Inside the museum they give you headphones and you go up the elevator to the sixth floor. You walk around the parts of the exhibit listening to the audio tour. You learn about the Kennedy presidency, and also about the mood in Dallas before his visit, during his visit.
You see amateur film of the event, still-photos. The crowds were ten-deep along Main Street.
You look out those windows on the sixth floor, down Houston Street where the motorcade came before turning sharply left. There are people all around the area, taking photos, pointing toward the sixth floor, a group gathered out on the Grassy Knoll.
New carpeting, new shiny displays, but the wooden beams and big steel braces are the same. You can touch them, lean against them, feel them.
It's family history, genealogy. We want to know where we came from. It's not like going to see some World War I battlefield. It's now.
There are people alive now who know the truth, who were there. It's a cold, open case. On the timeline of world history it's still the same day.
It's mostly quiet in the museum because people are walking around with earphones, listening to the audio tour. But it's also quiet from intensity, like folks are walking in to view the body of a close friend. When they actually get there it's perhaps more than they can handle.
I had meant to walk around in the neighborhood behind the depository where Oswald ran or walked to get away, but in the tour I learned that he walked out the front door, took a bus, then a transfer, then a cab, then walked, to get home in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, change clothes, get his gun, then supposedly kill officer J.D. Tippit, then try to hide in the Texas Theater on Jefferson Boulevard, where he was captured by the Dallas police.
Mike points back over the trees to the double McDonalds arches in the distance and says that's where Kennedy was supposed to be going to speak at a luncheon at the Market Hall. He just a few minutes from there.
I ask why Oswald ran. Mike says he didn't run, he just went home, to get his gun. Tippit was supposed to kill him. Oswald was the patsy. Maybe he realized at that moment what was happening to him.
Oswald sounds calm on the earphones saying he didn't kill anybody. You stand there, in the spot, and hear those words, and I can't see myself being that cool.
I get lost leaving the area as a matter of course, go along an overpass and find myself in Oak Cliff.
This is where Oswald lived, where Tippit was shot, where the theatre is. It's now a black neighborhood. I'll bet it was white middle class back then.
I make a wrong turn and almost hit a white car. The woman screams and honk. I mouth "sorry" and head back toward downtown.
Mike says that Tippit was supposed to kill Oswald the patsy and that Ruby had to be called in to clean up the job. But who shot Tippit then. And why?
I can't help but wonder what it would have been like to be Oswald at that time, to be boarding that bus, running, with all this happening around him, walking along a normal city street knowing his life would never be okay ever again.
You see amateur film of the event, still-photos. The crowds were ten-deep along Main Street.
You look out those windows on the sixth floor, down Houston Street where the motorcade came before turning sharply left. There are people all around the area, taking photos, pointing toward the sixth floor, a group gathered out on the Grassy Knoll.
New carpeting, new shiny displays, but the wooden beams and big steel braces are the same. You can touch them, lean against them, feel them.
There are people alive now who know the truth, who were there. It's a cold, open case. On the timeline of world history it's still the same day.
It's mostly quiet in the museum because people are walking around with earphones, listening to the audio tour. But it's also quiet from intensity, like folks are walking in to view the body of a close friend. When they actually get there it's perhaps more than they can handle.
I had meant to walk around in the neighborhood behind the depository where Oswald ran or walked to get away, but in the tour I learned that he walked out the front door, took a bus, then a transfer, then a cab, then walked, to get home in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, change clothes, get his gun, then supposedly kill officer J.D. Tippit, then try to hide in the Texas Theater on Jefferson Boulevard, where he was captured by the Dallas police.
Mike points back over the trees to the double McDonalds arches in the distance and says that's where Kennedy was supposed to be going to speak at a luncheon at the Market Hall. He just a few minutes from there.
I ask why Oswald ran. Mike says he didn't run, he just went home, to get his gun. Tippit was supposed to kill him. Oswald was the patsy. Maybe he realized at that moment what was happening to him.
Oswald sounds calm on the earphones saying he didn't kill anybody. You stand there, in the spot, and hear those words, and I can't see myself being that cool.
I get lost leaving the area as a matter of course, go along an overpass and find myself in Oak Cliff.
This is where Oswald lived, where Tippit was shot, where the theatre is. It's now a black neighborhood. I'll bet it was white middle class back then.
I make a wrong turn and almost hit a white car. The woman screams and honk. I mouth "sorry" and head back toward downtown.
Mike says that Tippit was supposed to kill Oswald the patsy and that Ruby had to be called in to clean up the job. But who shot Tippit then. And why?
I can't help but wonder what it would have been like to be Oswald at that time, to be boarding that bus, running, with all this happening around him, walking along a normal city street knowing his life would never be okay ever again.
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