BOSTON (AP) — Mourners lined up Thursday morning outside the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, where Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's body will lie in repose after traveling more than 70 miles from the Cape Cod home where he spent his final days.
Austin Howe, 15, a high school student from Laurel, Md., came with his father to see the museum and joined about 20 others before it opened its doors Thursday morning. Father and son planned to pay their respects to Kennedy after the statesman's body arrived in the afternoon.
"He is someone who made a difference," Howe said. "This is a person who served the people of Massachusetts and served the people of the United States."
His father, Scott Howe, 46, said he admired how Kennedy related to the people he served.
"He seemed to really care about his constituents," Scott Howe said. "The Kennedy family — despite the money they had — had a big streak of altruism."
Family members will attend a private Mass at Kennedy's Hyannis Port compound at noon, and the motorcade is scheduled to leave around an hour later. It will pass sites that were significant to the senator on the way to the library, which he helped develop, and his body will lie in repose there until Friday, a Senate office statement said.
At the end of a barricaded road leading to the Cape Cod compound, a bouquet of white and yellow lilies lay on the lawn of David Nylan's vacation rental, and a U.S. flag flew at half-staff in Kennedy's memory.
Nylan, 38, of Malden, said people have stopped near his house to leave flowers since Kennedy died Tuesday at age 77 after battling brain cancer. Some have asked Nylan and friends who are sharing the house to lead them down the road to view the Kennedy house.
"The Kennedys and Hyannis and the Cape, they just kind of go hand in hand," he said. "They're just a great family from around here, and people respect what they've done in office, and the good things they've done."
"Of course, they've had some black marks against them, but who hasn't?" he said.
Plans are being finalized for a private memorial service at the presidential library Friday evening and for the funeral Mass on Saturday morning at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica — commonly known as the Mission Church — in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood. President Barack Obama is scheduled to speak at the funeral.
All of the living former presidents will also attend the funeral, said a person familiar with the arrangements who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release details.
Shortly before the Mass, 44 sitting senators and 10 former senators will be among a group of approximately 100 dignitaries who will pay their respects to Kennedy at the library before making their way to the cavernous basilica, built in 1878.
Included in the group is former U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh, of Indiana, who pulled Kennedy from the wreckage of a small plane that crashed near Springfield, Mass., in June 1964. The pilot and a legislative aide were killed, and Kennedy suffered a broken back.
Kennedy's favorite song, "The Impossible Dream" from the musical "Man of La Mancha," will be played at one of the services, according to the person familiar with the arrangements.
Kennedy prayed at the basilica every day in 2003 as his daughter, Kara, was successfully treated for lung cancer at a nearby hospital. The church eventually became a place of hope and optimism for the senator, especially during his yearlong battle with cancer.
Thursday's motorcade is expected to go by St. Stephen's Church, where his mother, Rose, was baptized and her funeral Mass celebrated; cross the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, the Boston park that he helped create and that is named after his mother; and pass historic Faneuil Hall, where Boston Mayor Thomas Menino will ring the bell 47 times, once for each year Kennedy served in the Senate.
Kennedy will be buried Saturday evening near his slain brothers — former President Kennedy and former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — at Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia. Other family members buried on the famous hillside include former first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and the former president's baby son, Patrick, who died after two days.
Kennedy is eligible for burial at Arlington because of his service in Congress, as well as his two years in the Army from 1951 to 1953. He was a private first class and served in the military police at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, located at that time in Paris.
___
Associated Press writer Ray Henry in Hyannis Port, Mass., contributed to this report.
TV Station Profiles & Public Inspection Files forWACH