Alum’s letter to Jackie among many featured in ‘Dear Mrs. Kennedy’

Forty-seven years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. It seems you can ask anyone alive then where they were when they heard Kennedy had been shot, and they can recount their story vividly to this day. In the days and weeks following Kennedy’s death, the White House received well over a million letters written to his widow, Jackie. Two authors, Jay Mulvaney and Paul De Angelis, have compiled many of those letters into a new book, Dear Mrs. Kennedy: The World Shares Its Grief, Letters November 1963.

The printed collection includes letters from many famous people of the day — Billy Graham, Adlai Stevenson, Winston Churchill, Nikita Khrushchev, Queen Elizabeth, etc. — as well as ordinary citizens affected by the president’s death. Among those was Penny Griffin Dyer, BA ’72, a future Baylor Bear but in 1963 a 13-year-old Waco resident. You’ll have to check out the book to read her letter, but here are her memories of that time.

“My dad, who worked for the Department of Justice, had arranged with a Secret Service friend of his for me, my brother, my mother and her friend to attend the Presidential Luncheon at The World Trade Center in Dallas on November 22,” recalls Dyer. “Early that morning we drove to Dallas Love Field where we were supposed to meet our Secret Service contact. I have vivid memories of the President and Mrs. Kennedy smiling and waving as they exited the plane at Love Field. We still have the 8mm movies that we took of them.”

Dyer’s family decided to skip the parade, however, and the family was still at Love Field when they heard the president had been shot. “I was very shocked and saddened, so I decided to write a letter to Mrs. Kennedy to express my sympathy to her and her young children. Since that day I have always felt a special bond to the Kennedy family and have continued to care about them and pray for them. At a very young age, this tragic event caused me to begin to grapple with the uncertainty and brevity of life that all people (both great and small) face.”

Baylor’s Poage Legislative Library holds a wide variety of documents relating to Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson (the great-grandson of Baylor’s third president, George Washington Baines). An exhibit on Johnson is on display at the library through December.

Sic ’em, Baylor keepers of history!