Photo: Getty Images
A Texas man spent an afternoon sifting through a local thrift shop's music collection. But it wasn't until about a month later when he found something historic inside one of the CDs he bought.
George Rebeles purchased a CD of Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive's The Anthology at the Souls Harbor Thrift Store in downtown Ferris, WFAA reports. Weeks later, he finally opened his thrift find and was shocked to find out what was inside — an original black and white Polaroid photo of John F. Kennedy's motorcade, which had a handwritten date on the back of November 22, 1963, the day he was assassinated in Dallas.
"It wasn't until I turned it over that I noticed what it was," Rebeles said about his find. "Of course realized immediately that this was an unpublished photograph. So I was excited. It just struck me as odd to find it in a CD case. The timeline, and where it fits in to the President being assassinated and how this could have ended up in a small town thrift store, fascinates me."
Rebeles was interested in not only the historic aspect of the photo, but its potential monetary value. Former FBI analyst and JFK historian Farris Rookstool III weighed in. "The assessment is while you have a nice photo, it's a nice keepsake, it's a nice heirloom. It's something that meant something to someone in someone's family. I would say that if someone thinks this is of high monetary value, prepare yourself to underwhelmed or disappointed," he said.
As far as how much money Rebeles could get for the photo, Rookstool has "no clue" after listing a few reasons why its value might be decreased: everyone in the photo is looking away from the camera. Despite this, Rebeles doesn't know what he'll do with the photo yet; he just wants to know what it was doing in the CD case of a small-town thrift shop. "I'm not a huge conspiracy nut or anything like that, but sometimes things don't quite add up," he said.
"I just hope that someone will look at this and say you know what, this is pretty nice to have something from history to see something that no one has seen in probably 60 years," Rookstool said.
Watch WFAA's coverage of Rebeles' find and see the photo for yourself below: