At the 9:00 AM Tuesday sociology class, Nov. 20, 1963, at TCU, Dr. Austin Porterfield told us that if we went to see President Kennedy Thursday morning and missed class our final grade would be docked one level. I was carrying an A- and decided I could stand a B+ on my reports that semester, so I went.
Thursday was a gray, slightly misty day, but the crowd was excited in front of the Texas Hotel. I ran into several friends from TCU including two from my sociology class. We stood together. We were disappointed that Jackie did not come out. The President’s speech was all fire and brimstone about defense, war, and the importance of Fort Worth in that effort. It was good to see Sen.Yarborough, who I had met, Gov. Connally and V.P. Johnson, who I had met a couple of times in Johnson City, standing together behind the President.
At noon Thursday I came back to the Texas Hotel as a student member of the Downtown Rotary, due to my being Student Body President at TCU. Rotary met in the same ballroom where Kennedy had breakfast with the Fort Worth leaders and the bunting was still on the head table. As the minister of First Presbyterian Church (if memory serves) was standing at the podium about to deliver a Thanksgiving sermon, he was handed a note that the President had been shot. The shock was so great that several people stood up involuntarily. A few ran out of the room. The minister then offered a prayer for the President and, with difficulty, went on with his prepared remarks. After the meeting we stood around a small TV in the lobby and learned the President was dead.
AFTERMATH
The TCU Board of Trustees were meeting that weekend and the most important item on the agenda was a move to racially integrate the school. This was something that I and a number of students and faculty had been advocating for several years. It was past time for the school to make this move. The board handled only routine business and adjourned. Racial integration had to wait until the spring 1964 meeting where it passed easily, in part due to Kennedy’s death. The nation’s attitudes had changed.
Everything including a football game was canceled from Friday until the funeral. Many students went home to be with their families. On Saturday, a fellow student, David Hall, and I went to Acton cemetery to visit the graves of Davy Crockett’s family and on to the original TCU campus at Thorp Springs. We found some peace away from the incessant TV coverage of the Thursday tragedy.
A family friend, Rev. Louis Saunders, executive director of the Ft. Worth Council of Churches volunteered to do a graveside service for the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald. When Louis died some thirty years later the New York times noted this in his obituary.
In the months that followed, Dr. Saul Sells, TCU’s leading psychologist, with whom I had a course at the time, was called on to visit with and evaluate Jack Ruby in the Dallas County jail where his mental condition was rapidly deteriorating. Dr. Sells routinely did work with the Fort Worth Police Dept.
A group of older people in Fort Worth who were organized to do random acts of kindness reached out to Mrs. Marie Oswald and her mother in law to provide some help to them, as they were generally ostracized. In the spring of 1964 they were having a small social event and had invited Marie to come. It would be the first time she had been in a public setting since the assassination and they were concerned that she would be the only young person in the room. So they asked me to come as I was about the same age. Since I had such respect for the people in this group, several of whom were Brite Divinity School faculty, I agreed and spent the evening with the shy, demure, generally attractive young Russian woman with the typically dark Russian eyes. She seemed to appreciate the outreach this group had made to her and was at ease at the reception.
