Officer who was also killed by Oswald was from Clarksville, Texas.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a story about J.D. Tippit, a Clarksville area native who worked for the Dallas Police Department and was on duty the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Tippit was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald on the day of the Kennedy assassination. Information for this story was compiled from “Lawmakers & Lawbreakers of Red River County,—Volume II,” (2007) by M.R. Butts, a local Red River County historian. Information was also gathered from jdtippit.com.
As one of about 1,200 officers working for the Dallas Police Department on Nov. 22, 1963, former Clarksville area resident J.D. Tippit started the day fairly routinely. Tippit, by then an 11-year veteran of the police force, had decided to move to Dallas permanently in 1952 with his wife Marie and young son Allen. There, the couple would have two more kids, Brenda and Curtis.
For Tippit, the morning of Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, started out as familiar enough as any other morning, with breakfast before departing at 6:15 a.m. from his home at 238 Glencairn St. to get to the Oak Cliff Police Substation by 7 a.m.
From there, Tippit headed south in his squad car to his assigned patrol district by 7:30 a.m.
With Dallas expecting a visit by President John F. Kennedy by noon that day, 300 of the city’s 1,200 police officers received downtown assignment.
This force would aid in securing the president’s motorcade route from Dallas Love Field Airport to the Trade Mart, where Kennedy was scheduled to speak at 1 p.m.
Although Tippit wouldn’t be part of the special 300man detail, he, like many of the other patrol officers, was placed on special alert in case they were needed downtown.
Following a 10-minute coffee break at the Oak Cliff area’s Rebel Drive-in, he checked back into service at 10:40 a.m. before going back home for lunch at 11:30 a.m.
With the day taking on special importance because of the presidential visit, Tippit would have to cut his normally hour-long lunch break to just 20 minutes.
Finishing his sandwich, along with a serving of fried potatoes, Tippit reported back in service at 11:51 a.m.
Suddenly and shockingly, between 12:31p.m. and 12:42 p.m., Tippit’s radio began blaring downtown Dallas police dispatch reports of three gunshots being fired at the presidential motorcade as it slowly traversed Dealey Plaza on Elm Street. The shots were possibly coming from the Texas School Book Depository building.
By 12:45 p.m., police dispatchers broadcast a physical description of a male suspect being sought in connection with the gunfire. It was the only employee unaccounted for at the Texas School Book Depository building.
Almost immediately following this broadcast, Tippit and at least one other patrol unit received orders for dispatch to focus in on Oak Cliff’s central area. Nine minutes later, dispatch told Tippit to be available “for any emergency that might come up,” according to the Website.
For the next minutes, Tippit parked at a local filling station and watched traffic come out of downtown Dallas before driving south on Lancaster Boulevard.
By 1:08 p.m., police dispatch repeated the description of the male suspect, later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald was being sought in connection with the Dealey Plaza shooting, and by 1:14 p.m., Tippit was cruising a quiet residential roadway on 10th Street just past its intersection with Patton Street.
He spotted a male somewhat matching the description walking east in about the 400 block of 10th Street.
Upon pulling up alongside the suspect, who was near the passenger side of Tippit’s squad car, Tippit briefly spoke to the suspect through the car’s triangular vent window. Tippit then stopped and exited his patrol vehicle, then walked toward the front of the car to speak in more detail to the suspect. The suspect appeared nervous and was wearing a zipped up jacket in relatively mild weather of 68 degrees.
Seeing Tippit approach, Oswald pulled a .38-caliber revolver out and shot Tippit four times—three times in the chest and once in the side of the head after Tippit fell to the pavement.
That same dark, hectic day was Tippit’s last day on earth, and his name would soon become known throughout the world in association with Kennedy’s death.
Born on a rented cotton farm near Annona, Texas, on Sept. 18, 1924, Tippit became the oldest of five children to Edgar Lee and Lizzie Mae Tippit.
Although it’s been thought that Tippit’s initials stood for Jefferson Davis, they may not stand for anything in particular. Like other kids, he hunted, fished, rode horseback and sought adventure around every bend, according to Internet information.
At that time, power lines, telephones and paved roads were scarce in rural East Texas.
Water came from wells, clothes washing was done manually in wooden barrels, cooking stoves burned wood, and oil lamps were something kids did their school homework by at night.
Overall, families lived as just plain folk.
Tippit attended public school in nearby Fulbright, Texas, a town that had a two-story brick high school along with a couple of cotton gins and banks, according to Butt’s book.
Tippit rode a school bus to the high school before leaving school in 10th grade to help out on the family farm with cutting wood, plowing cotton fields and raising and hand picking cotton—a primary cash crop that consumed nearly every hour of daylight to harvest. The long hours in the field made it much easier to sleep at night.
Shortly after Tippit quit school, his family moved during that autumn of 1939 to nearby Baker Lane—a rural road about six miles southwest of Clarksville, surrounded by trees in bottom lands suitable for farming and laced with trails, hills and hollows.
At that time, when most of the country was still struggling to climb out of the Great Depression, rural East Texas contained scattered communities of populations, stretching for dozens of miles—areas traversed usually on foot or on horse since even cars were scarce.
Trips to town usually became a journey reserved for weekends, and Clarksville became a regular Saturday-afternoon destination for the Tippit family. There, they did their shopping and occasionally took in a movie, usually a Western at the Avalon Theater. In the late 1930s, a movie outing cost only a dime per ticket.
While growing up, Tippit’s personality was a curious combination of shy, funny, humorous and mischievous, according to the Website.
With the outbreak of World War II in 1941, Tippit’s dad, Edgar, left the farm and took a job at Red River Army Depot while Tippit continued to work on the farm since the war created higher demand for cotton, needed for uniforms.
However, J.D. Tippit joined the U.S. Army on July 21, 1944. By the end of July, he started 17 weeks of basic training at Camp Walters, near Mineral Springs, Texas—one of the country’s largest ground forces training centers during World War II.
The center covered about 7,500 acres and could accommodate nearly 2,500 men.
Seeking to join the army’s paratroopers in November 1944, Tippit applied for and received admission to Fort Benning, Ga., for paratrooper training.
There, he won his paratrooper wings, and the Army assigned him to the U.S. 17th Airborne Division’s replacement units stationed in France in January 1945.
There, Tippit managed to get in on the war’s last three months after parachuting across Germany’s Rhine River into combat March 24, 1945. The 17th, along with the British 6th Airborne Division, landed to seize some high ground. The 17th Airborne Division engaged in 65 days of combat and lost more than 1,200 men. The situation eventually earned Tippit the Bronze Star for bravery, according to the book.
Following the war in Europe, which ended May 7, 1945, Tippit’s unit received a boat ride back stateside to prepare to deploy for the continuing war in the Pacific. However, the war there ended before Tippit’s unit could depart, and he finally received his discharge about November 1945 and returned to Red River County.
Tippit, now 22, went back to working on his family farm, which by this time had moved to Red River County’s Birmingham Community for about a year. He decided to marry 18-year-old Marie Frances Gasway on Dec. 26, 1946, in Clarksville. He and his new bride moved to Dallas in search of work and a new life.
As it turned out, post-war Dallas wound up being a target-rich environment for jobs and better living supplemented with an abundance of urban conveniences like electricity, indoor plumbing and public transportation. But housing was scarce.
Tippit managed to land a job working for the Dearborn Stove Company and later Sears & Roebuck Company’s installation department. Between March 1948 and September 1949, times were good for the couple—including visits to the Texas State Fair.
However, in autumn of 1949, Tippit got laid off from Sears and decided to move back to Red River County and give farming and cattle ranching a try. The couple moved to a community near McCurry, Texas, on Jan. 1, 1950.
With the new year starting, Tippit enrolled in a Veterans Administration’s vocational
school near Bogota, Texas, from January 1950 to June 1952.
There, he took auto mechanics, general shop training and farming classes.
Tippit’s education initially looked to be beneficial, but East Texas’ exceedingly random weather, which alternated between dry spells and floods, devastated croplands and ranches and eventually persuaded him to change his career goal from farming to law enforcement.
Following careful consultation with his wife and a friend considering the same career change, Tippit quit the farm and the couple, along with the first of their three kids, Allen (born in 1950) packed up and moved back to Dallas in June 1952.
There, Tippit applied to become a police officer with the Dallas Police Department and embarked on a new calling. A month later, Tippit entered the police academy to become a Dallas police officer with a starting salary of $250 a month.
Having three kids by 1958, Tippit started taking on at least two part-time jobs to help make ends meet.
These included working security at Austin’s Barbecue Restaurant and at Stevens Park Theater, both in the Oak Cliff area. Some of the other “moonlighting” odd jobs Tippit took on included working security at Cotton Bowl games Saturday afternoons.
His wife, Marie, would also baby-sit neighbors’ kids to bring in some extra, needed cash. At the time of his death, Tippit’s overall salary amounted to about $5,880 a year.
Tippit’s fatal meeting with Oswald that mild autumn afternoon in the Oak Cliff residential area of 50 years ago wasn’t the first time this veteran police officer from Red River County had faced danger. Serious challenges to his life happened at least twice while working his patrol district in 1956.
The first incident occurred the night of April 28, 1956, when a suicidal resident swung an ice pick at Tippit, striking him in both the stomach and right knee cap and leaving him with a slight, permanent walking disability.
The next occurred Sept. 2 the same year at Dallas’ Club 80, where an intoxicated suspect pointed a .25-caliber pistol at Tippit’s face and pulled the trigger. The gun failed to fire only because the suspect forgot to remove the safety latch.
Immediately after shooting Tippit, Oswald fled—escaping south on Patton Street before turning west on Jefferson Street.
Of 11 witnesses, two saw the shooting and nine saw Oswald flee the scene carrying the pistol and attempting to conceal it.
Within minutes, local residents notified police by using Tippit’s car radio. An ambulance arrived, and residents help place Tippit’s body inside of it before it departed for Methodist Hospital about 1:20 p.m. and delivered Tippit within three minutes. He was pronounced dead on arrival at 1:30 p.m.
Today, 10th and Patton streets bears scarce resemblance to its 1963 appearance. Most of the post-World War II wood-frame, single-story family homes are now gone. The street is no longer a through street because mesh-wire fence now blocks off 10th street just beyond the west side of its intersection with Patton.
After fatally shooting Tippit, Oswald managed to ditch his jacket in a parking lot behind a filling station at Crawford Street and Jefferson Boulevard. He then paused to hide near the front of a shoe store before making his way a few blocks farther west on West Jefferson and ducking into the Texas Movie Theater, 231 West Jefferson Blvd., shortly after 1:30 p.m.
The theater’s ticket agent called police at 1:42 p.m., and police collected and converged around the theater within five minutes and eventually managed to arrest Oswald after a brief struggle with him shortly before 2 p.m. Five hours later, police filed charges against Oswald for killing Tippit.
About that time, Tippit’s widow, Marie, received a call from U.S. Attorney Robert F. Kennedy on behalf of now widowed First Lady Jackie Kennedy, offering sympathy for Marie Tippit’s loss and time of grief.
Marie Tippit returned the same heartfelt expressions for the First Lady. Jackie Kennedy eventually mailed Marie Tippit a family photo of her, the president and their two children, Caroline and John, along with a letter mentioning the bond that she and Marie Tippit shared, being made widows on the same day and apparently by the same person.
One hour after Kennedy’s televised funeral in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 25, about 700 policemen as well as the same number of mourners gathered at Beckley Hills Baptist Church in Dallas for Tippit’s funeral.
Thirty-eight years later, Nov. 17, 2001, the Texas Historical Commission memorialized Tippit for his contribution to Texas history by installing a state historical marker near his childhood home just outside Clarksville. The marker is located near the intersection of Texas State Highway 37 and Red River County Road 1280, just a few miles southwest of Clarksville.
Months after her husband’s death, Marie Tippit spoke and wrote about her feelings.
“You keep going because you have to,” she said. “You say your prayers and feed your children and you read your Bible and you live one day at a time, so it gets to the point where you can live a single day without crying.”
Tippit’s Website concludes with a tribute paid to him by those who knew him.
“To others, J.D. Tippit was just an ordinary man who through a chance encounter, stumbled into history. But to those who knew him, he epitomized the essential ingredients of the American hero.”