Report and audio exclusive: The JFK tape

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

By Ben Cannon

President Kennedy visited Jackson Hole two months before his assassination. Nearly 47 years later, a radio recording surfaces.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming - Before 1963, no American president had ever visited Grand Teton National Park. That changed when a DC-6 carrying President John F. Kennedy landed at Jackson Hole Airport on Sept. 25 of that year. He would be assassinated two months later.

Though many today still remember Kennedy’s visit, the occasion may come as news to a number of Jackson Hole residents. The moment is a footnote in American history.

But recently an audio tape has surfaced that brings JFK’s historic visit back to life. The recording contains Kennedy’s voice and documents his first impressions of Jackson Hole and the Tetons.

One reporter at the airport that day estimated that more than 500 people had gathered to greet or catch a glimpse of the wildly popular president. The reporter was a middle-age radio broadcaster named Gene Shumate. Only a year before, Shumate had brought radio to Jackson Hole when he began KSGT, an AM station that still operates today.

Shumate, a former Marine who fought in Europe, returned from the war and cut his teeth as a sports announcer calling Chicago Cubs and University of Iowa football games. He went West to buy his first radio station in Rexsburg, Idaho, then began one in Salmon before he came to Wyoming to start KSGT. The call letters stood for “shadow of the Grand Tetons,” said his daughter, Leslie Shumate, who now lives in Salmon.

Kennedy’s visit to Jackson Hole was part of a conservation tour that included stops in a handful of areas of scenic and natural resources interest

Before he came here, the president was in North Dakota to give a speech in support of a dam project. In Wisconsin, he visited a group of islands in Lake Superior that were later designated the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. At a nuclear plant in Hanford, Wash., he participated in a ground breaking ceremony for new atomic reactors at a site that 20 years earlier had been the site of secretive Manhattan Project experiments.



Before Kennedy’s DC-6 landed in Jackson Hole early in the evening of Sept. 25, the president paid brief visits to Cheyenne and Laramie, and toured the construction site of the Yellowtail Dam on the Bighorn River, which flows through northern Wyoming.

As a member of the press, Shumate was allowed to join a crowd that would first greet Kennedy after he stepped off the plane. Shumate would broadcast the president’s arrival live over KSGT. A seasoned radio man who could be aggressive when it came to getting the big story, Shumate was prepared to quickly interview the president when Kennedy came to his spot in line.

The broadcast was recorded, but somewhere over the years the tape was forgotten about and eventually lost. About a decade ago, however, a former KSGT station manager named Dick Carr found an old reel-to-reel in the basement of his Idaho Falls home. Carr, who was once married to one of Shumate’s daughters, was surprised to discover the tape contained not only the JFK segment, but also an interview he himself had done with John Glenn, who visited Jackson Hole not long after he became the first human to orbit the Earth.

“I was surprised it survived for so many years,” said Carr, now 70. When not properly stored, audio tape will eventually deteriorate, but Carr discovered that, apart from a few imperfections, the recording was still clear. The tape had more than survived for decades in a cardboard box in Carr’s damp basement; it was still of a good quality.

A few years after he found the tape, Carr gifted copies of it to his two sons. One of them, Don Carr, who is Gene Shumate’s grandson, has lived in the Jackson Hole area for much of his life.

Don Carr sat on the tape for a few years before he gave it to an Idaho man who does audio engineering for National Public Radio. Another couple of years elapsed before the man returned the recording, but Carr eventually received a remastered version on CD. Five years after he received a tape from his dad, Carr could finally listen to his grandfather interviewing JFK.

Residents who couldn’t make it to the Jackson Hole Airport on Sept. 25, 1963 tuned in to 1340 AM. They would have heard Shumate deliver a play-by-play description of the scene as Air Force One touched down just before dusk on that clear Indian Summer evening.

“The sun is just about down to the rim on the Teton range,” Shumate said as the president’s DC-6 prepared to land. “There could not have been a more beautiful weather day than this for the president’s arrival.”

Shumate’s broadcast paints a detailed portrait. He names some of the local officials awaiting Kennedy’s arrival. Then, with a sportscaster’s abilty for relaying the drama of an important moment, he announces the plane is approaching. Now it’s touching down. Now it’s taxiing toward the crowd.

After a few minutes, voices grow as Kennedy begins to make his way along a rail that modestly separates him from the crowd. Shumate can be heard chuckling after a young woman from the Pink Garter Theatre attempts to put a pink garter on the president.

But Kennedy “backs off,” Shumate says. “He shakes hands with her but he won’t accept the pink garter.”

Barely audible voices start to come into focus, and then the unmistakable Kennedy Brogue appears.

A man standing next to Shumate tells the president he drove from Rock Springs to be there. Kennedy asks him how long the drive was.

Then Shumate speaks into the mic. “Mr. President, can you comment on the scenery?”

Kennedy says, “It’s beautiful, I’m delighted we came down here.” He nearly divides the word ‘here’ into two syllables.

Shumate remarks to Kennedy that it’s his first time in Jackson Hole.

“Yes, I guess I’m the first president, I guess, since Chester Author,” Kennedy said, referring to the president who passed through the area with a group of cavalrymen in 1883, 46 years before Grand Teton National Park was established.

“But now they’re all going to have to come because [inaudible] I don’t know any part of the country that’s more beautiful.”

JFK’s prediction came true: nearly every sitting president after him has paid a visit to Grand Teton National Park, according to park spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs.
“It’s nice to say that we’ve been a park of presidents,”‘ Skaggs said. She added that, apart from the current one, the only sitting presidents who didn’t visit were Lyndon Johnson, who became president under the tragic circumstances of Kennedy’s assassination, and Reagan, who came after he was out of office.
Shumate tells listeners that Kennedy looks tired as he makes his way down the line, but he doesn’t seem to pass a single extended hand without shaking it first. The president even occasionally reaches over the rail to shake the hand of someone standing in the second row. A boy of about six even gets a hand clasp from JFK. Today that boy would be a man in his 50s.

Dick Carr was with Shumate at the airport taking photos. He recently described what it felt like to be in the crowd that greeted Kennedy that day.

“They were all excited to see him because of course everybody loved him,” Carr said. “Here was this nice, young, good looking tanned guy who looked more like a movie star than the president.”

Carr described Shumate, who would later become his father-in-law, as a reporter with the gusto to capture the moment when others might not have.
“He was a pretty aggressive radio reporter,” Carr said. “He just stuck a mic in Kennedy’s face.”

Kennedy left the airport on a Marine Corps helicopter that took him to Jackson Lake Lodge, where he stayed in a suite with a lake view during the one night he was here. During his visit, according to an article that ran in Jackson Hole Guide the following Oct. 3 "Kennedy conferred with park and forest officials on the subject of recreation development.”

While the recording of Shumate’s colorful broadcast sheds a previously forgotten light on JFK’s visit, it was a single reporter’s account of the day, and another reporter on the scene reported at least one conflicting detail.

In a cover story that ran the day after JFK arrived, the Guide reported that “probably 3,000 cheering citizens” welcomed the president at the airport – a much larger estimate than Shumate’s comparatively paltry 500. However, maybe the benefit of the doubt should go to Shumate, who had experience with the large crowds that turned out for Hawks and Cubs games. Meanwhile, in 1963, few Jackson Hole residents had ever seen thousands of people at once.

But Kennedy’s effusive comment to Shumate about the beauty of Jackson Hole is echoed by the Guide, which reported that he was overheard making similar statements throughout his stay. “As the President departed,” the Oct. 3 article stated, “he vowed to come to Wyoming and the land of the Tetons, which had given him a tremendous welcome.”

He was shot dead in Dallas on Nov. 22. JHW

Top photo:  Jackson Hole Historical Society archives.
Bottom three photos: Courtesy Leslie Shumate

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Report and audio exclusive: The JFK tape | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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