It was approximately 1:00 PM when a man called Vernon B. O’Neal of O’Neal’s Funeral Home and asked for the best casket that O’Neal had available. The man on the phone, simultaneously calm and tense, needed the coffin quickly and O’Neal had a slight problem. Of the 18 people who worked at O’Neal’s Funeral Home, 17 of them were out to lunch. After all, it was a beautiful Friday day for November in Texas.
O’Neal picked out a solid-bronze coffin with white satin lining tagged at a sales price of $3,995 from his storeroom and waited for three more of his employees to return from lunch. The bulky Handley Brittania casket from the Elgin Casket Company weighed over 400 pounds when it was empty and O’Neal certainly couldn’t lift it into his Cadillac hearse by himself. Once he had it loaded, he rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital on the most important delivery of his career.
The man who had ordered the casket, Clint Hill, was a Secret Service agent and less than an hour earlier he had climbed on to the back of a moving limousine to try to get to the subject he was charged to protect. He was unsuccessful. The casket was for the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.