Video preserves Iowa woman’s JFK handshake

CEDAR RAPIDS — It's only 21 seconds, but it's 21 seconds of his childhood Darrell Walters doesn't tire of reliving.

It starts as typical 1960s grainy home movie footage of a presidential motorcade. However, it's the final seconds of the now-digitized video that record one of his favorite memories: His then 32-year-old mother, Viola Walters, darting out of a crowd, running up to a limousine carrying President John F. Kennedy and shaking his hand.

It happened June 8, 1963, while his late father, also named Darrell, a Navy medical corpsman for 21 years, was stationed at Pearl Harbor. As Kennedy's motorcade approached, Walters' father stood on a lawn chair with his home movie camera. His wife steadied the chair.

'Mom didn't tell anyone what she was going to do,' Walters says. As Kennedy neared, 'she told my sister and me to hold Dad's chair and she suddenly ran out into the street. She dodged the motorcycle police and ran up to the president, reaching her hand out to touch him.'

'It was a more innocent time,' Walter says about the level of presidential security compared to now. Even then, on a Navy base, Viola Walters' impromptu greeting of the president wasn't universally appreciated. When he watches the video in slow motion, Walter says, 'You can see JFK looking back at her and smiling, but the agent in the car is looking back and he's not smiling.'

Of course, the innocence ended five months later on Nov. 22, when Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in an open car in Dallas.

'That changed everything forever,' Walters says.

The footage of his mother's handshake with the president was a family favorite when he was growing up. His father would show it forward and backward.

'It's best in slow motion,' says Walters, who was 4-years-old at the time. 'At the end, she has the biggest smile on her face I've ever seen.'

'It was just an impulse,' he says about his mother's action. 'She told me that she saw Kennedy and thought, 'This is it. This is my only chance to be so close to a man we all adored.''

Although his mother, now 85 and a resident of Village Ridge, an assisted living community in Marion, declined to be interviewed for this story, Walters believes that after spending much of her youth in a Catholic orphanage in Dubuque before going to live with an older sister in Guttenberg, she admired Kennedy for being the nation's first Catholic president.

'It was very important to her,' he says. 'Sometimes I think it was the high point of her life.'

Although, he adds, 'I'm not sure who has had more fun with (the video), Mom or me.'

After his father, who grew up on a Colesburg farm, retired from the Navy in 1968, the family moved to Cedar Rapids. His father worked as a nurse recruiter for St. Luke's for 20 years and his mother was a homemaker.

Walters is retired after practicing law in Cedar Rapids for 30 years.