JFK's Utah visits chronicled on Web

With two words, a single sign captured the profound impact President John F. Kennedy had on the 125,000 Utahns who energetically lined Salt Lake City's streets for his visit in September 1963.

The plea was simple. "Come back."

"Don't worry," a smiling Kennedy said. "I will."

That promise would be lost to tragic history. Exactly eight weeks later — and 45 years ago today — JFK was dead, shot on a street in Dallas while he sat in the back of the same open limousine that had carried him through the streets of Salt Lake.

Now nearly 400 photographs of Kennedy's five Utah visits — covering his days as a Massachusetts senator to those as a presidential candidate to the presidency of the United States — have been retrieved from the Deseret News archives and digitized by amateur historian Ron Fox.

For the first time, these pictures are available for viewing online beginning next week at deseretnews.com.

Most of the images were never published and have not been seen by anyone since the photographers wrapped the rolls of negatives in now-petrified rubber bands for storage.

Deseret News photographers clearly captured the faces of literally thousands of Utahns of all ages — including hundreds of schoolchildren for whom the event was a better history lesson than they could receive in school — who stood on the parade route in 1963. Hundreds more are plainly visible in the crowds that overwhelmed the LDS Tabernacle on Temple Square on both occasions Kennedy spoke there.

"People are going to see their uncles, their aunts, their mothers and fathers and themselves," Fox said. "These images make history come alive."

The black-and-white photographs are packed with history, said Oscar McConkie, who served as Kennedy's Utah point man during his 1960 presidential campaign. McConkie appears in some of the photos and helped the Deseret News identify others.

The photographs captured the fond relationship Kennedy shared with David O. McKay, then president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In one image, Kennedy and McKay are belly laughing with their heads thrown back. There are a handful of stunning shots of Jacqueline Kennedy, just 28 when she joined JFK in Salt Lake in 1959.

And there are smiling men in the more formal dress of the time, white shirts and ties and slacks; fawning women, all smiles in dresses and hats; and children sitting on the roofs of cars and perched atop their fathers' shoulders.