There I was in all my authoritarian glory, a sixth grade member of the Safety Patrol leading my daily group of 2nd graders to the crosswalk
two blocks north of the school. The security of these young minds was in my hands and I took my responsibility very seriously. But the conversation
I was to overhear between the crossing guard and her visitor was about to change my perception of the world forever. It was November 22, 1963 -
1:45 PM in St.Petersburg, Florida, the crossing guard's visitor had just told her the President had been shot. Shoot the President? No, I must have mistaken what she
was saying, nobody could shoot the President. Sure I knew Abe Lincoln had been murdered, but that was the old days, that couldn't happen now! And if it were true,
well it was probably just an arm wound like the ones John Wayne and my other western heroes from time to time would get but always recover.
My parents had strongly supported President Kennedy's campaign. He seemed so magnetic and enthusiastic. He had the feel of the other legends of the silver screen that I looked up to. While I understood little of the complexities of politics at that tender age, he appeared to epitomize the idea of what it meant to be an American.
Upon returning to my class and hanging up my patrol belt and badge, I felt that I had walked into a Twilight Zone episode. The other children in the
class room were totally quite and fixed on the somber voice of Walter Cronkite announcing that priests had just given the President his Last Rites. While I was not
Catholic myself, my father was. From time to time he would tell me of rituals in the Catholic Church. I knew what Mr. Cronkite was saying. I walked home from
school that afternoon in a dazed silence. Things like this just didn't happen. Why did this happen?
From that afternoon at the crosswalk years ago to the present day I have tried to find a satisfactory answer to that question. I have read dozens of books and seen many documentaries on the assassination. I have heard interviews and government denials but the one thing that was always missing in my desire to understand was to be at the very spot where events changed my view of humanity. I needed to walk the same grounds that I had seen hundreds of times in the films of Zapruder, Nix and Muchmore. To actually touch the objects that were burned into my mind in the still photos of Altgens, Mooreman, and Towner . In the summer of 1998 I made the pilgrimage to that hallowed ground. It was a very emotional afternoon for me, it was like I had been there a hundred times before. I felt I had come home to a place that had been waiting for me for a long time.
What follows are some of the pictures I took of Dealey Plaza as I tried to capture a moment from November 22, 1963.
