Louisville Magazine

OCT 2013

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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Photo by Bud Kamenish Doherty collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville Top: Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in October 1960, fanked by (left) Senate hopeful and former Kentucky Gov. Keen Johnson and (right) incumbent House candidate Frank Burke. Above: Kennedy in October 1962 with Senate-minded Kentucky Lieutenant Gov. Wilson Wyatt, a former Louisville mayor. 64 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 10.13 oppose the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, stumped for Snyder and a conspicuously absent Morton at Freedom Hall. It was Goldwater's 1964 campaign for the presidency that catalyzed the Republican "Southern Strategy"; he was the frst GOP candidate since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of the Deep South, albeit in a losing cause. Te Sunday after the JFK-visit announcement, 327,944 Jeferson County residents — 52 percent of the total city/ county population — reported to 45 area medical stations to pop a free vaccine-coated sugar cube in their mouths that would immunize them against Type I polio. Quite the indicator of community togetherness. Te next Sunday 200,000 more took part. Sometime during that next week, the Secret Service and Kennedy's advance people consulted with the Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville, headed by Archbishop John Floersh, about where the president might attend Mass on Oct. 14. Floersh, however, was forced to hand the responsibility over to Louisville's auxiliary bishop, Charles Maloney. "Te reason Bishop Maloney ended up having the Mass while the president was here was because Archbishop Floersh was at the frst session of the Second Vatican Council that was going on in Rome at the time," says archdiocese archivist Father Dale Cieslik. (Te historic council called by Pope John XXIII lasted for three years. Floersh fell seriously ill during the frst of four Vatican II sessions, and Maloney became his replacement — one of only a handful of bishops to serve in the event.) "Tey didn't want the Cathedral (of the Assumption, downtown on Fifth Street) — too much for the Secret Service to cover," recalls retired priest Jack Hanrahan, who served the archdiocese as secretary at the time. Cieslik says the second choice had been St. Louis Bertrand, on Sixth Street near Central Park, but then somebody suggested St. Mary Magdalen, a small red-brick church on Brook Street south of Broadway that, because of its proximity to the archdiocese chancery on College Street, had earned the nickname "the bishop's chapel." It was a perfect getaway location for the presidential motorcade. "Two short blocks from a southbound entrance ramp (to what was then called the North-South Expressway)," says Cieslik. "As soon as you step out the door, that's what's in front of you — the east side of I-65." "After casing the place, they made plans for all the details," wrote Maloney to Floersh that October. Te bishop made a to-do list he'd worked out with the Secret Service that included these directives:

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