Perusing one of my railroad books, ‘Down South’ on the Rock Island, by Steve Allen Goen (La Mirada, CA: Four Ways West Publications, 2002), I came across the photo and caption reproduced below. (Ignore the Brook Hollow ad.) The photo was taken 32 days after JFK’s assassination. Note what the caption says about the Texas Live Oak trees. (Click on the photo to enlarge the text.)

I’ve neither read the Warren Commission Report nor studied all of the facts surrounding the assassination. I remember hearing over the high school intercom system the news that the president was dead; I was a sophomore at the time. At my Fullerton, California Southern Baptist church that Sunday we prayed for our late president (it was unlikely that he, being Catholic, had found Jesus as his personal savior, as we, as Baptists had and believed people must in order to get into heaven). I went home from church and learned that Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald while Oswald was being moved in police custody.

Coming across the photo and caption above reminded me again of the controversy surrounding the death investigation and conclusions in not only John Kennedy’s assassination, but in the assassination of his brother Robert, whom I’d accompanied my mother and sisters to see as he and his wife Ethel and their dog came down the steps from their arriving plane at Orange County airport. At the fence my two younger sisters shook Robert Kennedy’s hand. The next day would be the California primary and his murder as he made his way through the kitchen at the victory party.