By Tracy Gupton
When I was going through a cabinet at my parents’ home following the death of my father in 2001, I came across several stacks of old newspapers that my mother had kept over the years. She preceded my Dad to “her reward,” as Granny Daisey Moses used to say all the time on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” by five years. Included in those stacks of old yellowed papers were Houston Post issues from November 1963 that chronicled the now defunct daily newspaper’s coverage of the tragic assassination of our nation’s first president to be born in the 20th Century.
It was 60 years ago today that I was seated at my desk in Rose Earle’s first grade classroom at West Columbia Elementary School, having just returned from dining on the usual fried fish Friday meal in the cafeteria, when news President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot by a sniper in downtown Dallas, Texas, filtered across our elementary campus. Mrs. Earle’s husband, S.J. “Sam” Earle, who four years later would be my fifth grade teacher at Charlie Brown Intermediate School, was the elementary school principal during the 1963-64 school year.
Peggy Hall Gupton, my wife for going on 44 years now, was seated in her desk in the adjoining first grade classroom on that horrible day, November 22, 1963. Peggy and I both graduated from Columbia High School in 1975 and married in the summer of 1980. Our memories of that horrible day when we were both six years old are very similar. We both recall the scene like it was yesterday of our teachers — Rose Earle and Anne McNeel — embracing in deep sorrow outside our classrooms when news that President Kennedy had died from his wounds reached the first and second grade wing of the old elementary school in West Columbia that has since been torn down.
Peggy and I have a granddaughter in the first grade in Angleton now and our grandson is in the fourth grade at the new elementary school in West Columbia, which is situated on what used to be our playground area when my wife and I were little kids. If I would have to pinpoint the moment in my life that innocence was lost, it definitely started with the President of the United States being gunned down in the streets of a major Texas city when I was only six years old.
The late Caroline Farris of West Columbia told me that she was standing on the side of the highway in Austin, Texas, with hundreds if not thousands of others preparing for President Kennedy’s motorcade driving through our state’s capital later that afternoon on this day 60 years ago. Caroline was in college in Austin in the fall of 1963. She remembered that it took a while for those parade attendees in Austin to disburse and abandon their choice positions along the planned parade route when news of the President’s assassination reached Austin.
The previous day, November 21, 1963, President and Mrs. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird had participated in parades in Houston and San Antonio on their planned quick sweep through Texas that was intended to raise money and secure votes for the 35th President of the United States ahead of John Kennedy kicking off his 1964 re-election campaign. Kennedy, a World War II hero, was the youngest man at age 43 to be elected our nation’s president. He narrowly defeated sitting Vice President Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.
The planned parade through Austin later in the day on Friday, November 22, 1963, was to conclude the Kennedys’ two-day visit to the Lone Star State. They were to return to Washington, D.C., following the Austin visit for their son John-John’s third birthday party on November 25th and then spend the Thanksgiving holiday at the White House. Instead, President Kennedy’s funeral was held in our nation’s capital that Monday, the same day John F. Kennedy Jr. turned three. John-John’s older sister, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, was born the same year I was, 1957. Her sixth birthday was only five days after the assassination of her father, the President.
My paternal grandmother, Eula Meadows Gupton, loved to watch “her stories,” as she called the daytime TV soap operas she regularly viewed. Since President Kennedy’s assassination occurred during the lunch hour on a Friday, most kids like me were in school, fathers were at their jobs and mothers who did not work were most likely at home with their television sets on. Although my memory from 60 years ago is foggy about details, I’m sure my grandmother was among the first in West Columbia to learn of our president’s assassination. Her husband, my grandfather, had died two years earlier and we lived in our new home across the yard from my grandmother in November 1963.
Eula Gupton was probably walking across the yard to inform my mother, Verna Gupton, at about the same time my maternal grandmother, Pauline Giesler, was phoning my Mom from her East Columbia home (if she could get through on her party line) to let her daughter know some fool went and shot our handsome young President in Dallas. All I know is that at West Columbia Elementary School our principal had notified all of the teachers, from Frances Worley in the kindergarten room to Johnny Shannon in the sixth grade wing that President Kennedy had died. Mr. Earle’s wife, my first grade teacher Rose Earle, had all of her students including me place our heads on our desks and listen to the live radio broadcast that Sam Earle was playing over the intercom system that went to all of the classrooms.
My older brother, Cody Gupton, was in Dahlia Askew’s fourth grade classroom in another wing of our elementary school at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. Our younger sister, Kelli, was only three and most likely witnessing first-hand our mother and paternal grandmother reacting to news of the tragedy from her viewpoint at home. Our father, Rex Gupton, was most likely at his job at the Ohio Oil Company refinery near Markham in neighboring Matagorda County and learning of the big news of the day from his fellow workers or bosses.
Rex Gupton had served in the Navy like President Kennedy during World War II. So, he was probably heartbroken by the assassination like the majority of American citizens and thousands around the globe. It hadn’t been many months earlier that my brother Cody and I watched the movie PT 109 at The Capitol Theater in West Columbia where actor Cliff Robertson portrayed John F. Kennedy as a heroic PT boat captain during the second world war. How could something so horrible happen in America to such a young, vibrant, energetic President? The leader of the free world gunned down in such a tragic manner in the middle of the day?
Television coverage of the assassination of JFK was so different 60 years ago than it would be if the event occurred in modern times. My grandmother’s “stories” were interrupted with a news flash on all three networks. That is not a misprint. In 1963 there were only three television networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — with few people tuning in to PBS (Public Broadcasting Services), educational television. Since I was only six at the time, I don’t actually remember seeing Walter Cronkite, the news voice of CBS-TV, informing the grief-stricken nation that President Kennedy had died. And I don’t think I was looking at the black-and-white TV set in our West Columbia home when Dallas strip club owner Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of the President, on live television in the basement of the Dallas Police Station that Sunday, two days after Oswald allegedly killed President Kennedy, when police were in the process of transferring Oswald to the Dallas County Jail. But millions across America were. All three TV networks replaced their normal weekend programming in order to air nonstop coverage of President Kennedy’s murder investigation, the transfer of power in the White House from the slain President to his Vice President, Texas native Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the funeral coverage that Monday.
The most memorable television shot from John F. Kennedy’s funeral procession was that of young John-John saluting his Daddy’s flag-draped coffin while his mother, Jackie Kennedy, held his other hand. The first lady was seated beside President Kennedy in the back seat of an open air limousine, both of them waving and smiling to the crowd along both sides of the street in Dallas, with Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie occupying the seat in front of the Kennedys, when “shots rang out over Dealey Plaza” at 12:31 p.m., according to a September 23, 2001, story in The Houston Chronicle that looked back on President Kennedy’s assassination in Texas 60 years ago today.
Bo Byers, chief of the Chronicle’s Austin Bureau in 1963, was riding in the second of two White House press buses behind the president’s car as it headed for a scheduled luncheon at Dallas’s Trademart where Kennedy was going to give a speech. Byers reported hearing three shots and saw the president’s car speeding away but didn’t immediately learn what had happened.
Governor Connally was also seriously wounded from gunshots that horrible day 60 years ago. The Democratic governor of Texas at the time of the assassination later ran for president himself, only as a Republican after switching parties. His memory of the incident, as written in the James Reston Jr. biography, “The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally,” (1989, Harper & Row publishers), goes like this: “The first sense of anything unusual was when I became conscious of a shot, what sounded like a gunshot,” Governor Connally said in his hospital testimony to the FBI. “Instinctively, I turned to my right and as I did so I sensed, more than I saw, that President Kennedy was hit. As I turned, I realized something was amiss with President Kennedy and then I turned back to my left, and as I did so I got hit with a bullet in my right shoulder.”
The third shot was the mortal blow that exploded President Kennedy’s skull. Governor Connally recalled that the shots were “unbelievably quick.”
Even today, 60 years later, many skeptics refuse to believe that accused sniper Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. Oswald, while handcuffed at the Dallas Police Station, claimed to television cameras and a roomful of reporters that he “was a patsy” and did not kill President Kennedy.
The lead front page headline of the November 23, 1963, final edition of The Houston Chronicle read, “Death for Accused Kennedy Killer to Be Asked; LBJ Urges Unity.” The smaller headline beneath that read: “Dallas DA To Try For Quick Trial.” But all of that became a moot point when Jack Ruby shot Oswald in the stomach on Sunday, November 24, 1963, the day before President Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, D.C. Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had defected to Russia and was working in the Texas School Book Depository the day of Kennedy’s killing and Connally’s wounding, died at 1:07 p.m. in the same emergency room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas where both the president and governor had been treated two days earlier.
Jack Ruby was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Oswald but died of cancer in prison while an appeal was pending. His alleged Mafia ties and connections with Chicago underworld figures added fuel to the fire of the many conspiracy theories about who actually was involved with the murder of our 35th president. And now, in the present day, JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose own father, Bobby Kennedy, was also assassinated while he was running for president in 1968, is seeking the presidency as a third party 2024 candidate.
What are your memories of that awful day 60 years ago? And what are your thoughts on the conspiracy theories swirling even today? Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone in shooting President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John B. Connally on November 22, 1963, in Dallas? Let us know your opinion.