John F. Kennedy made five visits to Utah as a Massachusetts senator, presidential candidate and president of the United States. Amateur historian Ron Fox found 399 images of those visits in the archives of the Deseret News. The newspaper's photographers captured the faces of thousands of Utahns who clamored to see an American icon. The newspaper is posting photo galleries from JFK visits on its Web site to remember the 45th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963.
Sept. 26 and 27, 1963
The Deseret News dispatched six photographers to chronicle the only visit John F. Kennedy made to Utah while president of the United States. He made the trip in part to fulfill a promise to the wife of LDS Church President David O. McKay, who hadn't been able to see him when he visited in 1960 as a presidential candidate.
Salt Lake City police estimated that 125,000 Utahns turned out to greet the president, from the airport to throngs who watched the presidential motorcade roll into the city to a huge crowd at the Salt Lake Tabernacle, where Kennedy denounced U.S. isolationism.
The newspaper reported that 8,000 people crammed into the Tabernacle for the speech, with another 2,500 in the Assembly Hall nearby watching on television and 5,000 more on the Temple Square grounds crowding the entrances to the Tabernacle.
The photographers captured images of all of it. When Kennedy went out in the street, he was met by a crush of people, which the newspaper called an "ocean of motion."
At the Hotel Utah, the Murray High School band and drill team performed. When Kennedy turned, waved and smiled at a baton-twirling girl, the newspaper reported that she forgot the baton she had tossed in the air and that it narrowly missed hitting her on the way down.
"He smiled at me!" she cried. "He smiled at me."
He left Utah on Friday, Sept. 27. Exactly eight weeks later, Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.