Fort Worth, Texas ? A young girl waited late into the evening at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth to shake the hand of the arriving president.

An eighth-grader who met him the next morning was especially interested in his shoes.

Two doctors who were at John F. Kennedy’s side when he died witnessed his wife’s tender goodbye kiss.

They are among the many Texans to cross paths with the 35th president in the hours surrounding his assassination 40 years ago today.

For them, the anniversary never fails to evoke vivid memories and a special sadness.

The schoolgirl

President Kennedy’s trip to North Texas began in Fort Worth the night of Nov. 21, 1963. The skyline was lit up in Christmas splendor to welcome him.

Hundreds of people crowded the Air Force base hours before his arrival in hopes of catching a glimpse of the president and his glamorous wife.

Judy Devine Skillman, then 12, her mother, Betty, and other family members were among those huddling along the fence lining the tarmac that Thursday night.

People reach out to greet President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy upon their arrival at the airport in Dallas, in this Nov. 22, 1963, photo. Later that day, the president was assassinated.

The Devine family was intimately involved with the Texas Democratic Party. Betty Devine had recently volunteered to work for the re-election of U.S. Rep. Jim Wright, D-Texas.

And like the president, the Devines were Roman Catholics.

“We were all obsessed with the Kennedys,” said Skillman, now 52 and a resident of Arlington.

Air Force One stopped directly in front of the family, and the Kennedys descended from the plane and were greeted like superstars.

Flanked by Wright, the first couple shook a few hands near the Devines and started to move away.

“Jim, do something!” Betty Devine called out to the congressman. Kennedy turned to Wright and asked, “Are they friends of yours?”

The Kennedys quickly returned to greet the family with handshakes and smiles, Betty Devine remembers. It was brief, but it was more than enough.

“You couldn’t say anything,” she recalls. “There were too many people and too much electricity in the air.”

The congressman

Friday morning dawned gloomy, with an unrelenting rain. Wright thought the weather would doom plans for Kennedy’s speech before thousands of Fort Worth residents outside the downtown Texas Hotel.

Wright was thrilled to see the streets filling despite the downpour. Just minutes before Kennedy was scheduled to speak, the sun broke through the clouds.

“We went with him out the front door and the crowd went wild,” said Wright, now 80. “As far as you could see, there were people. They loved him.”

Kennedy talked to the crowd — estimated at 5,000 people — about the nation’s economy, the growing space race and new booster rockets.

Wright said that although the president came to Texas to heal a schism in the Democratic Party, that was only part of the mission.

“The overarching thing was that Texas was worth recognizing and worth visiting,” Wright said. “He wanted to be here.”

Wright said he was especially delighted by Kennedy’s visit because it was the first time a U.S. president had stopped in downtown Fort Worth since 1936.

“I thought, ‘Golly, a sitting president in my town,'” Wright said. “It just gave you a lot of joy.”

The doctors

At Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Dr. Robert McClelland was showing a film on hernias to a group of medical students when he was called away.

The president had been shot, and everyone was needed in the emergency room.

On the way down, McClelland remembers thinking, “We always get calls like this about a major catastrophe, and it’s usually nothing big.”

This time, they found chaos.

McClelland saw Jackie Kennedy sitting by herself on a folding chair, with blood on her face and pink wool suit.

“When I saw her I thought, ‘Oh, my God. This is really real,'” McClelland said. “She had blood all over her.”

Several people were working on the president when McClelland entered the trauma room. He went to the head of the gurney to help with a tracheotomy.

Dr. Kenneth Salyer, then a 27-year-old resident on the neurosurgery rotation, was also in the room.

He helped undress Kennedy, who was wearing a back brace beneath his clothes and a white handkerchief tied on his right leg, and then started a unit of blood.

“We started working on him, doing everything we’d been trained to do for any kind of trauma,” said Salyer, known today for his work on the medical team that separated conjoined Egyptian twins in Dallas. “But he had a fatal injury. The right side of his cranium and head were severely injured.”

Jackie Kennedy entered the room several times and each time a doctor would escort her out again. At one point, she slumped in the corner watching the doctors work to resuscitate the president, Salyer said.

After a priest gave Kennedy the last rites, the first lady stood looking at her husband, then moved toward the head of the gurney, the doctors recalled.

She took off her wedding ring and slipped it on the president’s hand, then walked to the opposite end of the gurney, where the president’s bare foot was uncovered. She leaned over and gently kissed his foot.

For 40 years, that has been McClelland’s most profound memory of that day.

“(The day) was terrible enough, but that last part was even more emotionally rending,” he said. “Indescribable.”