He was born in Kovel in 1905. It was a city that is now in Ukraine but was in the Russian Empire back then. His father, Israel Zapruder, left for America in 1909. Abraham Zapruder lived on in Kovel with the rest of his family and they all moved to Warsaw in 1918. Zapruder’s brother was murdered by Polish guards for being Jewish, but Abraham was allowed to leave because he had blond hair.
In 1920, he left for America, where he settled in New York with his mother and sister. He got a job as a pattern cutter in the garment district of Manhattan. He got married in 1933 and had two children. By 1941, he had worked up to lead a crew before he moved to Dallas to be the production chief of a sportswear company called Nardis. He worked for Ben Gould, the owner of the company and he worked with a woman called Jeanne LeGon. I don’t know if he actually worked “with” her or just in the same building, but her husband was actually friends with Lee Harvey Oswald, which is rather an interesting coincidence. And, before anyone jumps on this, it is just a coincidence.
In 1949, he left Nardis and cofounded a dress company called Jennifer Juniors. They took the name from a film star called Jennifer Jones. The company took off and was very successful. Zapruder appears to have been a respected boss and a kind person. His offices were on the fourth floor of the building opposite the Texas School Book Depository.
Nobody outside his family and the people he worked with would ever have heard of Abraham Zapruder if it hadn’t been for the 26.6 seconds of video he happened to shoot on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. He was a keen moviemaker and going out with his 8mm camera. However, the story goes that he didn’t have it with him that day and only went home to get it because his assistant suggested it would be a good idea.
Zapruder climbed onto a concrete block so he could get a good vantage point and filmed the motorcade coming past. He also filmed President Kennedy being shot and the president’s car driving off toward the Parkland Hospital.
Zapruder turned the video over to the Secret Service on the day of the assassination and insisted that they only use it for the investigation. What he had seen haunted him.
A video of the assassination was a rare thing and LIFE magazine offered to purchase the rights to it the very next day. They paid $150,000 for them, which is about $1.4 million today. Zapruder felt terrible for profiting from the death of President Kennedy, so he requested that the terms of the deal were not revealed. He also gave $25,000 of the money to the widow of Officer J. D. Tippit, the police officer that Oswald had shot. He also requested that LIFE not show frame 313, which is the frame that captures the fatal shot. This wouldn’t be shown in public until 1975.
Zapruder died in 1970, of stomach cancer. He was 65 years old. He was famous for a short while, but despite everybody knowing the movie with his name, almost nobody knows who he was.
In 1975, Time, Inc, which had bought LIFE magazine, sold the rights to the movie back to him for $1. In 1992, the Kennedy Act was passed, and it set up the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. The job of this organization was to collect and protect all documents pertaining to the assassination. As of today, they have over five million pages of records.
The Kennedy Act meant that the government could legally buy the Zapruder film and so they did. They paid $16 million to Zapruder’s heirs and took possession of the movie.
So many people have gone over the movie with a fine-toothed comb and analyzed every single frame of it. It is the basis for many conspiracy theories. Zapruder himself, though, always believed that Kennedy was killed by one lone crazy man. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapruder_film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Zapruder
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/abraham-zapruder/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-does-the-zapruder-film-really-tell-us-14194/
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/faqs
https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/3006