1/x I bought this news photograph recently on ebay, listed plainly as "1963 Press Photo Senator Edward M. Kennedy & mother Rose, Hyannis, Massachusetts," without description or irony. When I saw it, it took my breath away; I knew what the caption on the back would say.

2/x This is Rose Kennedy and son, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, leaving St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis Port after Sunday Mass 11/24/1963 — 2 days after President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, one day before his state funeral in DC. Teddy was 31, in the Senate barely a year.

3/x Indeed, this is the verso:

4/x I knew instantly that it came from the Boston Record American, direct predecessor to tabloid Boston Herald, via the '72 corporate intrigue that eliminated the sober broadsheet known as the Boston Herald Traveler. Indeed, here it is #onthisday 56 yrs ago, via @GenealogyBank

5/x Note the cropping in print (amid center spread that was a Boston Record-Am staple) & markings on the actual photo print someone developed on deadline in the BRA darkroom (in the landmark New England Press building in Winthrop Sq, here via @dcatufts https://dl.tufts.edu/concern/images/3484zt219)

6/x I can't say I'm that much of a news savant that I knew on sight this was a BRA photo — and not, say, a @BostonGlobe pic — but it's partly because I already knew that the Herald's old prints (including those of its antecedents) were on @eBay, having been sold off en masse...

7/x And partly b/c I read every digitized or microfilmed word of coverage — every page of every paper, really; it doesn't take much for me to go all-in on archival research — in every daily from Boston to the Cape in week around JFK's death, to inform this https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/11/22/the-news-hit-rogue-wave-sudden-unthinkable-savage/99oHHOgs67lckpCQSJYvfI/story.html

8/x OK, here's a deep-cut detail for those who still have newsprint on their fingertips & ink in their blood (or who enjoy a good day at the @Newseum — and are mourning its physical closing): The edition above said Rose & Teddy were *arriving* at the church; my copy says leaving!

9/x Clicking through @GenealogyBank, I see that the escorted to St. Francis Xavier caption ran in a later edition than the "escorted from" one. Note the evolving front pages! (The escorted-to one ran inside the ASSASSIN SLAIN paper.)

10/x Like any good tabloid then, the BRA printed a zillion incremental editions, sometimes to sell copies around evolving stories but mainly to cater to all the thoroughbred-, trotter- & dog-track denizens not yet granted the convenience of state-sanctioned numbers racket:

11/x Indeed, there were way fewer incremental editions over those days when the nation was in shock and mourning, because the tracks were shuttered, so there was no need to crank out as many different versions to sell to racing fans/gamblers. See here, inside that same edition:

12/x If you open that pg, you might notice this shameful daily item, which was hardly unique to the Record American or Boston's fraught history; as #1619Project illuminated, it's impossible to turn over a stone w/o finding extent & persistence of US's "original sin/true origin"

13/x And a last word on buying old press photos in general: I feel conflicted about it, for all the reasons outlined in this short @petapixel piece from 2013 about the self-proclaimed "Walmart of Photography": https://petapixel.com/2013/05/29/photo-archive-raking-in-120k-per-week-selling-old-newspaper-photos-on-ebay/

14/x That's even before the strange subsequent turns in saga of John Rogers, the sports-memorabilia-dealer-turned-news-photo-digitizing/reselling entrepreneurial fraudster who trucked these prints from free-falling dailies, as seen here via @MinnPost https://www.minnpost.com/media/2015/06/more-trouble-john-rogers-man-who-bought-photo-archives-pioneer-press-and-star-tribune/

15/x But in the case of all the pics out there for purchase, that ship has sailed. I can't restore those dailies to health, direct royalties to the journos who deserve them, or pull all those prints back to the place where they originated & formed a larger story.

16/x But I can at least recognize the photographer — Bob Howard — whose name didn't even make it onto the hand-written metadata on the back of the print 56 years ago yesterday (unless it's the coded squiggles that look like "Hey-1"?):

17/x I don't know Bob Howard personally, but he was part of the amazing photo crew at the then-Herald American that won a staff-wide Pulitzer in 1979, among them Teddy Gartland and @sjforman138:

18/x And, sweetly, Google shows the Boston Press Photographers Association "Good Fellowship" Award is named for him! Even better, it's not a posthumous award! He's still active w/the BPPA, per @BosPressPhoto site (hi friends @CraigFWalker @jrinaldi5 @GlobeBillGreene & John T!)

19/19 If you made it this far, here are 2 fun ones from the same purchase to end on, notwithstanding the mournful reverence of the photo that started this ... "regular guy" Dick Nixon at the ballpark (paging @leoncrawl), and Casey Stengel pulling on his shoes at Old Timers Day.