JFK assassination remembered
as he filed the news to the world, and then ran out to the Texas School Book Depository to track down more information.
Later, at police headquarters, she said, she witnessed “just a wild, crazy chaotic, unfathomable scene.”
Reporters had filled the hallways where an officer walked through with Oswald’s rifle held aloft. The suspect’s mother and wife arrived, and at one point authorities held a news conference where Oswald was asked questions by reporters.
“I was just with a great mass of other reporters, just trying to find any bit of information,” she said.
Two days later, Simpson was covering Oswald’s transfer from police headquarters to the county jail, when nightclub owner Jack Ruby burst forth from a gaggle of news reporters and shot the suspect dead.
As police officers wrestled with Ruby on the floor, Simpson rushed to a nearby bank of phones “and started dictating everything I saw to the AP editors,” she said. In that moment, she was just thinking about getting out the news.
“As an AP reporter, you just go for the phone, you can’t process anything at that point,” she said.
Simpson said she must have heard the gunshot but she can’t remember it.
“Probably Ruby was 2 or 3 feet away from me but I didn’t know him, didn’t see him, didn’t see him come out from the crowd of reporters,” she said.
Simpson’s recollections are included in an oral history collection at the Sixth Floor Museum that now includes about 2,500 recordings, Fagin said.
The museum curator said Simpson is “a terrific example of somebody who was just where the action was that weekend and got caught up in truly historic events while simply doing her job as a professional journalist.”
Fagin said oral histories are still being recorded. Many of the more recent ones have been with people who were children in the ’60s and remembered hearing about the assassination while at school.
“It’s a race against time really to try to capture these recollections,” Fagin said.