In the fall of 1960, it was election season. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, not the way I do now, with all the money and noise and certainty people wrap around politics. Back then, I was a young boy watching the world through small windows, and one of the things I saw most clearly was my father.
My dad was a regular Texas man. He worked hard, kept his word, loved his family, loved the church, and loved the state he lived in. He painted houses, businesses, and whatever else needed painting. He took jobs where he could find them. To people who knew such things, that made him what they used to call a yellow-dog Democrat, though he never said much about it. What I do remember is that when it came time to vote, he didn’t talk himself into a decision. He prayed. He would get on his knees and ask God for direction, not because he thought his vote would change the world, but because he believed obedience mattered.
To this day, I don’t know whether he voted for John Kennedy or Richard Nixon. I only know that Kennedy became president, and life went on.
Not too soon after the trip to Tennessee and the election, my father had landed a job with the City of Dallas as a maintenance man. He painted what needed painting. His office was in the basement of City Hall, close to where the police headquarters operated. It was just another building to me, another place adults went during the day while children went to school and played outside.
I was growing up. We had moved to Lancaster Texas, into a rented house. My dad had taken a pastorate at a small church there. The rent house was in the Wilmer-Hutchins school district, so my brother and I each went to district schools, him to Wilmer Hutchins High School, and me to Hutchins Elementary.
In late November could still feel warm. That kind of warmth that makes children forget coats and adults linger longer than they should. In 1963, November 22nd, the Friday the president came to town, the weather played its part. The motorcade passed by City Hall, and my father was able to see the president as the cars rolled past. The limousine was open, its top removed for the drive. At the time, it seemed ordinary. Just something worth looking at before getting back to work.
That same day, school was like any other day. Second grade. Hutchins Elementary. We played outside. We talked about Thanksgiving. I didn’t carry any sense that the world was about to shift. I didn’t know that people remember where they were when certain things happen. No one had told me I was standing on one of those days.
Sometime after lunch, things changed. Teachers were crying. The televisions in the school offices were on, black-and-white screens flickering. We were told to line up to get on the bus to go home early. No explanations that made sense to an eight-year-old. Just a hush that settled over everything.
I rode the yellow bus home, still not understanding. When I walked in the door, my mother was standing at the ironing board, the black & white console television on, tears streaming down her face. The show wasn’t her ‘stories’, it was the familiar news stations, but it wasn’t night time. It wasn’t until later that I understood that the president had been shot and killed downtown Dallas.
That weekend unfolded in fragments. A police officer who my father knew was killed after being assigned to assist in looking for the assassin suspect. Officer J.D. Tippett was shot while confronting Lee Harvey Oswald in Oak Cliff, not far from where our family had lived before we moved south to Lancaster. We had rented out our Oak Cliff house because of my dad taking the pastorate in Lancaster. Money was tight, though I didn’t know it. Children rarely do.
On Sunday, services were about praying for the country. Because of all the ‘breaking news’, the television stayed on. Oswald had been caught at the Texas Theatre. Cameras followed everything. When he was brought out of the jail to be transferred, people watched live as Jack Ruby stepped forward and fired a gun. The police converged on Ruby. There was confusion and shouting and disbelief.
I wasn’t glued to the television. I was a kid. I played outside. But I learned later that the place where Ruby stood was close to where my father worked. Very close.
My father didn’t work Sundays.
Years later, I went with my dad to help him finish a small painting job at a house in Dallas. It belonged to a police officer he knew from work, Captain Will Fritz. At the time, it didn’t feel unusual. It was just another house. Another job. Another afternoon spent holding tools and watching a man work who knew how to do things with his hands.
Only much later did I understand who Captain Fritz was, and what role he had played in those days. Even then, there was no sense of pride attached to it. No bragging. Just recognition. As if everyone involved understood they had been near something they didn’t own.
Looking back now, what stays with me isn’t the history itself, but how quietly it moved through ordinary lives. A warm day. A motorcade. A school bus ride home early. A man who prayed before voting. A job that didn’t include Sundays.
My father’s office in the basement of Dallas City Hall was approximately twenty feet from where Jack Ruby stood when he ended Lee Harvey Oswald’s life.One day.
Twenty feet.
And a man who didn’t work Sundays.
