A few weeks ago, the communications director at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce sent me an email. Clint Hill, the last surviving Secret Service agent who was part of John F. Kennedy’s motorcade, would deliver remarks at the chamber’s breakfast on the 50th anniversary of the assassination and would be available for an interview.

“Of course we want to interview him,” I told her. “WBAP is a Ft. Worth station!”

It turns out, though, I was pretty far off.

“It’s not really Ft. Worth’s day,” my boss told me. “Hal and Brian will be so busy at Dealey Plaza, they won’t have time for it.”

Since I’m the Tarrant County reporter, I felt kind of left out. Why shouldn’t Ft. Worth get some of the action?

For the witnesses who remain, the common theme of their accounts is that Ft. Worth threw an awesome party. A party where the president rode around town in a white Lincoln and had such a good time, he decided to stand out in the rain just to meet more of the townsfolk.

“Dallas has done a great job explaining what happened and how it moved on, but that’s not Ft. Worth’s story,” Taylor Gandy, the chair of the Ft. Worth JFK Tribute Committee told me recently. “People didn’t know until very recently that a small group went to such trouble to fill the president’s room at the Hotel Texas with all this art from local collectors.

“Ft. Worth is a can-do city. The president even called during the trip to Dallas to thank Ruth Carter Stevenson for organizing it. The president and Mrs. Kennedy had a real affinity for Ft. Worth because of it. Ours is, fortunately, a more uplifting story.”

Roy Eaton was the news director at KXOL radio, now defunct, at the time of the assassination. He’d later become news director at WBAP and is currently the president of the Wise County Messenger.

“As a Ft. Worth guy, I held a certain disdain for Dallas [non-Texans can learn more about the relationship between Dallas and Ft. Worth by consulting Amon Carter’s epic sack lunch policy],” Eaton said to me at his office the other day. “I got on the air and said the president was dead, he was shot by an assassin and it happened in Dallas, Texas.

“That was my way of saying, ‘You rascals. You did it. We didn’t. We brought him here and we had a great time.’ Looking back, it was unprofessional, but there was a lot of emotion at the time.”

One of my friends was more blunt:

“Fort Worth gave Kennedy a Picasso,” he said. “Dallas gave him Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In Dallas’ defense, Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of the Ft. Worth ISD, but the point remains: Ft. Worth has a very Ft. Worth-y story to tell.

After four years in the Metroplex, I’ve come to embrace Tarrant County as the rollicking Delta House to Dallas’ dysfunctional, appearance-driven Omega Theta Pi.

For instance, people in Ft. Worth can say “black hole” without sparking a lengthy debate about the role of racism in astronomy.

Ft. Worth builds bridges that have sidewalks and cost less money.

Ft. Worth embraces its “cowboy heritage.” Dallas, meanwhile, plans to build an $80 million maritime museum where the pieces of the submarine will have to be disassembled and trucked in because there’s no water within 300 miles.

So I was sitting there, sulking about being left out when one of our morning show hosts emailed me, writing that he did want the Clint Hill interview after all, and also a piece on how Ft. Worth presented the president with a bunch of art.

“This is great,” I thought to myself. “I’ll just track down several people who saw the president outside the Hotel Texas, find archive audio… conduct some interviews at the Amon Carter exhibit… and–you know what? If I had just kept my mouth shut, I probably could have taken most of this week off and no one would have noticed.”

Way to go, Scaia. Way to have a can-do attitude.