A trip to Dallas to view the King Tutanchamun exhibit was eclipsed by the Sixth Floor Museum on Dealy Plaza. That is the infamous site of the John F. Kennedy assassination.
The King Tut exhibit is at the Dallas Art Museum for a few more months and I highly recommend it. I recommend the Sixth Floor even more. Airfare is cheap and lots of fancy downtown hotels have ridiculous deals. That’s because downtown Dallas looks like a ghost town and that’s not much of an exaggeration.
Downtown Dallas is provided telephone service by our very own Windstream. When some telecommunications company comes along and wants to buy downtown Dallas the seller points to us, Ruidoso, San Angelo, Texas and a little flat spot in Arizona. You see there are more phones in one Dallas city block than all of Rio Arriba County.
They can actually put two repairmen in an office in Dallas, with no truck, no fuel costs. It’s just two guys taking the elevator up to fix a line or walking to the next building and repairing a junction box. They can put as many technicians as they need spread around Dallas to handle the work load and make boatloads of money.
Compare that to driving up to Coyote every time someone’s line blows down.
Walking from the hotel down to West End we passed a lot of empty buildings. Former offices, real estate offices, gyms, small businesses and restaurants were boarded up and for sale or lease or both.
Most of the restaurants on the West End are closed. Those hanging in there had a brisk business but walking around outside it was very quiet, except for the hurricane force winds buffeting us about.
The Sixth Floor of the then Texas School Book Depository was where Lee Harvey Oswald sat with his $12.95 rifle, ate a sandwich and waited for Pres. Kennedy’s motorcade to come through the gauntlet of three streets converging under the triple overpass. He sat and ate a sandwich. Go figure.
The museum drove home for me the vast difference in how we get our news. I took exception with the museum portraying UPI as the first news service to get it our over the wire that Kennedy had been shot. I’m pretty sure that honor goes to the late Bob Johnson, former Dallas bureau chief for Associated Press.
Bob headed the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government for almost two decades and would come back from the grave and bust heads at the roundhouse right now if he knew about the slight of hand politicians are performing there with regard to our Open Meetings Act and Inspection of Public Records act.
He was slightly vindicated as he appears in a picture a few panels over. No glory about being the first, just, “Bob Johnson works the AP desk in Dallas.”
Film was a novelty then and considering the dearth of cameras, it’s amazing there were actually 10 different pieces of film shot at the time. They’re on display along with Abraham Zapruder’s marvelous footage.
On the seventh floor is an homage to Bob Jackson, a photographer for the Dallas Times Herald who not only photographed Kennedy from Dallas Love Field, followed in the motorcade and went on to Parkland Memorial Hospital; he also got the shot of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald in the Dallas Police headquarters’ basement. Won him the Pulitzer in 1964.
Jackson had just reloaded his camera and was handing off film to a reporter at the corner of Main and Houston, one block behind Kennedy when the president was shot. Jackson saw the rifle being pulled inside the sixth floor window.
Imagine today with almost everyone carrying some kind of device that will take a picture. It would take the FBI twice as long to make a mess of the Kennedy assassination.
Good trip and plenty to learn. And if you’re not a conspiracy theorist, you’ll become one. If you are, you might join the “lone gunman club.” There’s no shortage of “experts” roaming the museum and streets outside.