PRESIDENT KENNEDY'S COWBOY CAREER

John F. His Days as an Arizona Cowboy Kennedy

Rancher Jack Speiden was showing me the handiwork of his most famous cowboy, the future President John F. Kennedy. "You can see the fingerprints on the side of the fireplace there in the corner where they patted the wet adobe over the bricks. I can't tell you which are John Kennedy's prints and which are his brother Joe's, but I know both of them worked on it," said Speiden, who owned the J-6 Ranch on the edge of the Whetstone Mountains high above Benson. "And both of them traced their initials in the foundation before it hardened. You can't see the initials now because the foundation is underground," he said. The one-room adobe house that John and his older brother helped build during the summer of 1936, when they worked as cowboys on the ranch, still stands. But the building is all but forgotten today, and few know of its historic connection with the 35th president of the United States. Except for a different roof, the house looks much the same as when it was built more than 60 years ago. Speiden, who used the building as an office and den for 30 years before he died, was always willing to show visitors what he called "The House That Jack Built." The little-known story on how the future author of the "New Frontier" came to be a teenage cowboy on an Arizona ranch began in the spring of 1936 when Speiden, a transplanted Easterner and a product of Ivy League schools, received a letter from Arthur Krock, then a famous New York Times reporter and columnist. "I had recently purchased the ranch, and I was struggling to show a profit while building fences, digging water holes, and putting up ranch buildings," Speiden told me when I visited his ranch in July, 1963. "I needed workers. When friends Back East suggested they come out and spend some time on the ranch, I'd snap them up on the offer and put them to work," Speiden said.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) A teenage John F. Kennedy spent Easter in Palm Beach, Florida, just before he came to Arizona for the summer. (ABOVE) Sitting next to John Kennedy is Pete Haverty, a famous one-legged Arizona rodeo cowboy. Standing next to Jack Speiden, in the white shirt, are cowboys Joaquin Marid and Callestano Villa. The sixth man is unidentified.

"Arthur [Krock] was a very dear friend of mine. He knew I occasionally took in Eastern boys. He asked in his letter if I could take two boys on the ranch for the summer. He said the boys were not in too good of health, but that all they needed was a hardening up. "I thought nothing of adding two more, so I said yes," Speiden said.

"I never met their father, Joseph Kennedy," said Speiden. "When I took boys on the ranch, I preferred not to know their parents as that gave the boys the option of exploiting the friendship by working as hard as they felt like."

Joseph Kennedy, a wealthy Irish Democrat and soon-to-be ambassador to Britain, wanted his two sons to compete in sports at college that fall and felt that they needed the vigorous outdoor experience.

"Both boys were in the gangly stage. Jack was 18 when he arrived and had his 19th birthday in May. Joe was 20, then turned 21 in July. They were soft, but not too far out of shape when they arrived in April. However, I worked the heck out of them, and when they left in September, they were leathertough and tanned," Speiden told me. Knowing they came from a wealthy family, Speiden "didn't pay them a cent" for their summer's labor.

"I remember that both were hard workers, alert, and very willing. They did everything they were told. But I knew they would. Krock would never send me a lemon."

But there was the impression that the brothers may have believed they were serving out a sentence of hard labor.

"I would say that, on the whole, they were philosophical about it," Speiden said diplomatically.

The two Kennedy boys lived and worked with the other cowboys, a mix of Americans and Mexicans.

Work began at dawn. The brothers got their breakfast in the cook shack and then were told by the ranch foreman what to do for the day.

Usually, Speiden said, one boy was responsible for wrangling the horses. He kept his mount nearby and rode it to where the remuda, or horse herd, was kept in the horse pasture overnight. He then herded the horses that were to be ridden that day to the ranch bunkhouse.

The Kennedys knew how to ride before they came to the ranch. But most of their experience was on Eastern thoroughbred stock not the rough-string ponies that Arizona cowboys normally rode.

Speiden said the brothers "got a whole lot better" at riding before the summer was over.

The boys did the same work that the regular J-6 cowboys did: rounding up cattle, branding, and doctoring cows. Worming cattle was an especially difficult job. Before it was eradicated, there was a nasty insect in the Southwest Called the screwworm fly. The fly got its name because it laid its eggs in a fresh scratch or cut on a cow, and the eggs hatched into worms that literally burrowed — or in the language of the cowhands, “screwed” — their way into the animal's flesh.

Cowboys hated worming because the only treatment was to cut the worm out of the living flesh of the cow and treat the wound with thick evil-smelling worm medicine.

The future president didn't shrink from the unpleasant task nor did he shirk another hated job: building barbed wire fences, said Speiden.

Fence building was hard muscle-aching work that consisted of digging holes in the often rocky ground, dragging heavy spools of barbed wire up steep hillsides, and stretching the sharp-pronged wire drum tight.

But the real test for the brothers was when Speiden decided to build an office-den building a short distance from the main ranch house.

Speiden, who fell in love with the Southwestern lifestyle after moving to Arizona, instructed his ranch hands to build the structure the Mexican way that was traditional to Arizona and Sonora: adobe bricks mixed and dried at the site, a curved corner fireplace, mesquite window frames, and a roof covered with sheaves of dried bear grass gathered on the ranch.

Traditional but not very durable, the bear grass roof didn't last. Leaky and a home to rodents, it was later replaced with conventional shingles.

To make the adobe bricks, a pit was dug near the site, and the adobe soil from the hole was mixed with water and straw and stomped into the right consistency by the bare feet of the Kennedys and the other workers.

Then the mud was slopped into wooden forms and laid out in the sun to dry into bricks.

When dry usually in a day or two under the hot desert sun the bricks were laid up in walls and the spaces chinked with more adobe mud. Linseed oil was splashed on the walls to darken and harden them.

The Kennedys left the ranch in the fall to return to college. John transferred from Princeton to join Joe at Harvard, their father's alma mater. Later, during World War II, Joe Kennedy was killed when his bomber exploded over the English Channel while on a secret mission.

John Kennedy, as a result of his Arizona summer, developed a lifelong interest in the state that resulted in several lengthy visits to Phoenix and Castle Hot Springs while he was recuperating from injuries suffered when his torpedo boat was sunk in the South Pacific during the war.

Speiden, shortly after my visit in mid-1963, attended the Gridiron Show in Washington, D.C., and met President Kennedy there. He showed the President a newspaper story I had written about the adobe house and asked him to autograph a photo showing an 18-yearold Kennedy sitting on a corral fence on the ranch.

Kennedy did so, inscribing: “To Jack Speiden, from an old ranch hand.” “When I told him that his old job as a cowboy was still waiting for him when his presidency was over, Jack laughed uproariously,” said Speiden. “Then he told me he hoped he'd get paid the next time.” A few months later, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was dead of an assassin's bullet.