CAMELOT

“The editor at The Baltimore Guide called and said President Kennedy was coming from Washington to give a speech at the armory,” recalls Tom Scilipoti. “He said he was flying in by helicopter and was going to land at Patterson Park and asked if I’d be interested in shooting it. I said, ‘Hell, yeah.’”

- PATTERSON PARK

Scilipoti, who is now 90, was a barber by profession at the time and a photographer on the side. His Bank Street rowhouse had two leather barber chairs in the front living room and a red, white, and blue barber pole spinning outside his window. He put down the phone and his scissors, closed for the day and ran down to the Fifth Regiment Armory for press credentials. He then hustled back to Patterson Park, where the charismatic 45-year-old Kennedy was scheduled to disembark from the presidential chopper in the early evening of October 10, 1962.

Meanwhile, word leaked out in the working class, heavily Polish, German, Italian, and Irish Catholic enclaves of Southeast Baltimore that the country’s first Catholic president was literally landing in their midst. “If I close my eyes, I can see it like it was yesterday,” says 65-year-old Marianne Weis. “We lived on Stiles Street in Little Italy, and I was in second grade at St. Leo’s School. My grandfather, who was an Italian immigrant and didn’t speak English, took me. We walked the whole way to Patterson Park together, and he sat me on his shoulders so I could see. I don’t know how we got so close, but I remember telling my grandfather, ‘e bello’—he’s handsome.”