by Allen Childs
If the answer was accurate, I knew they would be taking him to Parkland, so my wife and I got up from our table and headed out an exit door. No one else was visible in the parking lot, all seemed to have remained inside the building. We jumped in my VW Beetle and headed over to Parkland.
Cervando Martinez, MD
We drove to the Trade Mart, parked the car, and while going to position ourselves where we could see him again, we heard the first news that something had happened. I don’t recall that we knew what the “something” was, so we climbed on a highway ramp sign and soon heard sirens and saw the blur of the presidential car go by. I vividly remember seeing a man clinging to the back bumper reaching forward and the pink of Jackie’s dress draped over JFK. We then realized what had happened, that he was shot. The word may have also been in the crowd by then, I don’t know.
David Haymes, MD
We then returned to our car and cut across town to the Merchandise Mart on Stemmons Expressway while the motorcade wound its way through downtown. We parked near Harry Hines and walked to Stemmons and stood next to a telephone pole in front of the Merchandise Mart that still stands. As the motorcade approached we waved in anticipation. The motorcade didn’t slow and sped past us allowing only a glimpse of the limousine. Over the years what we saw and what we think we saw, have become inseparably mixed. I’ve always told people that we saw the president after he had been shot and Jackie hovering over him but I can’t be sure. All we knew was that something untoward had happened, possibly that someone had gotten sick. As we raced to our car we asked a motorcycle officer what had happened and he said he didn’t know but the motorcade was going to Parkland Hospital. So we drove to Parkland (I have no idea where we parked) and headed to the emergency room but were barred from entering so we raced up stairs to try another entry point and that’s when we heard. We passed a nurse on the stairs who said so clinically, “Kennedy’s dead and they’re taking Connally to surgery.” We gave up our mission and gathered in front of the emergency room with all the other stunned students, faculty, police, and citizens. I don’t remember much about the day after that.
Chapter 3
PARKLAND AND SOUTHWESTERN
It was Friday, and the weekly internal medicine death conference on Parkland’s sixth floor was winding down toward a merciful end. As always, whose death it was depended on which intern or resident’s case had been selected for laser dissection by Donald Seldin, chairman of internal medicine. Arguably one of the world’s greatest teachers of medicine, his ferocity and inquisitorial zeal left conference participants bruised and bloody. Recently, one beneficiary of this conference (as well as the “sunshine rounds” Seldin held at 6:00 a.m.) told me he bribed the chief resident with a bottle of scotch to put his chart on the bottom of the stack!
Four floors below, Dr. Robert McClelland, professor of surgery was showing surgical films to trainees in the operating room conference room, when he “heard a knock at the door.” Reports differ as to who summoned McClelland. One recalls surgery professor Malcolm Perry entering the room, saying softly, “The president’s been shot and they’re bringing him here.” McClelland recalls surgery resident Charles Crenshaw urgently beckoning him into the hall.
Many, like senior surgery resident Ron Jones, were having what passed as food in the Parkland cafeteria. Hearing the frantic staccato of emergency pages, he called the hospital operator and was told, “The president has been shot and they are bringing him to the emergency room and need physicians.”
At Southwestern Medical School, only a hundred yards away, some of my sophomore classmates were waiting in our classroom for a pathology exam while others believed they were about to hear a lecture from Kemp Clark, who would never show up for it. Rick Cohen and I thought we remember sitting in the Parkland library when the frantic pages started, and we seem to recall Clark hurrying out after somebody ran up to him with the news. The freshmen were in the anatomy lab—some even managed to keep on with their dissections until mid-afternoon, listening to history unfold on the radio. Most of us, though, sprinted over to Parkland to join the death vigil outside the Parkland ER entrance. The CBS film of that moment shows our classmate Cervando Martinez hanging on to a “KEEP RIGHT” sign in the parking lot, as though the weight of that moment made it hard to stand unaided. He had seen the president at Love Field that morning, witnessed the blood drenched presidential limousine race by on the Stemmons Freeway, and now the dreadful finality of 1:00 p.m. when we learned our president was dead.
The Parkland Hospital of the 1960s appears in this aerial shot. The oblong drive to the right leads to Southwestern Medical School, then only a few years old. The Cary and Hoblitzel buildings connect the medical school to Parkland. An underground tunnel ran under these buildings from the medical school to the hospital, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis a year before the assassination, emergency supplies were stored there. Southwestern was to become a world-class medical school, home to five Nobel Prize winners.
Ron Jones, MD
(oral history courtesy of the Sixth Floor Museum)
I don’t think that Parkland Hospital was as well-known prior to 1963 as it became known afterwards, although it was becoming recognized as a major teaching institution and particularly noted for its management of severely injured patients and the so-called “trauma” patient.
Sam Dorfman, MD
The first we (the class) knew was the sirens as they emanated from town and then, even in the anatomy lab, we heard that the president had been shot and was en route to Parkland. While we were working on our cadavers, we kept an ear “glued” to the radio and eventually heard that he was dead. No one felt like working, so we left about three that afternoon.
Gerald Hill, MD
I was eating a ten cent lunch bag, which consisted of Fritos and a tuna sandwich, in the lecture room at noon. A classmate came in and told the four of us that Kennedy had been shot. He said the word was Secret Service shot the front up on a building. We hee-hawed at first, then went directly out the doors of the room to the grassy slope overlooking the ER entrance. . . . We saw some of the coming and going. He was already in the ER.
Donald Seldin, MD
Every Friday the Department of Medicine held a death conference in a large room which was located just one floor above the emergency room. In the middle of the conference one of our faculty members, Dr. Dan Foster, entered the room and interrupted the conference with the statement, “President Kennedy and Governor Connally have both been shot and are in our emergency room. I think the president is dying and Governor Connally is wounded in the arm.” Dr. Foster looked pale and shaken; there was a stunned silence in the room.
Dr. Madison and I left the conference immediately and went down to the emergency room where there was chaos. Several Secret Service agents were moving about with machine guns in their hands. In the far end of the room was the president, who was attended by Dr. Kemp Clark, chief of neurosurgery and Dr. Pepper Jenkins, chief of anesthesiology. Dr. Jenkins was administering oxygen while Dr. Clark, Dr. McClelland, and Dr. Baxter were attending to the head wound.
I had heard a rumor to the effect that the president might have been suffering from adrenal insufficiency and wanted to make certain that he received large doses of hydrocortisone. It turned out that this had already been administered by Dr. Carrico, a surgical resident.
Dr. Jenkins was shaking his head muttering, “Last Rites.” Mrs. Kennedy was sitting limply in a chair, her skirt spattered with blood and some buttery-looking material, presumably the president’s brain tissue. Shortly after I arrived at the president’s side, he was pronounced dead by Dr. Jenkins. I felt disarrayed and ineffectual and left the emergency room with a stunned feeling of incomprehension and agitation.
Daniel Foster, MD
On November 22, 1963, I was attending the weekly clinicopathologic conference of the Department of Internal Medicine presided over by Dr. Donald W. Seldin, the chairman of the Internal Medicine Department. I was seated immediate
ly in front of the door of the Doctors’ Dining Room when I heard a knock on the door. I opened it and my close friend, Dr. John Brown, a rheumatologist, stood there. With no explanation he said the president had been shot and brought to Parkland Memorial Hospital. I came back into the dining room and Dr. Seldin said, “Dr. Foster, what is wrong?” (He later told me I was very pale.) The conference was canceled and Dr. Seldin headed to the emergency room. I was not involved in the remainder of the events.
I was a close friend of Dr. Jim Carrico, the chief resident of surgery. He was working in the surgery clinic and had been called to the emergency room to see two Parkland patients, one with a mechanical intestinal obstruction, the second with a thrombophlebitis with infection. He took another resident with him. There was no time to care for the Parkland patients because the mortally wounded president arrived. He was the first to see him and injected him with hydrocortisone, remembering that the president had adrenal insufficiency (Addison’s disease).
When the presidential party left he returned to the patient with intestinal obstruction and operated on her.
We did not learn until a few days later that two other famous persons also died on November 22, 1963: the author/theologian, C. S. Lewis, and the author Aldous Leonard Huxley, whose best known novel was Brave New World.
Bob Persillin, MD
As a fellow in rheumatology at the time, my recollections are clear. Certainly you will hear my story many times over in many different forms.
Ironically, it was the time of the Department of Medicine death conference at Parkland when JFK was brought to the ER. At that very excellent teaching conference, presided over by Dr. Seldin, patients who died in the hospital were presented and their care defended. Residents and even attending cowered at the scorn from His Holiness.
A junior assistant professor, Dr. John Baum, chronically late to the conference, was on his way when he was diverted by the commotion in the ER. When told what was transpiring, he rushed to the death conference glass door and hurriedly beckoned Dr. Seldin who ran to the ER, but quickly returned as the outcome was already clear.
H. Wayne Smith, MD
I was in my second year of internal medicine residency. Each Friday at noon we had a death conference with case presentations by house staff and discussion by one of the staff members. Dr. Don Seldin was talking when Dr. Dan Foster came in the room—white as a sheet—and announced that the president had been shot. The conference was immediately adjourned and Dr. Seldin immediately left.
Everyone was in shock. What I witnessed next was chaos in the halls of Parkland—TV commentators, media members, and miles of cables up and down the halls.
Rex Cole, MD
I was a third year medical student then. I was on the internal medicine rotation. We were in the chart room on the sixth floor and it was about noon. There was a conference in session and it was concluding. I was leaning against the wall and could see out the open windows toward the front of Parkland. I saw two black limousines speed by and proceed to the rear of the hospital. I remember thinking that was strange because I had never seen a limousine at Parkland before.
Shortly thereafter, I went down to the cafeteria to eat alone. As I was sitting there I heard the hospital operator page Dr. Tom Shires stat to the emergency room. Now that was truly out of the ordinary. Then I recall she paged stat to the emergency room in rapid succession Dr. Malcolm Perry, Dr. Kemp Clark (whom we naturally called “Man Super”), and I believe Dr. Charles Baxter. I thought something big must be happening. I noticed nothing out of the ordinary at that time.
Then I went back to the sixth floor. I saw the intern on our service, Ron Prati, in the hallway and he said, “Man! What a day!” I asked him what he meant and he said, “They shot Kennedy.” I remember being confused, thinking that we didn’t have a patient named Kennedy. Then he told me it was the president.
I recall an eerie silence on the floor the rest of the afternoon. There were no requests for PRN meds or other requests for service by the patients on the floor. Later I thought they were probably thinking about something other than themselves.
Michael Ellsasser, MD
In November 1963 Don Gilliard and I were third year ophthalmology residents, recently returning to Parkland from our V.A. rotation. On November 22, we were eating lunch in the cafeteria with Dr. John Lynn, who had been installed as the first full-time chief of ophthalmology in our absence. Getting better acquainted with one another, we had difficulty believing the rumor that quickly spread over the room that President Kennedy had been shot. In a few short minutes, however, we heard several sirens, and we ran to the windows overlooking the ER entrance. The presidential vehicles roared in, in apparent panic. I’ve never witnessed such pandemonium.
Harry Eastman, MD
At the time President Kennedy was brought to Parkland, I was a senior medical student eating lunch on the floor above the emergency room with Charles Jenkins and Bill Scroggie. We heard the news and ran to the emergency room.
At that time Parkland ER had two trauma rooms—one was crowded with people and we could not see in the room, but were asked not to go in unless we were involved in the care of the president, so we did not. The other room appeared almost empty (we were not close), and Governor John Connally lay on a gurney with only perhaps one person attending to him. We didn’t go in that room either.
Bob Vaughan, MD
My recollections of November 22, 1963, were punctuated by chaos and confusion as i remember that day. our assembled class was receiving a lecture in the medical school auditorium by Dr. Kemp Clark, chief of neurosurgery, when he was interrupted abruptly by a stat page to the Parkland emergency room. our class spilled out into the hallway to learn that all Clinical Chairs were paged stat to the PMh eR including the surgery chairman, Dr. Tom Shires. That never, ever happens . . . but it did!
Ron Jones, MD
(oral history courtesy of the Sixth Floor Museum)
I would like to have seen the parade, but that morning I had surgery to perform and just couldn’t get free. I came in that morning fairly routinely, and we had performed a vascular procedure—Dr. Perry and I had. And we had just completed that and had gone downstairs to the cafeteria when this event unfolded.
The reason that I answered the phone was that they were paging overhead, “Dr. Tom Shires, stat. Dr. Kemp Clark, stat.” Dr. Shires was chief . . . chairman of the department of surgery. Dr. Kemp Clark was chairman of the division of neurosurgery. And several other physicians on the full-time attending staff were being paged stat. That was highly unusual. And as a matter of fact, I happen to know that Dr. Shires was out of town that day, and Dr. Perry and I were across the table from each other and began to look in some wondering astonishment as to why this was happening. And I said, “I’m going to go call the operator and see what’s going on,” and so, I actually called her. And she said, “Dr. Jones, the president’s been shot, and they’re bringing him to the emergency room.” To my knowledge, that was the first indication that the staff at Parkland knew that anything had happened, and I presume that she had been called by the police or Secret Service to notify that they were en route to the hospital.
I hung up the phone and turned around and noticed a table. This was a fairly large cafeteria. And just a few feet away behind me sat Dr. M. T. Jenkins, who . . . [was] better known as “Pepper” Jenkins, and he was head of the department of anesthesia, and Miss Audrey Bell, who was the operating room supervisor at Parkland. And so, people were beginning to look at me at that time from . . . employees in the cafeteria, knowing that something must be going on. I went over to that table, and I said, “You aren’t going to believe this, but the president’s been shot and they’re bringing him to the emergency room.” And Dr. Jenkins said, “Well, I’ll get an anesthesia machine from the operating room and bring it right down.” And Miss Bell said, “I’ll get an operating room ready.”
Another person at that table, I think, was Dr. George Beck, who was another anesthesiologist. And ab
out that time, coming up the hall or the aisle in the cafeteria was Dr. Perry, with whom I had been eating, and Dr. James “Red” Duke, who was one of the junior residents at that time. And both of them asked me what was going on, and I said, “Well, let’s go on out the backdoor, but the president’s been shot. And they want some people in the emergency room.” And so, we went out the back of the cafeteria and down some back steps because we were on the . . . just one floor . . . we were on the ground floor or the first floor, and the emergency room was on the ground floor. So, we went down one floor, and we entered directly into the front part of the emergency room.
Ron Jones, MD
(from Baylor Reflections)
On November 22nd, 1963, as a young chief surgery resident at Parkland Hospital having lunch in the cafeteria with Dr. Malcolm Perry, I suddenly heard several pages for various department chairmen over the loud speakers. This was before the age of beepers, and messages were obtained by prominently displayed lighted signs or the overhead speaker pages. I went to a telephone in the cafeteria, called the operator and asked why she was paging so many chairmen stat. She replied, “The president has been shot and they’re bringing him to the emergency room and need physicians.”
