Image of the vice president's car in the motorcade on Lemmon Avenue

Thomas Charles Geron Jr. (1922-2021), a draftsman at a Dallas oil company in 1963, was an active amateur photographer. After his passing, daughter Cindy Lewis went through her father's collection of approximately 56,000 color slides and discovered two photos that he captured of the Kennedy motorcade on Lemmon Avenue, soon after making the turn onto Lemmon from Mockingbird Lane, on November 22, 1963. Cindy, a Dallas elementary school student at the time, recorded an oral history with the Museum in 2023. Her husband, David Lewis, who was attending school in Pampas, Texas, also recorded an oral history in 2023. We are grateful to Cindy for sharing this new perspective on the Kennedy motorcade nearly sixty years after the assassination. I'd also like to acknowledge researcher Randy Owen for his help identifying the location of this image on the motorcade route. - Stephen Fagin, Curator

Good photographs of Vice President Johnson's car, a 1964 steel grey Lincoln, are rare because bystanders focused so intently on the Kennedys, traveling two cars ahead with a Secret Service follow-up vehicle in between. A large number of motorcade spectators who have recorded oral histories with the Museum over the years admit that they paid no attention to the vice president's vehicle. Emerging nearly sixty years after the assassination, Thomas Geron's clear color image showing Vice President and Mrs. Johnson and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough is quite remarkable. A Dallas Times Herald photo of the vice president's empty vehicle at Parkland Memorial Hospital, with driver Hurchel Jacks standing next to the driver's side door, can be seen here: https://emuseum.jfk.org/objects/3446. - Stephen Fagin, Curator