Brooks marks JFK's 40th anniversary visit

  • Published
  • By Rudy Purificato
  • 311th Human Systems Wing
BROOKS CITY-BASE, Texas (AFPN) --  Current and past members of the Brooks community gathered here Nov. 21 to mark the 40th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s historic “cap over the wall” speech.

Kennedy’s 1963 keynote address dedicated the Aerospace Medical Center and validated America’s commitment to space exploration underscoring the Air Force’s contributions to putting a man on the moon.

The commemoration ceremony featured the unveiling of a permanent display, just a few yards from where Kennedy delivered his speech.

“The 3-by-4-foot display (features) text on the history of the ‘100 area’ and an aerial photograph of the 15 buildings that comprised the Aerospace Medical Center,” said Shelia Klein, Brooks Heritage Foundation executive director.

The event showcased the base’s current contributions to aerospace research and technology development. It also reunited several key people who supported the Kennedy visit.

“Colonel John Pickering and I wrote Kennedy’s speech,” said retired Lt. Gen. George Schafer, who at the time of the visit was the Aerospace Medical Division’s vice commander. “We sent the speech up to him. We were told he got the speech just before getting on the plane (to fly to Texas).”

Schafer and Pickering said they were interested in how much of their original speech had survived Kennedy’s edits and how well the president would deliver it.

“He added a couple of things in the introduction and (also) added ‘the cap over the wall’ (tag line),” Schafer said. But he said most of their speech was left intact.

“He gave the speech as if it was extemporaneous,” Schafer said. “He only mispronounced one word -- toxicology.”

Schafer met Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, as they were walking toward the commander’s office.

“I escorted them into (Maj. Gen. Theodore) Bedwell’s office. (The president) looked great and better than on (television). He looked younger, more vigorous and very polished,” Schafer said.

Hazel Holden, a retired 311th HSW protocol officer who was a U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine secretary in 1963, said she remembers the Kennedy entourage.

“There was a crowd of civilians who lined up along both sides of (the road) outside the (base) gate,” Holden said. “They weren’t allowed on base, but wanted to see him.”

Holden, whose boss, Capt. Jim Endicott, was officer of the day, said she was given more freedom of movement than most Brooks employees during the visit.

“(Endicott) invited me to go with him throughout the base. A lot of people who worked on base brought their children here to see the president,” Holden said.

“Everybody was excited about him being here. The world was still innocent back then. We didn’t know that his visit was the beginning of the end of that innocence,” she said, referring to Kennedy’s assassination the next day.

For a short exhilarating time, Holden said she and thousands of Brooks employees focused their excitement on the president and first lady who briefly visited a research experiment.

Kennedy had heard about a Brooks space-cabin experiment involving several airmen sequestered inside an altitude chamber, said Lt. Col. John Stea, commemoration ceremony co-chairman. During Stea’s investigation to reconstruct the Kennedy visit in preparation for the 40th anniversary, he located one of the airman involved in that experiment. Today the airman is a professor of soil conservation in California.

“Dr. Ronald Taskey was at the time of Kennedy’s visit a 19-year-old … basic trainee who had volunteered for the experiment,” Stea said. “He was surprised that I had contacted him about (Kennedy’s) visit, which evoked in him a lot of memories.”

It is stories such as these that Stea said he wants to showcase and promote as a Brooks historical legacy for current and future Air Force generations.