She now runs the Oswald Rooming House Museum in the same house her grandmother used to rent out.īut Puckett-Hall said she also accepts that she could be wrong. Puckett-Hall was 11 years old when Oswald allegedly shot and killed President John F. KERA Patricia Puckett-Hall flips through a scrapbook on the bed where she said Lee Harvey Oswald used to sleep. She also said she believes the fringe theory that Oswald was a CIA operative and that the agency set him up and used him - though the House Select Committee on Assassinations denied the CIA's involvement in the assassination in a 1979 report and the Warren Commission concluded unequivocally that Oswald was the shooter. The home appears small on the outside but had enough rooms for 18 people her grandmother housed, Puckett-Hall said. Puckett-Hall, now 71, owns and operates the Oswald Rooming House Museum. “I absolutely believe this sweet young man did not kill the president,” she said. Puckett-Hall remembers Oswald differently than perhaps most of the country - she said he was a sweet, kind and gentle man who played with the boys and always tried to help her with her homework. Patricia Puckett-Hall, who was 11 when Kennedy was assassinated, said she and her younger brothers spent their childhood at the Oak Cliff house, owned by their grandmother Gladys Johnson. Payne said lodgers at the rooming house described Oswald as an aloof loner whom they often heard talking on the phone in a foreign language. We have to be here in this space where history happened, where the country, the world was really deeply impacted.”įollowing the shooting, Oswald went back to his rooming house on North Beckley Avenue in Oak Cliff, where he allegedly grabbed a pistol before leaving on foot. And we talk a lot about the importance of place - this museum can only really exist here. “Whether you remember it or not, people come here and it is a sort of profoundly emotional experience,” Bryan said. Kim Bryan, chief philanthropy officer for the museum, said visitors are often taken by the power of the experience. On display are exhibits and installations dedicated to education and keeping the history of the assassination and Kennedy’s legacy alive. The depository is now home to the Sixth Floor Museum, which opened in 1989, years after the school book company left and Dallas County restored the building. “And it didn't seem to be too difficult to me or to somebody else who had just finished an Army stint.” “We looked out the window and compared notes as to whether or not we thought it was an easy shot or a very difficult shot,” said Payne, who had six months of active-duty training. But to Payne and others, the reality from that perch seemed clear. Since that time, the theory of a “second gunman” has taken the imagination of some more conspiracy-minded members of the public. Payne said he then managed to get access to the sixth floor of the depository with officers and other reporters, where authorities found Oswald’s perch at the window and later his rifle. He went next door to the former Dal-Tex Building where he met Abraham Zapruder, creator of the infamous Zapruder film, also in tears. Still, he focused on the task at hand: get as much information from witnesses and law enforcement officials as possible. Payne, then a 26-year-old general assignments reporter and a fan of Kennedy, was managing his own shock and grief, too. KERA The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza is located at the former Texas School Book Depository building where the alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot President John F. “And I tried to talk to a number of people who were - many of them - in tears still.” “There were police officers there with rifles, shotguns - I'd never seen a police officer with a shotgun before - and pistols, of course, looking everywhere,” Payne said. The seven-story orange brick building is where Oswald is said to have fatally shot Kennedy from the sixth floor as the president’s motorcade rounded onto Elm.ĭarwin Payne rushed to the depository minutes after his newsroom at the Dallas Times-Herald learned Kennedy had been shot. The Dallas County Administration Building on the corner of North Houston Street and Elm Street was once leased out by the Texas School Book Depository, which hired Oswald - a discharged Marine - in October 1963. In the 60 years since, many Dallas residents who remember or were there to witness the tragedy are long gone.īut three buildings that were essential to the story of the assassination have been preserved as historical sites by people dedicated to honoring these pieces of one of the most pivotal moments in American history. 22, 1963, traced a path through Dallas before he was caught for the crime while hiding out in a historic Oak Cliff movie theater. Lee Harvey Oswald, the man arrested for assassinating John F.
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