Amateur Video

On this day in 1963, Abraham Zapruder used his 8 mm. Bell and Howell movie camera to film the arrival of President John F. Kennedy at the plaza opposite the Texas Book Depository. He filmed for 26 seconds, 486 frames, a little over six feet of film. He sold it to Life magazine for $150,000, and later testified to the Warren Commission, but he was a bystander, as are most of us in the great events of history, and knew very little about what happened. He was 58. Abraham Zapruder appears once in A Book of Ages.