No More Silence: An Oral History of the Assassination of President Kennedy

W.G. Lumpkin

W.G. "BILL" LUMPKIN Solo Motorcycle Officer Dallas Police Depar tment "We were going fast, very fast! I'm going to say we might have hit speeds up to 80-85 MP.H on Stemmons... ! saw the limousine behind us, and ! noticed this Secret Service man hanging on the back of it with his coat hanging, and ! was amazed that he could hang on.... When we got to Hines, there was a railroad track, and! know that! got airborne....! knew that if! went down I'd probably get run over... " Born and raised in Avery, Texas, Bill Lumpkin worked at General Dynamics as an aircraft electrician after serving a hitch in the military. He joined the Dallas Police Department in 1953 and was assigned as one of the lead motorcycle officers in the Kennedy motorcade. I don't know what time we went to work that day. I remember having a detail with all the squads of the motor jockeys together, and we were all given our assignments. We knew the route and where we were going and approximately how long we were going to be. We were told what to do in case things happened, what hospital to go to if an emergency came up. That would be the only time we would use the siren. I was one of the people that led the parade along with Leon Gray, Ellis, and McBride. There were quite a few of us in the parade, but some of the motor jockeys weren't assigned to the parade. Some of them were sent to stand-by stations. It wasn't W. G. L UM P KIN, MOT 0 R eye L E 155 considered necessarily an honor; you just did what they told you. I escorted a lot of parades, so it was just an assignment. Probably if I hadn't been in the parade, my feelings would have been hurt. But we used to have a lot of parades in town and there had been times when the other jockeys had gone out of town on assignments, and I'd stayed in to lead a parade because I had done it so many times. I was used to doing it. There was nothing special about that particular morning. We spit and polished our equipment and our uniforms and were told to assemble at Love Field. There were a lot of folks there, a lot of folks! We had no problems with the parade except one time, I believe, the President got out of the car on Lemmon. The Secret Service got on the back end and proceeded again. When you lead a parade, you limit your speed to whatever speed they want to go. And so we really had to keep our eye on his vehicle by turning around and looking because he was slowing down. My job in leading the parade was to make sure the crowd was back out of the street in front, and then, of course, you alert the officers up on the parade route that the parade is behind you. But the main thing is, when you're four abreast like that, you keep the street clear for the parade. You look back and try to be sure that the parade is in a group, that it hadn't straggled out. And you can slow them down for that. But nothing stands out. It was just a presidential motorcade. We were in front of the President's car when the shooting took place. We were stopped on Elm Street between Houston Street and the Triple Underpass. There were only three of us at the time. McBride had already gone over to Stemmons to notify them that we were getting ready to come through since they were going to close Stemmons northbound. Sergeant Ellis had asked him to go on up and notify them that we were en route. But we had turned off of Main Street onto Houston for one block, then over to Elm Street, then turned back left, and we were stopped at the time before we heard the shots. When the shots occurred, I thought it was a motorcycle backfiring. The motors were running really hot because we had been going slowly for so long. They would have a tendency to backfire when they were running hot, and running slow for a long period would cause them to run hot. 156...