Tomorrow is the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s assassination in Dallas, and my 83 year-old mother Joy West remembers November 22nd very well. She and my father lived at 406 Lilac Lane in Irving, Texas…..five houses down from Ruth Paine’s home where Marina Oswald lived in the fall of 1963. Lilac is a short street that curves and becomes West 5th Street, where the Paines lived at 2515.
Lee Harvey Oswald never stayed overnight, just coming to the Paine home to visit his estranged wife and their daughter. But on the night of November 21st, however, he came unannounced and spent the night, having stored that infamous rifle in the Paines’ garage. My mother and father never knew any of these things until after the horrible event when law enforcement descended on their neighborhood.
Now being so randomly close to an assassin’s 411 is an interesting mix of history to happen once, but Oswald-proximity ended up happening again to my folks. Three times! The other two times my mom and dad were in proximity to LH Oswald was during visits to my grandparents’ home in Oak Cliff.
They lived on Elsbeth street, residing just a couple blocks north of West Davis St. At the intersection of West Davis & Elsbeth stood (until earlier this year) the apartment building that Oswald lived at a year before the assassination. Then in the spring of ’63 the Oswalds moved just around the corner west of Elsbeth, at 214 West Neely, where Marina took the infamous “backyard” pictures of Oswald holding the sniper rifle. My mom and dad passed both of these locations many, many times when driving to see my grandparents who unknowingly lived a block or so away from a one of history’s craziest people.
Today Elsbeth is a fairly bleak street until you drive north toward Canty, then it’s pretty nice. My mother grew up on this street, back when Oak Cliff was as popular a neighborhood as Highland Park. I really wish they had kept the old apartment building that Oswald lived in intact on Elsbeth. If nothing else they should preserve 214 West Neely for history. That’s no guarantee in the city of Dallas, which tends to tear things like this down with alarming regularity. The Neely house’s backyard still looks the same to this day. And my old street, Lilac? It’s still kicking it, with most homes looking about the same as when I lived there in the mid 70s. In fact, Irving bought the Paine residence years ago and turned it into a museum. Here’s a recent pic of my old humble childhood home, and the Paine home about 5 houses down:
Twelve years after JFK-Dallas I was born, and my father passed in 1975. My mother was unsettled from the late 70s until the late 80s and moved around a lot. She just didn’t want to live on Lilac St anymore, like it was bad Karma or something. There were good times and bad during those unsettled years, and during the tougher days there were two things Mom would talk about: happy memories of my father, or sad memories of November 22nd.
And how does my mom feel today about Oswald acting alone or if it was a conspiracy?
“Nobody will ever ever know, but I think he did it by himself”, mom told me some time ago. “He was just too odd and undependable, bit of a loose cannon to be in cahoots with any organized group of people.” (cahoots, a classic term Mom uses to great affect). Despite the temptation to give into conspiracy theories, I agree with her assessment.
After all, how could I disagree with my mom? She was there.
Originally published at julianwest.me on November 21, 2013.