Carson man recalls shock of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963

Exactly 37 years have passed, yet Floyd Love vividly remembers sitting at the Main Street intersection near downtown Dallas and watching the presidential motorcade pass by that Friday morning.

The date was Nov. 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy was in town as part of his electoral battle tour through the southern states to jump start his campaign for the 1964 election.

Love remembers seeing the woman in a pink wool suit sitting in the back seat of the limousine. He remembers waving and calling out her name.

But as the motorcade passed, Love had no reason no suspect anything extraordinary would occur, so he merely drove off to finish taking care of business errands.

As it turned out, what transpired in the next 10 minutes or so became one of the best known events - if not whodunits - in American history. President Kennedy was assassinated on Elm Street in Dealey Plaza.

Love, now 78 and a resident of Carson City the last 24 years, still isn't sure exactly what happened or why it happened that day. Nor is he sure any of it is important anymore, but he will never forget the emotions of that day in Dallas.

"The whole state was shocked," Love recalled. "Particularly Dallas. That was the hardest thing to hit Dallas that I ever saw.

"I felt so bad about it. I just didn't do anything, and it was the same with just about everybody," he went on. "I'll tell you, the people on the radio, all they did was play soft music for about two, three days. It was like that the whole time."

Love grew up in the Houston area and served as a Navy pilot in World War II. After the war, he returned to Texas and moved to Dallas to continue his education at Southern Methodist University.

And so he happened to be in Dallas with a business associate that fateful morning.

"We were in the main part of Dallas that day, and we happened to be on a collision course (with the parade)," Love said. "There I was at the time, we couldn't go anywhere because they've got the streets blocked off for the cars, so I just got out. I saw all the police motorcycles coming. When they came by, I was standing up and I just said, 'Hi, Jackie.' She was on my side, and she waved back. I said, 'Well, that's fun, at least I got to see Jackie.'

"At that time, they let the traffic go by and I said, 'Let's get out of here before everybody else wants to leave,' so we took out. I turned the radio off; I said, 'We don't need to listen to this stuff, we know he's here and he's going to make his speech downtown."

Not more than a half hour later, Love received the news at his office.

"I didn't have the slightest idea that anything was going wrong," he said. "When we got to my office, somebody called and said, 'You heard the president was shot.' And sure enough, there it was. I was astonished that happened, especially so soon after I saw them both. It couldn't have been more than five or 10 minutes."

Since then, Love has heard the many theories about what happened. He saw Oliver Stone's film "JFK."

So, did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone in the assassination from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building? Or was there a conspiracy?

"The Warren Report, that's the one I don't know about," Love said. "But what could you do? They had it all wrapped up in a nice neat package everywhere you looked. They said, 'There it is.' There are so many things I've forgotten, but at the time, I'm saying, 'How did all of this happen?'"