DALLAS – It is hard to believe the license plates from President John F. Kennedy's limousine sat for years in the kitchen junk drawer of Jane Walker's Cincinnati home.
"My sons always wanted me to put them in a safe deposit box," said Walker, 72. "I figure if anyone ever came in and saw them, they wouldn't know what they were."
She's right.
No one outside her close friends and family knew the still-pristine yellow-and-black District of Columbia license plates bearing "GG-300" existed.
"Anytime anybody saw them, it made their heart flutter," Walker said in a telephone interview with WFAA from her Ohio home.
She has finally decided to part with the artifacts with Dallas-based Heritage Auctions.
"Sometimes you can't know 100 percent for sure. In this case, we do know 100 percent for sure," said Heritage consignment director Don Ackerman. "These are the plates that were on Kennedy's limousine."
After the assassination, the limo was returned to Hess & Eisenhardt in Ohio — where it had been turned into a presidential vehicle — so it could be refurbished, painted, and bullet-proofed.
"I remember when the car was flown back, it still had some blood in the back of the car," said Walker, who was 20 at the time and a college student. "I was in on every aspect of the reconditioning and rebuilding the car. It was really sort of part of my life at that time."
But the license plates, stamped to expire on March 31, 1964, were almost an afterthought.
"These plates were about to expire, so the FBI agent [overseeing the work] took the plates, installed them on the new car, and threw out the old plates and Mr. Hess got them out of the garbage," Ackerman explained. "He wanted to keep them as a souvenir for his files. He asked the agent 'Is it all right if I take these?' The agent said, 'What do you want them for?' He said, 'I'd like to have them for my files.' The guy said, 'Fine. Go ahead and take them.'"
For years, Mr. Hess kept the plates between some books on the top shelf in his study. Before he died in 2000, he gave them to his daughter, Jane.
"Periodically, I would show them to people when they came in my house," she said. "If we happened to be talking about it, I might have brought them out. I never really made a big deal out of them because I didn't want anyone to know I had them."
Farris Rookstool III, a JFK historian, calls the limousine's license plates iconic.
"These are so recognizable in all of the famous images from the Zapruder film to Ike Altgens photos of the assassination sequence to Clint Hill climbing on the back of the car," Rookstool said.
"I just felt that it was time for them to get out so that other people would be able to enjoy them and know they existed," Walker explained.
The starting bid is $40,000, but collectors will decide how much they eventually sell for — likely six figures — when the auction begins Saturday morning at 10.
