"The first thing I was aware of was the limousine. It was a navy blue, uh, Lincoln, and there was a bunch of long-stemmed roses on the seat. I started walking over to it. There wasn't anyone else around at that point, and I thought -- this is inappropriate. So I never saw any blood or brain matter or anything. I just remember seeing those roses.

"And it was a bright, bright, sunshiny day."

Retired Helena physician Spencer Shropshire was a medical student working at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas when, 44 years ago today, a medical professor staggered into a lunchtime meeting and told those gathered that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and was being brought into the hospital's emergency room.

In a recent 75-minute-long interview, Dr. Shropshire remembered the day Americans were stunned to learn of the young president's assassination.

Though time has added perspective to the events of that Friday, the following Sunday when Shropshire saw a fatally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald brought into the hospital, and the chaotic events of the decade that ensued -- with race riots, war protests and several more assassinations -- he still clearly remembers the roses, the radio chatter from a nearby police motorcycle as dispatchers coordinated the hunt for a gunman, and the sight of women groveling on the waiting-room floor, screaming at news of the president's death.

Shropshire doesn't remember why he didn't go into the emergency room -- perhaps it was cordoned off, maybe he just didn't think he had any business being there.

So the 25-year-old stood outside near the limo, listening to the police radio.

"Shortly after that ... I remember seeing LBJ was surrounded by Secret Service guys, and Lady Bird, her feet weren't even touching the ground. They had her by either arm. They raced out into these unmarked white cars, Ford sedans."

The coffin came soon after.

A few days after the assassination, Shropshire happened into the hospital's blood bank, where he sometimes worked.

"There's a big log-in book ... they would bring in the tubes of blood to be cross-matched and then they would set them there and enter the names in.

"And I remember looking back in this big thing, like some big book God would write in, and sure enough somebody had written 'John Kennedy.' And somehow to me that was sort of the bottom line of everything. There it was."

The next day, Saturday, passed uneventfully, Shropshire said. He worked at his assignment in the psychiatric ward on Sunday, where his job was to see anyone who came in seeking help.

"I received word that Oswald had been shot (by nightclub owner Jack Ruby). I did see him. They rolled him in and on up quickly to the operating room, but that shot had essentially severed every major vessel in his abdomen, so there wasn't any chance of fixing him.

"All of the sudden, I started getting calls. They started funneling these calls down to the psychiatric section of the emergency room from all over the world. I talked to people from Australia and Europe and ... they were all crazy, or momentarily bothered. They wanted to make sure that we were taking care of him, and to keep him alive (so he could stand trial)."

They wanted Oswald to live "so we would learn why he did it," Shropshire added.

The assassination is many things to Shropshire: the searing images of the events, a benchmark in his own life and in his understanding of society -- a moment against which to measure America in the ensuing decades, and with the distance of years a sort of epic drama, complete with heroes, tragedies and absurd comedy.

"It really has a Shakespearean sort of grandeur to it," Shropshire said. "You have the various factions, the communist murderer, the Jewish avenger, the various personalities that evolved."

He remembers the police -- "they just can't hide their sort of uniquely Texas lawman quality" -- the reporters scurrying from one place to another, attempting to follow the events; a funeral director who showed up with a bronze coffin and "was under the impression that they were going to go to his funeral home and he was going to handle this deal;" and a colorful cowboy doctor named Red who saw to Texas Governor John Connally, who was wounded in the shooting.

Out of all of it, he said, Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, rose as heroes.

"There were a lot of people who were losing it at that point, they were hysterical. Major public figures," Shropshire remembered. "There was a fistfight between the Dallas coroner and the Secret Service over what to do with the body. But LBJ and Lady Bird had a serenity and a command that was really striking, and I don't think enough attention has been paid to that."

"It's striking how an individual, a disturbed individual, can so disrupt the social fabric. Both of these guys, Ruby and Oswald, had had terribly traumatic childhoods and ... they had been in psychiatric hospitals as older children. And somehow the unique stresses of the president visiting Dallas gave them both the opportunity to veer into psychosis again."

The public, he noted reacts the same way to events like these, in which deranged individuals wreak havoc. The killing of Virginia Tech students earlier this year prompted the same question as the assassinations of the 1960s: Why?

"I guess that somehow these things happen, there is probably no way to respond to them differently than we usually do, but I'm always amused when people say 'What was Charles Manson really thinking?' Well, for heaven's sake. 'What was Oswald (thinking)?'

"They're crazy. They're not thinking. The center of their mind is the center of a hurricane.

"There's a lot that we could have learned from the assassination that we haven't learned. It's still astonishing to me that a single deranged individual can have so much effect on a society."

After Oswald killed Kennedy and Ruby killed Oswald, the 1960s continued on with a series of cultural explosions that shook the American people -- young men died in Vietnam while Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were slain at home, racial tensions exploded, and teenagers left home for the siren's call of San Francisco.

"It was really an extraordinary period that had a lot more effect on us than the assassination did," Shropshire said.

"Every time the anniversary comes up I go through this. Not as emotionally, because I generally try to avoid going into it too much. While with time it becomes more of a drama and something you can be reflective about, it still is a sad time because ... I just don't feel that we've learned very much. Not that we should have learned very much from that singular event in particular, but I use that as a benchmark to periodically review in my mind what I think is going on and the direction we should be going into, the direction we should be taking as a country, and it's hard for me to be optimistic.

"The world belongs to the young, and none of the young were alive when Kennedy was assassinated. It's a distant thing, a curiosity and not anything more. But it would be comforting to think that as these things evolve so does our society evolve."

Kennedy's assassination has perhaps spawned more conspiracy theories than any other event in American history, and Shropshire considers these stories rubbish, especially tales that allege some sort of conspiracy in the emergency room.

"It's fascinating how obvious the psychopathology of the people that's writing these things is," he said. "All of them are so absurd that they're comic.

"It took place in such a short time. He was shot at 12:30 and pronounced dead at 1 o'clock. That was getting him to the hospital and getting him into the emergency room there and assessing things. And this is the President of the United States, and his wife was there.

"And so the idea that these doctors could somehow have contrived to do something different is preposterous.

"I think (theorists) are just unbalanced, and so they get caught up in these sort of things."

Today's politicians don't seem to share Kennedy's charisma or his sense of statesmanship, Shropshire said, though he pointed to JFK's ruthlessness as one characteristic that has remained standard in political leaders.

Regardless of his methods, Kennedy has been etched in this country's history as a promising leader whose tenure was cut too short.

"I think it might be overdoing it to say that he had already reached mythic quality, but certainly the assassination changed that.

"If I could put my finger on one thing, it was his sense of humor. He was really quick off the mark. He could make comments that were certainly unrehearsed, but his sense of humor at least to me gave a sense that he understood things deeply, and I think that's very important."

Kennedy was far from everyone's favorite, and Shropshire remembers the atmosphere in Dallas as one of open hostility. The day the president arrived at Love Field, a full-page ad appeared in the Dallas Morning News, accusing him of being a traitor under the guidance of communists.

Shropshire has heard, and to some degree believes, stories of classrooms cheering upon receiving news of Kennedy's death.

"There's something unique about Texas. I don't understand why there was such a fertile ground for that. Why does Texas still have some lead far and away in terms of capital punishment? I don't understand that.

"Dallas was always very good to me. The people that I knew weren't like that, but people were frightened to go to Dallas because of this stuff."

Shropshire never directly spoke about Kennedy's death to any of the people who were in the room when he expired.

"It was like that thing where there was something that held me back from going over there and looking at the limousine. There was something ... it would have been obscene. I think that that's what a lot of people thought, that this was something that so transcended the usual thing.

In a book about the assassination, Shropshire said, one of the emergency room doctors said, "We never looked at the wound in the back of the head because we didn't turn him over because we didn't have the heart to."

Shropshire also recalled a quote from a congressman at the time, who said Kennedy, "If he could speak to us now, would tell us to carry on."

Reporter Larry Kline: 447-4075 or larry.kline@helenair.com.