Nov 22, 2002 By Patty Shultz 4 min read

CONNELLSVILLE – President John F. Kennedy was smiling and waving to those who had gathered along the corridor of his motorcade as it traveled through MacDill Air Force Base during a visit to the military installation. Standing alongside a curb, Connellsville resident Herbert L. Wrote stepped forward to get a closer view of the commander-in-chief and to capture the moment on film.

“At the time, he didn’t know that just a few days later, the president would be dead,” said Councilwoman Judy Keller as she recalled her father’s mid-November 1963 encounter with the 35th president.

Wrote had traveled with his father to the Tampa, Fla., base to visit with his younger brother, Sgt. Maj. Fred W. Wrote, who was stationed there at the time.

“Uncle Fred had enlisted in the Army right after he had graduated from high school, and neither my dad or my grandparents had the opportunity to visit with him very often after that,” said Keller. “It was around Thanksgiving and on the spur of the moment that my father called my grandfather and said ‘let’s go’ and they got in the car and drove to Florida.”

Just a day or two after their arrival, Kennedy made his appearance at the site.

Although it is unclear whether the visit was part of a pre-presidential campaign swing or because the military installation served as the Tactical Air Command base, Kennedy motored through the site before lunching with 10 of the base’s top brass, which included Keller’s uncle.

It was as the Kennedy entourage was traveling through the base that Herbert L. Wrote sought to take the president’s photograph from his curbside vantage point.

“As he stepped from the sidewalk, a Secret Service agent came alongside him and asked him to step back,” said Keller. “At that moment, President Kennedy signaled the agent from the convertible to allow my father to take his photograph. It was a memorable moment for my father, he told us later.”

The photograph and the memories shared of the timely visit have remained prized possessions of the Wrote family, added Keller.

“My father not only spoke of the encounter with Kennedy through the Secret Service agent but also his first glimpse of him when he got off of the airplane,” said Keller. “My father was not one to comment on the physical appearance of another man, but he remarked that Kennedy had a striking presence: so tan and healthy, so much better looking in person than when he was on television.”

Just days after the Wrote patriarch took his photograph, Kennedy was shot and killed on Nov. 22, 1963, as he traveled through the streets of Dallas, Texas.

“Our entire family was shocked,” said Keller, who was a junior in high school at the time. “For a U.S. president to be shot and killed in the United States was unthinkable.”

Her father, too, had similar thoughts concerning the assassination.

“He was never one to wear his emotions on his sleeve, but it hit him hard because he had just seen him alive and well just a few days before,” said Keller.

Both her father and uncle had distinguished military careers, with Herbert L. Wrote receiving the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster after serving as a member of the Big Red One during World War II in northern Africa at Kasserine Pass, in Sicily, Italy, Germany and Czechoslovakia. After returning to the U.S. he served 20 years as a member of the U.S. Army Reserves and was elected as city treasurer and tax collector.

Maj. Wrote served 35 years with the military.

While fighting in Germany during World War II, he was taken captive and spent several months in a prisoner of war camp.

“In a strange turn of events, he was in the same prison camp as (Connellsville resident) Pete ‘Chicken’ Canestrale,” said Keller. “The two supported each other through those long days in captivity.”

Maj. Wrote later received the Purple Heart after being wounded in battle and later took part in the Korean War and served at numerous military bases around the world before retiring from the Army.

The brothers have since died.

Her father’s encounter with Kennedy and the prized photograph, meanwhile, became part of many history lessons when she taught at Connellsville Area High School, said Keller.

“It was truly a moment in history,” she said.