486 Frames

On this day in 1963 President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th US president and the first (and only) Roman Catholic to hold that office, is assassinated in Dallas, Texas at the age of 46 — one bullet piercing his skull in a lethal trajectory — while riding in an open-top Lincoln Continental limousine as it moves slowly through the city streets, surrounded by adoring crowds.

Oddly, there was no live broadcast of the assassination by radio or television stations because the area through which the Presidential motorcade was traveling was not deemed important enough for such documentation.

Yet one film records the history-changing moment — made by garment manufacturer and amateur cameraman Abraham Zapruder, who happened to be standing almost exactly in front of the limousine at the exact instant the President received his fatal head wound. This silent 26.6-second 8mm piece of color footage — 486 frames taken before, during and immediately after the assassination — became known as the "Zapruder film," key evidence in chronicling the events of that black day. It was used by the Warren Commission in their investigation of the assassination — the frames involved totaling less than 1 second of the entire document.

The film shows Jacqueline Kennedy, in her pink Chanel suit (which her husband had chosen) and matching pillbox hat, scrambling across the back top of the automobile in primal desperation, towards a Secret Service agent who had jumped onto the car's runner. She wears the same clothing — splattered with her husband's dried blood — and a blank dazed expression hours later while standing aboard Air Force One by Lyndon B. Johnson's side as he is sworn in as US President #36 — his hand on JFK's own black bible (taken for the ceremony at the last moment from the white box in which it was kept on the nightstand in the Kennedys' private cabin) — before departing the Dallas Love Field Airport, the dead President in a coffin at the jet's rear. Despite repeated entreaties to do so Mrs. Kennedy refused to change her bloody clothes.

Dallas radio station KBOX-AM later recreates the sounds of the shooting on an LP-record using excerpts of news coverage of that day.

On this very same date in 1968 The Beatles release their White Album.

Bang bang shoot shoot....

This shirt, with its simple white black-bordered box — reminiscent of a film frame, an obituary notice, or a rifle's front sight — is one of the offerings in the Dimosio Clothing & Accessories CafePress.com shop. (Some items suitable only for grownups.)

[To purchase items click on the photograph or colored text links.]