This Just in What I Couldn't Tell You on TV

ONE Oswald's MotherIn those days, I was the night police reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the newspaper in the town where I grew up. I was twenty-six years old, made $115 a week and worked the late trick, 6 P.M. to 2:30 A.M. I hung out with cops, emergency-room nurses, barmaids and other creatures of the night. Like most young reporters who covered crime, I considered myself a superb investigator, more cop than journalist. I wore a snap-brim hat, hoping I'd be mistaken for a detective, and when someone made that mistake I never corrected him. The stories I covered were an endless series of car wrecks and murders, the hours were awful, the pay was low, even by Texas newspaper standards, and I thought it was about the best job anyone could ever have. But when I heard that President Kennedy was coming to Fort Worth, I wasn't entirely happy about it. In those days, presidents didn't travel nearly as much as they do now, so it was big news for my hometown, but bad news for me. Kennedy's visit would cause no interruption in my regular schedule. The political reporters would handle Kennedy. They would not need any help from me. For a reporter, there's nothing worse than being in the middle of a big story that someone else is covering, and I was more than a little irritated. Kennedy and his entourage flew into Fort Worth late on a Thursday evening and, assignment or no assignment, once we put the paper to bed early Friday morning, I hustled over to the Press Club, which was being held open after-hours to accommodate the traveling White House press corps. The party was well under way when I got there around 2 A.M., and for me this was as good as it got. There I was, chatting up reporters I had known only for their bylines, Merriman Smith of UPI, Tom Wicker of the New York Times, Bob Pierpoint of CBS and a dozen more. Kennedy had come to Texas to heal some quarrels in the Democratic Party and to raise money for the '64 campaign, and the tour had started in Houston and San Antonio. After a Thursday-night speech in Houston, he had flown to Fort Worth to spend the night and attend an early-morning Chamber of Commerce breakfast before taking a ten-minute flight to Dallas for a parade and luncheon speech. The tour was to end with a huge fund-raising dinner in Austin. Governor John Connally had convinced Kennedy that only in Austin, the state capital, could you count on getting people from the rest of the state to come to a fund-raiser. People from Houston wouldn't go to San Antonio for a fund-raiser, Connally told Kennedy, and people from Fort Worth damn sure wouldn't go to Dallas. He was right about that. When Amon Carter was running the Star-Telegram, he made a point of taking a sack lunch when he had business in Dallas, claiming he did not care for the city's restaurants. Dallas repaid the courtesy when Fort Worth built an airport between the two cities and named it Carter Field. Dallas residents declined to use the airport, in large part because of the name, and the airport eventually failed. (There was and is such a rivalry between the two cities that the only project they ever cooperated on is the current airport. Planners were careful not to name it after anyone from either city.) The visiting reporters had no interest in our airports, of course. What they did want to know about was a local after-hours joint called the Cellar. The Cellar had no liquor license, but if you were a friend of the owner, a former stock-car racer named Pat Kirkwood, the drink of choice, Kool-Aid spiked with grain alcohol, was on the house. It was not the drinks, but the fact that the Cellar's waitresses wore only underwear, that had given the place some notoriety and the notoriety had apparently spread as far as Washington. Hippies and free love would descend on San Francisco, and Kirkwood always claimed his place was a forerunner of what was to come. WhateSchieffer, Bob is the author of 'This Just in What I Couldn't Tell You on TV' with ISBN 9780399149719 and ISBN 0399149716.