's tragic death," says Marilyn Gilbert, executive vice president/marketing, for the Chamber. "This day, I'm sure, will be an emotional journey for him."
As it will be for all who were alive and old enough to remember. People of a certain age can recall exactly where they were, including minor details like what they were wearing, when they heard of the assassination.
In Fort Worth, large crowds of people gathered outside the hotel and along the route of the motorcade. Old-timers joke that if you took a survey today, many more than 2,000 people would claim they were outside the hotel that day.
One who was there is Fort Worth native Patricia Whisenant. She was 11. "Mom thought it was important to see the president and hear him, even though she was a life-long Republican," Whisenant said. "So, a morning missed at school had lots more learning potential in downtown Fort Worth."
Back at school - late, but with a note from her mother - she learned that the president was dead. "I had just seen him, full of life and energy. It was difficult to understand then," Whisenant said. "In my head, he was always as I had seen him." It would give her a lifelong interest in the Kennedys and color her political views.
Gerri Dye, a 32-year employee of RadioShack, was 9 when her mother took her and her sister to the Hotel Texas. Room was made for her at the front of the crowd outside after breakfast when the president was preparing to leave.
"I remember Kennedy coming out of the elevator, and they were waiting onJackie. Kennedy stopped, shook my hand, said something about being out of school, and then told me to study very hard when I got back to school," Dye said. "I was crying because I had just met the president of the United States." Back in school, after news he was dead, "the boys sitting around me couldn't understand all the tears." She put together a model of Kennedy in his rocking chair. "I kept that model on my shelf well into high school," she said.
Taylor Gandy had recently graduated from law school and had been in Fort Worth for 11 months. He wasn't at either speech. Deeply interested in politics and public service, he'd never actually seen a president. He didn't intend to miss the chance.
He knew the approximate time of the motorcade from the Hotel Texas, and he had papers to file at the Tarrant County Courthouse, so it was no accident that he was on the sidewalk at the corner of 5th and Main streets when the president passed in an open convertible.
He learned of the assassination at Kay Drug Store at the corner of 7th and Lamar. "I was inside the drug store at the soda fountain about 12:45 or whenever it was, and that's when I heard," he said. "Isn't it amazing that you know exactly where you were?"
Kennedy - both as president and in death - had a profound effect on him and contributed to his running for Fort Worth City Council in 1969. "I wanted to do something. I felt like I needed to do something. I'm not saying that was the reason, but it certainly was a contributing reason," he says now.
Shirlee Gandy was working at the Soil Testing Laboratory at Texas A&M and attending school part-time when she heard the news on the radio. "I never will forget it. I remember going home for lunch and going back, and by the time we got back, he was gone," she said. She ultimately would major in political science as a result.
Then U.S. Representative and later Speaker of the House Jim Wright recalls the spirit of the morning. "It was a happy morning, a glorious morning. I think most of us who were there felt that we were on top of the world. It was just such a beautiful time," Wright said. "And then, we were plunged, I at least, into the deepest depths of despondency. I was just knocked out."
Wright and his wife lost a child at 18 months of age in December of 1957, and he said that was the saddest day of his life, but the second was the day Kennedy died. At Parkland Hospital, he was struck by despair. "I couldn't function," he said. "It was really unbelievably debilitating to know that this man who had been such an inspiring figure only hours before, with whom I had engaged in such a pleasant conversation on the airplane on the way to Dallas, was no longer with us."
He praised Vice President Lyndon Johnson who was also present and took the oath of office later that afternoon. "He did a marvelous job and passed more of JFK's program than JFK himself probably could have done," Wright said.
Building the Tribute For years, there was little recognition of Kennedy's Fort Worth visit. Eventually, the theater at the Tarrant County Convention Center was named for the president in a tribute that required no funding. And even that disappeared when the city, which had acquired the convention center from the county, expanded it and the theater was eliminated.
Doug Harman, former Fort Worth city manager and former head of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, said $50,000 donated by the Remington Hotel Corp. in the mid-1990s led to commissioning the statue of Kennedy by the late Houston sculptor Lawrence Ludtke that now stands in place. It was completed in clay, but languished as funding efforts failed.
When Harman left the CVB in 2006, he gave the files to Andy Taft, head of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., and urged him to consider the project. Taft turned to the Gandys, possibly unaware of their keen interest in Kennedy and his visit to Fort Worth.
"We flew to Houston, met the artist's widow, saw the clay model, and Shirlee looked at me after we saw the clay model and she said, "We've got to do this," " Gandy said. She adds: "It's just an amazing piece of art."
So they agreed to make a generous personal donation and to chair the renewed effort for the recognition. By Shirlee Gandy's own admission, projects she's involved in always get bigger, and the original plans for just a bronze of the statue expanded into the much more elaborate recognition that was dedicated last year.
Raising the money was not easy. "But what I would like to say is that every time we went out to a prospective donor and told the story to someone who had the capability of making a contribution, 90 percent of the people we talked to contributed," Taylor Gandy said.
The Fort Worth Library will present JFK in Fort Worth: A Lasting Impression, a special exhibit documenting Kennedy's visit to Fort Worth, Oswald's connection to the city and other information, open now through Dec. 6 at the Central Library.
Among the items on display will be documents from the Chamber of Commerce files used in planning the Hotel Texas breakfast, including seating charts. Harman chairs the exhibit committee and contributed the Chamber file. He's a flea-market groupie and found the file at a flea market a number of years ago. Among items in the file is a card with Kennedy's boot and hat size, traditional presents to visiting presidents.
Test of Modern Media The coverage of the Kennedy assassination was the first real test for modern electronic media in the handling of major breaking news.
"The next few days, all of us, we were glued to that TV, because he died on a Friday, and so we had Saturday and Sunday," Shirlee Gandy said. "We were glued to it. Or I was."
Luther Adkins was the administrative manager of Channel 5 that day and was involved in an intense discussion over whether a story to be assigned to Bobbie Wygant in the programming department about the president's wife, Jackie, would be shown in a news segment. "To the news department, we were just something of a joke at that time," Wygant said recently. She didn't learn of that debate until 50 years later. "I was moderating this conflict, which became moot when a station employee burst into my office saying that the president had been shot," Adkins said.
Wygant's regular half-hour daily talk show aired at 12:30 p.m. She had been warned that the station would cut to a news feed if the president's motorcade got to Market Center in Dallas early. She was already on the air when the first report broke on United Press International's primary national news circuit at 12:34 p.m. The wire service simply reported that three shots were fired at the motorcade.
She had two guests that day - big band leader Ray McKinley, who was from the area and was going to play for a dance at the Casino ballroom on Lake Worth, and Lambuth Tomlinson, publisher of All-Church Press Inc. Tomlinson, Wygant says, "was a lovely man and a man of faith."
In those days, television floor directors communicated with the on-camera people through hand signals. Her director that day was Ed Milner. "All of a sudden, he put both hands up. I didn't know what it was. It was not any standard communication signal to the talent," she said.
Then a slide came up on the monitor. "It said, "News Bulletin." When that came up, I just stopped. Ray finished, and I didn't continue the interview," Wygant said. "And then I heard a voice that said, "From the motorcade of the John F. Kennedy parade in Dallas. We have a report that there has been what could be gunshots in the vicinity of the president." "
When it ended, Milner told her to pick up where she had left off and go on. "My initial thought was some idiot is out there with firecrackers," she said. "I couldn't comprehend that there would be anybody out there with a gun, firing a gun."
The segment would be interrupted six or seven times with news bulletins. "I continued on with Mr. Tomlinson, and being a man of faith, he could relate a spiritual comfort after we knew that the president had been hit and was fighting for his life," Wygant said.
"The last thing that we had before we went off at 1 o"clock - the last bulletin we had - was that the president had been given last rites," she said. "Actually, when we signed off, the president was dead. It just wasn't confirmed."
She drew uniform praise for her professionalism that day but modestly lays it to her previous experience in broadcasting and to her training. But she also grew in confidence. "I've thought many times, if I could get through that day, I can handle anything. Throw it at me. I can handle it. I can't conceive that I would ever have a bigger challenge than that on live TV," Wygant said.
She has a built-in annual reminder. "My birthday's on Nov. 22. I was born in 1926, and that was my 37th birthday," she said. And she is still on air at NBC 5.
It was the first time in history WBAP - now KXAS-TV - stayed on the air overnight. Station personnel were on duty constantly for three days, Adkins said, and when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald at the Dallas jail, it started another three-day around-the-clock cycle, he said.
It was a significant test of television as a news medium, but many still wanted to see it in the newspaper.
"The scene that I will always remember most was when I pulled my car into the Star-Telegram parking lot and saw people in lines that stretched around the building - there were several hundred of them, and they seemed in shock and disbelief, some were crying," said Bob Schieffer, a reporter at the paper who would go on to a legendary career with CBS News.
"They were waiting to get the extra editions of the Star-Telegram that were rolling on our presses. In those days, people really didn't completely believe anything until they saw it in print. It was as if they were standing there, hoping the Star-Telegram would let them know that what they heard on the radio and saw on TV really hadn't happened," he said. "But of course, it had."
Changed Lives Schieffer answered the telephone at the newspaper when Marguerite Oswald called asking for a ride to Dallas where her son, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been arrested after the assassination. He drove her to Dallas and accompanied her to the police station.
It was the weekend that America lost its innocence, says Schieffer. "After that weekend, we have never looked on the presidency, our politics and even the media in quite the same way as we had before that," he says now.
In perhaps a touch of irony, the Fort Worth native whose life may have most been affected by the assassination was nowhere near Fort Worth or Dallas that day. Jim Marrs was a journalism student at the University of North Texas. There was a tenuous relationship in that Marrs has a picture of himself dancing with Kathy Kay on the stage of Jack Ruby's Carousel Club in Dallas. It was popular with college boys.
He became a reporter for the Star-Telegram in 1968 and was fascinated by the assassination. "It did not take me long to realize that something was amiss with the "lone-assassin" theory," he said. "So I kept digging. I didn't realize it would change my life from that point onward as far as my career was concerned, but it sure did. I was ridiculed at the time for talking about conspiracy, but I have been proven right by the House Select Committee on Assassinations." His book, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, became a New York Times Best Seller and the basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK.
He taught a long-time course on the assassination at the University of Texas at Arlington. "Having watched the assassination newsreels both spring and fall for 30 years, it is still fresh in my mind," Marrs says today. "To me, it seems the assassination happened only about two years ago, not 50."
Burying Oswald Associated Press Fort Worth Correspondent Mike Cochran drew the assignment to cover Oswald's funeral on Nov. 25 at Rose Hill Cemetery. "The only people present that day were journalists, police, federal officers and the five members of the Oswald family," Cochran said. There were no pallbearers.
"As the afternoon wore on, Jerry Flemmons, who would become a legendary reporter for the Star-Telegram, turned to me and said, roughly: "Cochran, if we're gonna write a story about the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald, we're going to have to bury the son-of-a-bitch ourselves." "
And that is what happened. The pallbearers included Cochran and Preston McGraw of UPI, and three Star-Telegram reporters - Flemmons, Ed Horn and Jon McConal.
"But perhaps the most memorable event for me personally occurred after returning home the November night after the Oswald funeral," Cochran said. "Watching TV reruns of the Kennedy ceremonies in Washington, I finally had time to stop and think about all that happened during those four incredible days in November 1963.
"And for the first time in those four days, I broke down and cried."
