JFK & LBJ- at the The Alamo,
September 1960
© Copyright Dec 29. 2005 by Harold Arnold
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Just a few weeks after
their August 1960 nomination, JFK and LBJ came to San Antonio where they
addressed a large crowd of enthusiastic supporters and a few
opposition activist in front of the Alamo. I left my office a few
blocks away about an hour before the scheduled arrival time with my Licia
M-3 rangefinder cameral loaded with the end of a roll of Kodak Etkachrome
color positive film . Already a substantial crowd of people were
gathering. Looking for a suitable spot, I observed that several
young guys had climbed up the inclined plain on the South face of the
Cenotaph Monument in the plaza in front of the old 18th century shrine to a ledge some
12
feet above the ground. I followed getting an unique elevated seat
some 50 feet from the street along which the Candidates would
arrive. From my perch on the ledge with my feet dangling below I made the picture on the left as the two candidates arrived sitting side-by-side in the back seat of an open convertible with the crowd pressings close along both sides of the moving vehicle. Though I had a 135 mm lens for the Licia, all these pictures seem to have been made with the 50 mm summicron. As a result the candidates taken from a distance of some 50 feet showed up rather small in the picture center. (Continued )
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.Another unfortunate fact was that the film was Ecktachrome positive film that turns out to be particularly difficult to scan even with the special professional scanning equipment used by my nephew, a free lance professional photographer. The resulting 35mm slides showed up well when projected on a screens, but I never had prints and scanning slides requires the special equipment that was used. Finally after 45 years. during, last 15 of which, the slides were stored in the un-air-conditioned loft in my tractor garage in Guadalupe County, I re-discovered them last fall and over Christmas my nephew scanned them to make theses pictures which though poor in quality are interesting to those of us who remember the time... In any case the figures of JFK and LBJ in the first picture and LBJ in the final picture below are clearly recognizable. The second picture to the right was taken before the candidates arrived when three guys with the "Nixon" signs streaked through the crowd They simply ran through the crowd and disappeared after crossing Houston Street. Their appearance sparked a loud cry of "Boos" from the mostly partisan crowed coupled to a few cheers from a few from the party opposite.. |
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In
the picture
left above, the sign silhouetted against the ivy covered wall just left of
the center of the picture again is a measure of the opposition. It
read something like, "We don't want the Kremlin or the
Vatican." The vertical cylindrical shaped object just left
of the Alamo was a primitive NAASA rocket that at the time was the state of
the art basis of the U.S. space program.
In the last picture (above right) LBJ again appears though JFK at his right (to the left of him in the picture) has been obscured by the crowd. |
The candidates did not stay long before departing for their next engagement and the crowd began to disburse. I shimmied my body back along the ledge to where I could slide down the incline face to the ground. Walking along the side of the cenotaph, I observed a visible black line about 18 inches below the ledge on which I and some half dozen of us had sat. It was made by our heals rubbing the marble as our feet dangled from our seats. That line remained visible for the next decade until either a special maintence scrub-down or the accumulate winds and rain of time finally obliterated it. |
