Trauma Room One: Ronald C.Jones via DMN
Two Parkland Hospital surgeons shared with visitors at the Sixth Floor Museum last night their experiences from Trauma Room One at Parkland Hospital the day President John F. Kennedy died.
Over the weekend, the Dallas Morning News ran a gripping piece about the doctors — Robert N. McClelland and Ronald C. Jones both now in their 80s — and the grave task with which they were charged: saving the life of a president who obviously was beyond help.
“Jones said if doctors had ‘examined the back of his head initially’ and observed the gaping wound and fragmented skull, they might not have tried to resuscitate him.”
A couple years ago, we ran in the Lake Highlands Advocate a story about witnesses to history. We featured Lake Highlands resident Scott Causey who spent the afternoon of Nov. 22 1963 sitting in a chair an office just beneath the Parkland ER. Not nearly as stressful or action packed as the doctors’ experiences, Causey — just a kid at the time —viewed the historic day from a unique perspective:
Scott Causey today
“I was in the ninth-grade when my mom took my brother, sister and I to the corner of Lemmon and Mockingbird to watch John F. Kennedy’s motorcade pass. After waving at the president — I was so close I could have reached out and touched him, it seemed — we returned home to make lunch, and soon after heard a report that Kennedy had been shot and that his motorcade was headed to Parkland hospital. My mother took my brother and sister to school, and somehow I talked her into taking me with her. A social worker at Children’s Medical Center at the time, my mom had an office almost directly under Parkland’s emergency room. We were one of the last cars allowed inside the back, gated entrance before the area was cordoned off. I spent the next two hours or so sitting in the emergency room with the likes of Sen. Ralph Yarbrough and CBS’s Dan Rather…Reporters fought each other to use the two pay phones in the room. The bloody convertible limo sat just outside the window. Eventually, a hearse parked next to it. No one ever asked who I was or asked me to leave. “
