Palm Beach police foiled plot to kill JFK

Last week, we told you about retired postal worker Richard Paul Pavlick’s plot to murder president-elect John F. Kennedy in Palm Beach in December 1960.

Pavlick had driven to Florida with the idea of ramming JFK’s motorcade as it headed for Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church.

He’d aborted one attempt after seeing Kennedy’s wife and two small children.

Authorities following a tip had been watching for the 1950 Buick with New Hampshire plates.

Lester Free, an officer with the Palm Beach police, spotted it on the North Bridge at 9 p.m. Dec. 15, and fellow officers, along with Secret Service agents, swarmed it and pulled Pavlick out.

It turned out the “grandfatherly type” with white hair had filled his trunk with seven sticks of dynamite and a detonator. A Secret Service photo (below) shows the Buick and its deadly cargo.

Photo provided by Secret Service

Pavlick had three more sticks and more detonating equipment in his motel room.

“He talked very rationally. He had it all planned. I’m certain he was capable of doing it,” Free told The Palm Beach Times in 1972.

Free later would leave Palm Beach to become part of a four-man force in Juno Beach.

Pavlick had been convinced the Kennedy family had bought the election, and in his car was a letter to the American people, saying in part, “I decided that never would the presidency of the United States be up for sale.”

Pavlick later was found incompetent to face charges and was sent to a medical center in Missouri. He bounced around psychiatric hospitals for six years until charges eventually were dropped.

By then, another man, Lee Harvey Oswald, had accomplished from the window of a Dallas schoolbook warehouse what Pavlick had failed to do.

In the 1970s, Pavlick still was sending dozens of letters proclaiming his innocence to everyone from the White House to Congress to the media. Pavlick died at 88 in 1975 in a veterans’ hospital in Manchester, N.H. He’d outlived by three years Lester Free, the police officer who’d saved the life of a president.

Read more about the incident in an article by Stuart writer Alice L. Luckhardt in the October 2010 edition of Florida Monthly Magazine.

Tags: notorious crimes, Palm Beach, police, presidents

Kennedy almost slain in Palm Beach

Two years from this week, expect an avalanche of news coverage. It will be 50 years since that day in Dallas when a young president died and a country lost its innocence.

Far less known: A man tried to kill John F. Kennedy in 1960, just weeks after he even was elected and before he even was sworn in. And it happened right in Palm Beach.

While the “woulda-coulda-shoulda” of Kennedy’s assassination has been picked apart more than probably any murder in American history, smart police work — and the providential appearance of JFK’s family — averted tragedy in 1960. Or at least postponed it.

On Sunday, Dec. 11, 73-year-old Richard Paul Pavlick sat in his 1950 Buick across from the Kennedys’ Palm Beach home. The retired postal worker was violently anti-Catholic and believed that the Kennedy family had bought the election.

Pavlick’s plan: Wait for Kennedy to leave for Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church, then ram the presidential car. Inside Pavlick’s Buick: seven sticks of dynamite.

But then Jackie Kennedy came to the door, along with Caroline, 4, and “John-John,” all of 16 days old, to see the president-elect off.

“I did not wish to harm her or the children,” Pavlick (above) would say later. He decided to wait for a better opportunity.

He didn’t get one. Pavlick had sold his Belmont, N.H., home and had made one trip to case the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. But he also had let slip his plans to a Postal Service colleague, who told authorities.

The Secret Service posted a bulletin describing Pavlick and saying he might have explosives.

So four days after Pavlick’s almost attack, at 9 p.m., Palm Beach patrolman Lester Free (above) spotted the Buick crossing from West Palm Beach on the North Bridge. He stopped it at Royal Poinciana Way and North County Road. In seconds, Palm Beach officers and Secret Service agents had surrounded the car and one had pulled Pavlick out.

“We hit the grass,” former patrolman Nick Mancino recalled in a 1983 Palm Beach Post story. “I didn’t know what was in that car, but my reaction was that it was going to go, ‘Boom!’ ”

NEXT WEEK: He had it all planned.

On Dec. 15, 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy and Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, hold a news conference at what would become known as the ‘Winter White House’ in Palm Beach. (Photo by Mort Kaye Studios)

Tags: notorious crimes, Palm Beach, police, presidents

This week in history: President Kennedy spends the last weekend of his life in Palm Beach

President John F. Kennedy arrived at Palm Beach International Airport for the last time on Nov. 15, 1963 for a weekend trip that included a visit to Cape Canaveral.

Click on the images to browse the Nov. 16 and Nov. 18, 1963 pages of The Palm Beach Post.

After the president’s death Mrs. Kennedy carried on the family’s tradition of visiting Palm Beach for the Christmas holidays, arriving in Palm Beach on Dec. 18 with six-year-old Caroline and three-year-old John Jr.

Tags: celebrities, Palm Beach, This Week in History

When Dave Garroway Came to Town

By Bill McGoun

Television was still a pretty new thing in Palm Beach County in December of 1956, when Dave Garroway came to town. Yet the event went virtually unreported.

It had been only four years since Channel 4 in Miami had obtained a transmitter powerful enough to reach Palm Beach County. I say “reach” advisedly. The picture was pretty bad and so was the sound.

Dad fined-tuned the set for the best picture – picture and sound are on slightly different frequencies — and used the radio for sound as we watched the 1952 political conventions. Even at its best, the picture was bad, but we could at least see it. That, incidentally, was the last time neither nomination was sewed up before the convention.

That also was the year the first cable capable of carrying a TV signal was laid from Jacksonville to Miami. Before that, Channel 4 aired all local or canned stuff, including bad movies. The only films available to TV then were B-list stuff from studios such as Republic and Monogram.

Palm Beach County’s first station, WIRK-TV, Channel 21, went on the air in 1953. But, because it broadcast on an Ultra High Frequency channel, it had a hard time building an audience. In those days most TV sets received only channels 2 through 13, the Very High Frequency channels.

The station folded early in 1956. By then Palm Beach County had two VHF stations. WJNO-TV, Channel 5, carried NBC shows and WEAT-TV, Channel 12, had taken ABC from WIRK. Channel 4 furnished CBS.

The Today Show, of which Garroway was the first host, broadcast for a week that winter from the parking lot of the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach. This would have been a coup for Channel 5, but no one else seems to have noticed. Today, no one seems to have remembered.

While the local papers didn’t cover Dave Garroway’s December 1956 broadcasts from Palm Beach, the Miami News did cover the Today show broadcasts from Miami Beach in January 1955.

Though it must have been the first network show to originate from Palm Beach County, I can find no mention of it in any newspaper.

One factor may have been that newspapers of that era tended to regard television as a competitor and weren’t disposed to give it what they regarded as free advertising.

Queries to the Society of the Four Arts, the Today Show and Channel 5 turned up nothing. I might have given up at that point had I not been certain of what had happened.

Why? Because I was on one of the shows as a member of the choir at Palm Beach Junior College, as Palm Beach State College was known two name changes ago.

Two things I remember vividly. The first was Garroway’s outfit. He wore a checked sports and solid trousers. I don’t remember the colors, except to know that while they may have looked all right on black-and-white TV, they clashed hideously in living color.

The second was the water-skiers on Lake Worth. This was back in the days when cities still were dumping raw sewage into the lake and no one in his right mind would ski there except to get on national television.

I remember nothing else of the show. I can’t tell you what we sang or who the other guests were. Jack Lescoulie was Garroway’s announcer, so he must have been there, but I don’t remember him.

I was almost to the point of doubting my own memory until I consulted the 1957 Galleon, the PBJC yearbook. There, under events for December 1956, is a photo of the choir in the background with Garroway, Lescoulie and an unidentified woman in the foreground.

Interestingly, the photo shows my memory about Garroway’s outfit was wrong. Both his jacket and his trousers were solid colors. I’m still sure whatever they were, they didn’t match.

Oh well. My memory still is better than most regarding this Palm Beach County milestone.

Bill McGoun is a retired editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. He is the author of four history books, including Lake Worth High School: A History, Palm Beach County Schools: The First 100 Years, and Southeast Florida Pioneers, which tells the history of Palm Beach County, the Treasure Coast and the Lake Okeechobee region through the lives of noted individuals.

Tags: Palm Beach, Palm Beach Community College, television

Historical society seeks details on Camp Higgins

For many years, Debi Murray, the archivist at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County, has been an invaluable source. Recently she asked us to ask you for more about Camp Higgins.

It was one of many federal installations that sprang up in South Florida during World War II.

They include Morrison Field (now Palm Beach International Airport), Camp Murphy (now Jonathan Dickinson State Park near Hobe Sound) and Boca Raton Army Air Field (now the Boca Raton airport and Florida Atlantic University).

“Camp Higgins operated from early 1942 or earlier, at the undeveloped northern tip of Palm Beach, bordered by North Ocean Boulevard, Indian Road, the ocean, and Lake Worth Inlet,” the historical society’s website says.

“The camp accommodated about 200 men, sent for rest and recuperation. They lived in wooden-sided canvas tents, and kept a few tanks and sandbagged gun positions on the dunes. In 1943 the commanding officer of Camp Higgins was Lt. C.B. Hindman.”

The society quoted Philip H. Reid Jr., who lived nearby as a boy and recalled in 1981, “There were eight or ten North End boys who could often be found wandering through the camp, climbing on the tanks, visiting the tents, and talking to the soldiers. We often accompanied the soldiers when they hunted for sea turtle eggs, which they unearthed and cooked.”

Debi writes the camp had been deactivated by September 1942, when its recreation hall was loaded onto a truck and moved to Morrison Field.

Readers: Can you help?

American soldiers parade down Worth Avenue in this World War II-era photo. During the war, Palm Beach was a hotbed of patriotism, support for Allied troops, and even warlike action as German U-boats sank U.S. ships off the South Florida coast and prompted officials to mandate countless blackouts on the island. As Florida airfields and other facilities became home to military bases, uniformed personnel were everywhere, including marching in parades along the avenue. While not pictured, one can assume Palm Beach’s hundreds of Volunteers for Victory were marching, too. Volunteers for Victory operated several war-effort endeavors, ranging from a bathhouse at the beach to a soldier’s canteen. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

Update: Palm Beach State College dean Ginger Pedersen, who runs her own local history Web page, wrote about the mystery behind the name of Congress Avenue: “I think the origin is more tied to the Westgate subdivision, which was started in the land boom. I too have found the newspaper referenced back to 1933. The best solution is that the road was a connector between Okeechobee and Belvedere. I think “Congress” in this case means a “connector.” Later when Palm Acres was platted, they took the name and extended it first south across the airport, then later north. Congress was not extended south to Boca (Raton) until the 1960s.

Tags: Palm Beach, place names, World War II, WWII