The house that Lee Harvey Oswald stayed in the night before he shot President Kennedy may be turned into a museum.
The tidy house with the large picture window on West Fifth Street looks like many other older homes in South Irving.
But this is the house Lee Harvey Oswald visited the night before John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. This is the house where he picked up a rifle that he apparently used to kill the president. And this is the house where his wife, Marina, stayed in the months leading up to President Kennedy’s death.
Irving officials are studying whether to commemorate the house of Ruth Paine, who took in Ms. Oswald, bonded with her and helped Mr. Oswald find a job at the Texas School Book Depository.
“We feel this is definitely a very historical, significant structure that needs to be preserved,” said George Edwin, chairman of the Irving Museum Board. “A significant, historic event took place in that structure.”
City staffers have had only informal discussions on the matter, said Keith Parkhurst, Irving’s heritage and museum coordinator.
Transforming the house into a museum or placing a commemorative plaque at the site are possibilities, he said.
The Irving City Council would have to take action in order to do something with the house, Mayor Herbert Gears said.
“My idea is to first look at the property and see if there’s an opportunity there,” he said. “It seemed like it’s a significant piece of [history] that we just don’t want to let disappear.”
Maybe they could make it the new home of the Conspiracy Museum while they’re at it. There’d be a certain synergy to such a thing, I think.
Snark aside, the backstory is pretty interesting, and was not something I’d known about before. Check it out. Thanks to South Texas Chisme for the link.
The Kennedy thing sometimes seems like 99% back story. My favorite, being here in Houston, and sitting in the Mucky Duck as I type, is that across Norfolk street here used to stand the skating rink that David Ferrie travelled to the night of 11/22/63, so memorably recounted in Oliver Stone’s JFK.
a repeat for the sake of archives and further distribution, if okay:
http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/2006/04/jfks-assassination-solved.html
In their new book, Ultimate Sacrifice, Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann make it wholly clear that Kennedy was murdered by the Mafia, whose chieftains had infiltrated Jack’s and Bobby’s covert plan to spark a coup in Cuba and have Castro killed. The mafiosi–specifically, Carlo Marcello, Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante–knew that that operation was so sensitive that any news about it could have touched off World War III; and, therefore, that Bobby would do anything to keep the whole thing secret. In the two weeks prior to Nov. 22, 1963, those hoodlums had already tried to have JFK killed in Chicago and in Tampa. Both efforts were logistically identical to the assassination that occurred in Dallas.
This is not supposition or speculation, but a solid case, based on copious documentary evidence and numerous firsthand accounts by close participants in the Kennedys’ top-secret venture (code-named AMWORLD).
In other words, the book explodes two antithetical mythologies: the preposterous cover story floated by the Warren Commission, and the paranoid master-theory that has launched a thousand books, and made Warner Bros. wealthy through the movie JFK. Thus this extraordinary book not only sheds abundant new light on the central trauma in our modern history, but in so doing it also sets us free.