casual fridays n'at

DATELINE: Dallas, TX

One afternoon I escaped from my conference duties and went to Dealey Plaza - as all of you can imagine, it was a terribly exciting trip. You could almost smell the gunpowder from the grassy knoll and hear the FBI coercing witnesses. I was able to climb up on the concrete post where Zapruder took his famous film of the assassination and take some pictures - very very exciting. My colleague who came with me snapped some pictures of me on the post - also very exciting.

The 6th floor of the old Texas Book Depository is now a museum dedicated to JFK and the assassination. They have the window set up exactly as it was when the moment the assassination took place - the cardboard boxes haven't been moved an inch, the window is opened to exactly the same height, and Oswald wasn't there*.

I was so geeked up to be there. I had been there when I had lived in Dallas in the early 1990's but I'm much more familiar with the details of the assassination now and got a lot more out of the visit. I wish I had had time to go to the other assassination sites, like Oswald's last house, where he shot Officer Tippit, Ruby's night club, and the garage where Oswald himself was shot.

When I did live in Dallas I remember meeting a guy who was doing some volunteer research for the Conspiracy Museum (the 6th floor museum is, among other things, dedicated to preserving the official story of Oswald being a lone nut gunman, and the Conspiracy Museum was started to show the 6th floor people what chump's they are) and he was looking into a diary that had surfaced from a Dallas policeman that claimed he was involved in planning the assassination. A year or two later the diary was discovered to be a fake, but it was exciting to talk to him & imagine it was true.

Enough rambling - enjoy the photos and sleep tight thinking about how safe you are since the government can cover-up the murder of a president.

This picture was taken by Mary Moorman right after the final shot hit JFK. If you look above the motorcycle cop's white helmet you can make out the fuzzy image of Zapruder standing on a cement pedestal - that's where he filmed the assassination from.

Here's The Man standing on the same pedestal. I was totally juiced.

The sign for I-35 was blocking part of Zapruder's view of JFK - unfortunately for us, when JFK's car reappeared from behind the sign a split second later he had been shot for the first time.