[Times files (1963)]
When this picture was published in the Times earlier this week, Earlene Gravis saw a face she hadn't seen in years: Her son, Reed, is the boy in front.
[Times photos: Jen Sens]
Earlene Gravis, above, recalls the day her son Reed, shown below in the last photograph taken of him before his death in 1975, ran home to tell her he had touched the president.
TAMPA - Reed Gravis was one of the last boys in America to touch President Kennedy.
He was 8 years old the day in November 1963 that John Kennedy visited Tampa. Reed hopped on his bike and rode away with a group of friends through Tampa's streets.
His mom thought he had gone to play.
Several hours later, Reed burst through the side door of his South Tampa home and whizzed by Earlene Gravis as she was fixing dinner.
"I touched him!" he screamed. "I touched him! I touched the president!"
In a week full of memories of Kennedy, the story of a little boy who got to touch the president might not stand out.
But then, these 40 years later, something happened.
On Tuesday, Earlene Gravis opened the St. Petersburg Times and saw a black and white photograph of a crowd of people reaching out to Kennedy during his Tampa visit, four days before he went to Dallas. A photographer for a wire service had snapped the picture.
Mrs. Gravis had never seen it before.
She looked more closely at the old photo. Her heart stopped. There, in the foreground, she saw the military-style haircut. The silhouette. The plaid shirt.
It was Reed. He is smiling, his right arm outstretched, anticipating a handshake from the president.
She saw her son, so young, so full of life. She saw the president, so much promise.
She saw the loss of a young president. And she saw the loss of her son.
"Double death," Gravis said. "I see a future that never was."
In August 1975, when he was 20, Reed Gravis committed suicide.
A life that had been full of adventure had ended amid a battle with drugs.
Reed was born in Germany to Mrs. Gravis and her Air Force husband, Jack, on Aug. 8, 1955. He was a curious spirit from the very beginning. When he was 2, and the family was living in France, he wandered away from home and was found playing in a cow pasture.
Once, when Reed was in second grade, he left class. His father, a fighter pilot, had his comrades search the area in helicopters. He was spotted walking down the street near their house.
Mr. Gravis' career took the family all over the world: Rome, Athens, Ethiopia. Reed played drums in a band and would perform at the Officer's Club. Once, at the Vatican, his dad handed him a camera. From that moment on, Reed snapped pictures everywhere he went.
When he was 18, he left Ethiopia and went to live with an aunt in South Florida. He worked at a construction business and then moved in with his sister, Robin.
On Aug. 25, 1975, as his parents were returning from a year in Korea, Reed committed suicide.
"To lose a child," Mrs. Gravis said on Friday, tears welling, "you don't ever get over it."
When Mrs. Gravis saw the photo in the Times, the memory of a singular moment in a short life surged through her.
"He was so excited," Mrs. Gravis recalled.
And the shirt. It's a black-and-white picture, but she still sees the blue. Reed's blue eyes glowed when he wore that shirt.
She remembers the scene in their house four days later. She sat with Reed in front of their black-and-white television, trying to explain to a little boy something that tens of millions of adults were struggling to absorb.
"Something like that is something that we don't have any control over," she recalls telling him. "Bad people do bad things."
This week, Mrs. Gravis cut the photo out of the paper and scanned it into her computer. She e-mailed it to relatives, some of whom never met Reed.
Forty years later, she had gotten a gift.
"Of all the pictures that were taken that day," she said. "I can't believe it, after all these years."
- Dong-Phuong Nguyen can be reached at 813 226-3403 or nguyen@sptimes.com
