TRAIN OF SORROW O
Fifty years after Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, two new exhibits focus on the American mourners who saw him off
N June 8, 1968, 14-year-old Barbara Krauss picked up her saxophone and headed to what was sure to be the strangest, and saddest, gig in her budding music career. Robert F. Kennedy had been killed two days before, and the train taking his body from New York’s Penn Station to Washington, DC, for burial was passing through her town. Barbara was one of 25 New Brunswick, NJ, middle- and highschool musicians who volunteered to play as the train rolled by.
“The train station was packed — it was just wall-to-wall people,” she tells The Post. “I think the most stunning thing, looking back at it, was that it was all kinds of people, all ages, all colors . . . And they were absolutely silent. There was no shoving, no pushing, everybody was wonderful.”
The now-64-year-old Barbara Santoro and her husband, Nick — who played trumpet that day — were among the estimated 1 million people who waited in the scorching sun to bid farewell to the beloved Democratic senator and presidential hopeful. Fifty years later, two New York City institutions pay tribute to those mourners.
“Paul Fusco: RFK Funeral Train,” at Danziger Gallery through June 22, spotlights legendary lensman Fusco’s snapshots of grieving bystanders that he captured from inside the train. And through Sept. 2, the International Center of Photography Museum will screen “RFK Funeral Train: The People’s View,” Rein Jelle Terpstra’s impressionistic, multiscreen film collage, which uses photos, home movies and testimonials to re-create the feeling of waiting and watching that day.
“It was a labor of love,” says Terpstra, who was inspired by Fusco’s photo series and spent three years tracking down eyewitnesses, including the Santoros, whose trumpet and sax you can hear in the film. “Robert Kennedy represented hope and change, and inspired so many.”
Devoted bystanders waited hours for the delayed train to arrive.
“It was like forever,” recalls Nick Santoro, a music educator now living in Milltown, NJ. “We played for like 45, 50 minutes, and the directors from the TV stations, who were there with their cameras on the other side of the track, kept yelling, ‘Keep playing!’ because we were the background music for the commentators. We ended up playing about 2 ¹/ hours, with maybe a 10-minute break.”
“It was very hot that day,” says Michael Scott, who’d just turned 15 and was living in Maryland when he and his mother drove out to see the funeral train pass by. “I felt like I had to pay my respects.”
Scott, now 64 and a sales manager in Oakland, Calif., tells The Post that, as the son of a member of the NAACP, seeing RFK’s casket in the last car was profound.
“That casket was the hopes and dreams of a lot of people — farm workers, soldiers fighting in Vietnam, us,” says Scott. “I didn’t cry then, but I cry thinking about it now.”
The journey took eight hours. As day turned to dusk, Americans from all walks of life came out to grieve together, but also to show their love and solidarity.
“There’s an emotion behind [the images],” says gallery owner James Danziger, who organized the Fusco exhibit and loaned some photos to ICP for its show. “Knowing why these people were out there, it’s just incredibly moving, even 50 years later.”
“Paul Fusco: RFK Funeral Train,” through June 22 at Danziger Gallery, 95 Rivington St.; DanzigerGallery.com. “RFK Funeral Train: The People’s View,” through Sept. 2 at ICP, 250 Bowery; ICP.org