Saturday, September 21, 1996

Limo ride makes money from JFK route

By MELISSA WILLIAMS
Associated Press

DALLAS - For $25, you too can sit in the back of an open-top limousine making its way through Dealey Plaza, hear the crack of rifle fire as you glide past the Texas School Book Depository and feel the car speed up as it roars through the underpass toward Parkland Memorial Hospital.

It's one of Dallas' newest tourist attractions built around the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and some say it's sick and exploitive. But that's not stopping visitors from taking the one-hour trip.

"All my daughter had to do was tell me about it on the phone and I said, 'Sign me up,' " said Janice Ritting, 55, of Tacoma, Wash.

The tour, thought up by Paul Crute, retraces the path of the presidential motorcade in a 1964 Lincoln restored to look like the 1963 model. Crute recreates the moment with piped-in sound effects and radio broadcasts from the day the president was shot.

Crute, 34, gave up a career in sales to start the tour after seeing tourists wandering the assassination site. He makes maybe three trips on weekdays and eight a day during the weekend.

"Being in touch with the fact that it is such an unhealed wound, that's kind of what motivated me to dream this up," he said.

"It's sick," said Chuck DiDiovanni, a tourist from Chicago. "Let's not relive it again. It was a terrible time."

Crute said no one who has taken the tour found it offensive. "I view it as history, and there's nothing tasteless or tacky about history," he said.

Many Dallas residents and city leaders have resisted annual memorials to the assassination, trying to erase the shame. A large but understated monument to JFK sits on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza and two privately run museums are nearby, one on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository where tourists can peer out the window Lee Harvey Oswald fired from.

As the tour began one day recently, Mrs. Ritting slid into the left rear seat, the place a pillbox-hatted Jackie Kennedy took. Mrs. Ritting's husband, Andy, took the right rear seat, resting his elbow on the door like Kennedy.

The taped sounds of cheering crowds ensued as the car proceeded from Love Field into downtown. Along the way, people pointed and stared. One man pointed his hand like a gun at the passengers.
The limo passed the former School Book Depository and headed downhill toward the underpass.

BAM! BAM! BAM-BAM-BAM! BAM!

Silence from the radio announcer for several confused seconds, then: "It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route."

The Rittings' limo flew down the freeway, goose bumps rise on Mrs. Ritting's bare arms.

Taped sirens screamed as Crute raced toward the hospital, although, without a police escort, he couldn't recreate the speed of Kennedy's limo. At the Parkland emergency dock, the car stopped and the announcer described a priest giving Kennedy the last rites.

Mrs. Ritting held back tears.

"This is really special," she said. "I have mixed feelings about it. I wouldn't miss it for the world, but it's kind of eerie. I relived this because it affected me so much."