When Alan Peppard pulled out his Smartphone and started scrolling through some photos not long ago, he wasn’t showing off vacation pix of his wife and daughters. Instead, the veteran Dallas Morning News scribe was going over some rare, historic photos of a trip John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson once made to Fort Worth and then Dallas, even motoring through Dealey Plaza. This wasn’t the fateful November 1963 visit, though, but one that came earlier, in happier times, two months before JFK’s election in 1960 as president.
It’s all part of a fascinating tale Peppard will tell in Sunday’s hard-copy paper titled “JFK’s Forgotten Dallas Motorcade.” As part of the story’s multi-media presentation, the DMN web site is featuring a color film that’s believed to be the only one existing of a complete Kennedy speech in Dallas (he delivered it at the Chance Vought Aircraft factory), plus a number of restored, never-before-seen photos of the September ’60 visit. Peppard says his favorite of these shows JFK and LBJ “on the back deck of their parade car at Burk Burnett Park in Fort Worth,” surrounded by an adoring crowd. Between them, he says, is district judge Sarah T. Hughes, who “three years later would give LBJ the oath of office on Air Force One.”
