farragutpress

Grant saw President wheeled in at Parkland

Villages of Farragut resident was on duty at Dallas hospital when President Kennedy was rushed there after shots Nov. 22, 1963

January 8, 2025 by Tammy Cheek

Many people are asked, “Where were you?” when an impactful, defining moment happened in history.

Two Villages of Farragut residents, Thomas and Marilyn Grant, both 94, certainly know where they were when the late President John F. Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963.

Thomas, a radiologist in residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, was their when the president was wheeled into the trauma unit. Meanwhile, Marilyn was watching the tragedy unfold on television.

The 46-year-old president was riding in a Lincoln convertible in a motorcade through Dallas, next to his wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, when one bullet pierced Kennedy’s back and exited his neck before a second shot to his head.

“I was actually across the street in a little sandwich shop, at noon, with another radiologist,” he recalled. “And, on the TV, they were showing Kennedy in the parade, going through Dallas. All of a sudden they said ‘he’s been shot.’

“On the TV, you could see the car pull off (the road),” Thomas added. “Both of us, the other radiologist and I, we decided if (Kennedy) wasn’t shot really bad, they’d take him to (St. Paul) Catholic hospital because he was Catholic.” Grant also was in residency at St. Paul.

“I said, ‘If he’s bad, they’ll bring him to Parkland,’” a trauma hospital.

They returned back to work at Parkland, where “the radiology department was on the ground floor and, of course, the emergency room was on the ground floor, adjacent to each other,” he said. “I just walked into the doctor’s entrance and went on down the hall to radiology, and everyone was running around, scurrying. They decided they were bringing Kennedy there (to Parkland).

“A little bit later, very shortly, they of course pulled up and they wheeled him in (on a gurney),” Thomas added. “Now, you couldn’t see him because they had him covered with a sheet.

“They rushed him right straight into Trauma Room No. 1, which was the big one, and shut the door, Just about a minute, maybe two minutes later, they brought Mrs. Kennedy in and they sat her in a chair, right outside the trauma room where he was. The Secret Service guy stood beside her, and she sat there the whole time.

Thomas observed Mrs. Kennedy “was in shock. People would come up and say something to her every now and then, but mostly she just sat there in her little blue dress.

“In a few minutes, they called. They wanted X-rays, so an X-ray technician went over to the room,” he added. “This particular room had X-ray facilities already there. (The technician) came back, probably a good 30 minutes later with a whole stack of (X-ray) cassettes. They ran them through the machine that develops X-rays.

“The Secret Service man stood there and collected the X-rays as they came out of the developing machine, so we never saw the X-rays. They took the X-rays back to the (trauma) room. The technician told us, ‘The man’s dead.’ He said the whole back of his head was blown off.”

However, “it took them another hour (or more) before the announced (to the public) that he was dead,” Thomas said. “They had to get everything lined up. They had to get (then Vice President) Lyndon Johnson. They had to get a judge to swear (Johnson) in.

“They wheeled (Kennedy) out and cleaned that room,” he added. “Everything in that room they took so there would be no souvenirs, you know.

“Of course, Mrs. Kennedy went with them, and off they went. They went to the airplane and Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as a president in the airplane by the judge.

“With Mrs. Kennedy watching,” Marilyn added.

“In all this hub-ub, the Governor of Texas (John Bowden Connally Jr.) was also shot, but nobody paid any attention to him,” Thomas said. “He was in the front seat of that car when Kennedy got shot.”

Through all that, Marilyn “was at home and saw (President Kennedy) on the television,” she recalled. “Actually, I saw him get shot (on the television).”

However, “my sister was at work and she and a friend left to go eat lunch,” Marilyn related. “They realized that he was coming right around the corner (in the motorcade), where she was standing. She’s not very tall, so (people) put her out in front. She said she could have reached out and touched him.

“The streets were lined with people, trying to get a look at him,” she added. “They had two cars. Not only (Kennedy) was there, but the governor was there; the vice president and his wife were there; Mrs. Kennedy was there; and the governor’s wife was there.”

“They were in convertibles,” Thomas said.

While the sister did not see the shooting, “when (she and a friend) got to the place where they were going to eat lunch, (the customers) were all talking about. On the news, they had seen where he had been shot and killed,” Marilyn said.

Marilyn’s biggest take-away of the tragedy was Dallas being blamed for the shooting.

“We felt like that people in the news, they made it sound like it was Dallas’s fault that (Kennedy) got killed there,” she said. “It wasn’t Dallas’ fault; it just happened to happen in Dallas.”

She remembered she was teaching Sunday School when she learned Lee Harvey Oswald, who was arrested for shooting President Kennedy, was shot and killed by Jack Ruby while in Dallas Police custody. Ruby, of course, was immediately arrested.

“I thought, ‘My gosh, what more can happen?’” Marilyn exclaimed.

Couple’s background

Both being born and raised in Dallas, the Grants have been in The Villages for about five years, moving here from Shreveport, Louisiana, to be near his son and daughter-in-law, Charles and Peggy Grant, and their grandchildren.

“We were born in the hospital, not at the same time,” Thomas said. “We went to the same junior high school and high school. We were in the same class in high school.

But they waited to start dating. “We knew each other, but it was a big school,” he said.

They graduated and went to college, then met on a family vacation in Red River, New Mexico, where they started “going together.”

“We had such a good time,” Marilyn recalled, saying their parents were friends. “We square-danced … played canasta with our folks. I say, ‘we courted with our parents.’

The budding romanced continued after Thomas and Marilyn returned home.

He was going to North Texas University in Denton, and she was going to Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where she left to attend North Texas.

“I was in the Navy Reserves at the time, and they called me up to go to Korea,” Thomas said.

“I stayed and finished school,” Marilyn added.

After Korea, Thomas came home, continued college and the couple married.

“I was still in the Navy when we got married,” he said.

After Thomas got out of the Navy in 1953, he went into pre-med in college and graduated in 1958. He then attended Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans.

“By then, we had two children,” he said.

After residency, the couple moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, where they resided for 50 years while he practiced radiology.