Four days apart

Rachel and I are the same age, except that I am four days older. 

By coincidence, her father got a job on my birthday — and just in time, because he needed money to help support this second daughter.

Like me, she’s the youngest of two girls, and she probably grew up squabbling with her big sister. 

All similarities end there.

Unlike me, she didn’t spend the first six weeks of her life in an incubator. 

Unlike me, she was not born in the Appalachian Mountains.

And unlike me, she would never know her father.  

Because today, 58 years ago, her father was murdered.

Ever since I learned that Rachel and I were about the same age, I’ve wondered about her; I’ve wondered about the twists and turns of fate that landed her where she was and me where I am. 

Why this obsession with a woman named Rachel, born four days after me?

Well, the main reason lies with her full name:  Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald.

If that last name sounds familiar, it should. 

Her father, Lee Harvey Oswald, 58 years ago, on November 22, 1963, pointed a rifle out a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, pulled the trigger three times, and murdered President John F. Kennedy. He also seriously wounded Texas Governor John Connally. 

Two days later, a man named Jack Ruby wormed his way into a supposedly secure police garage, pulled a .38 Colt revolver, and shot Lee Oswald in the abdomen. Despite the efforts of doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital (ironically, the same hospital that treated Kennedy), Oswald died an hour and a half later. 

Rachel was 35 days old, probably just beginning to smile, and mostly unaware of the drama around her. 

In March, 1995,  Texas Monthly wrote an article on this daughter of Lee Harvey Oswald. The article told about the life she’d led as a child and young woman. Rachel, in 1995, was working as a waitress to pay her way through nursing school.

Rachel was seven when her mother told her and her older sister, June, that Kenneth Porter, the man they knew as their father, was not their biological father.  Their biological father was Lee Oswald and “he had been accused of killing the president of the United States.” 

That, Rachel realized, was why her school bus sometimes got followed by the news, why some people shot at their mailbox, why sometimes kids asked her if her daddy shot the President. But at home, Rachel said, “we were just trying to be a normal family.” They didn’t really talk about what had happened. 

In the town she grew up in, Rockwell, Texas, everyone knew Rachel’s mother. They were “of interest to people” and “for the most part, people were nice, but they were always whispering things.” 

Despite the assertions of a 1982 tabloid article that claimed that the Oswald kids didn’t have “dogs or dates”, Rachel, as a teenager, was healthy and active, involved in gymnastics and ballet, made good grades, was a varsity cheerleader, and was even voted “most popular student” by her classmates.

She wondered, when do I tell a date about Lee? On the first date? The second? The third? She said, “What it boils down to is that every time I meet someone—every person at a party, every customer I wait on, every classmate, every teacher, every would-be friend—I ask myself, Do they know who I am? Are they looking at me that way because of me or because I’m the daughter of Lee Harvey Oswald?”

Her opinion on the JFK assassination? “Lee was this 24-year-old guy . . . that got himself in over his head . . . I don’t know who else was involved, but clearly it was too big of a deal for one twenty-four-year-old kid to do by himself.” She continued, “There are just too many loose ends for it all to be dumped on my father. . . I’m sorry for my father’s pain, but basically I just want it to be over, one way or another, especially by the time I have kids.”

She described herself as a regular person who drove a beat up car, who had a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences, but that there were still people “who refuse to believe that I could be normal.  That’s what I hope my kids will never have to go through.”

Rachel did graduate from nursing school and found a job. 

Keith Kachtick, the writer of the Texas Monthly article, called Rachel “the daughter of a presidential assassin, an attractive and healthy woman who apparently wanted nothing more from life than to be a good nurse. If it is true that poetry is the silence between words, then there is something genuinely poetic about the life Rachel Oswald is quietly living between the headlines.”

I am four days older than this woman. Call it fate, coincidence, whatever you will . . . but just suppose I had been the one born October 20, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, and she had been the one born on October 16 in Harlan, Kentucky? 

Suppose my father was Lee Oswald, the man who killed Kennedy? 

Suppose her father was a small-town teacher? 

Suppose my mother had to explain who my father was? 

And suppose I had to grow up in that shadow, wondering if the people who knew me, or knew my name — was it about me, the person I am; or it is about my father? Do they want a relationship with me because they like me, they are attracted to me, they think I’m nice, cool, etc . . . or do they just want a link with an infamous historical personage? 

Would I, as Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald did, forge a path for myself, working to have a successful career?

Or perhaps would I have tried to capitalize on whatever fame I could get from the last name of “Oswald”? 

Would Rachel have decided to become a nurse, or possibly found another career?

I didn’t find any other information about Rachel after that 1995 article, which tells me that she’s mostly succeeded in living the normal life that she wanted. If she is still a nurse at 58, I hope that career is successful for her . . . and I wonder, too, how she has handled this pandemic. Does she suffer from burnout and exhaustion, like so many of our medical professionals have and do? 

Two women, born four days apart, who have never met, probably never will meet, who share nothing in common but a birth month and year . . . and it makes me wonder, had our circumstances and positions been reversed, who would we be, what would our lives be like, and what would the world be like? 

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

 

 

German chocolate and the end of innocence

When Roz Fishburn learned that someone wanted a recipe for a layer cake made with German chocolate, she picked up her phone and dialed 527-4188.

By the time the other party answered the phone, she was out of breath . . . but not because she'd raced to the phone in order to make her phone call.

Between the time Roz Fishburn made her phone call and the time her party finally answered, she'd heard the following words:  "President Kennedy is reported to have been wounded by an assassin in Dallas, Texas.  There are no further details at this time."

The number 527-4188 that Roz Fishburn dialed belonged to radio station WTIC in Hartford, Connecticut; and the show she was trying to contact was "Mikeline."  This website, dedicated to Hartford, CT radio history, describes "Mikeline" as "WTIC's 'neighbors-over-the-backyard-fence' call-in program".  For a half-hour, between 1:30 p.m. and 2:00 p.m., people around the state of Connecticut (and some outside of the state) could call either 527-4188 or ask their operator for the number Enterprise-9842.  On the air, callers asked for recipes, cleaning tips, or other household-related questions; other callers would call in and say, I know where you can find such-and-such.  

On the day Roz Fishburn made her phone call--November 22, 1963--announcers Floyd Richards and Bob Ellsworth manned the studio, taking phone calls from people asking about such things as the game of mumblety-peg, how to clean a tent before you put it in storage, and where to get directions for an Italian knitting machine.  The very first phone call answers a question about "how do I keep my garbage cans clean?" with a suggestion about "these new plastic liners".  (We now take plastic trash bags for granted.)

"Mikeline" began at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.  In Dallas, Texas, it was 12:30 Central Standard Time.  At the moment Floyd Richards was greeting his listening audience, President Kennedy's motorcade was making its final turns through downtown Dallas, heading for the Dallas Trade Mart, where Kennedy was due to have lunch and make a speech. 

I've watched/listened to the JFK assassination TV and radio coverage posted on YouTube, and more than any other, this video shows just how ordinary that day was before those three shots that changed history forever.  No other video also shows the horrifying contrast between the chit-chat on the radio and the reality happening in Dallas that no one knew about yet.

The person who posted the video goes by the YouTube handle "Bertelevision".  Over the audio of "Mikeline"'s November 22, 1963 broadcast, he's superimposed pictures of what people were calling in about (for example, a picture of a garbage can shows up during the audio of the woman explaining about the new plastic liners). 

What he's also done is, in captions, post a minute-by-minute account of what was happening in Dallas at the exact same time "Mikeline" was being broadcast.  In fact, while the woman was talking about plastic liners for the garbage cans, the shots were fired at Kennedy's car, hitting JFK and Governor John Connelly.

Approximately 10 minutes into the broadcast, a woman calls in with a request for a layer cake made with German chocolate.  This was the recipe request Roz Fishman heard.  At the same time she was heading for her telephone, Jack Bell, an AP correspondent, finally got his hands on a receiver of his own and filed his account of JFK's shooting.  Unfortunately, Merriman Smith of UPI had already beaten him to the punch by grabbing the phone in the press bus and refusing to let anyone else have it.

At 1:55, after Floyd Richards listened to the question, "When is the best time to trim young maple trees?" Bob Ellsworth broke in with, "Floyd, I have something rather important from the WTIC newsroom in the form of a bulletin."  

He then read the announcement about JFK being wounded.

Floyd Richards and Bob Ellsworth, both blindsided, decided to take the next phone call, from the now-breathless Roz Fishman.  She said that the announcement just "took my breath away."

As she began to give the recipe, Bob Ellsworth interrupted with a second bulletin--announcing that President Kennedy and Governor John Connelly had been "cut down by an assassin's bullets".  

Bob Ellsworth, after saying that "this changes the complexion of many things", said that "we'll continue along." 

Floyd Richards said to Roz, you're in the middle of a terrible thing here; perhaps it's best to keep on going as best we can and for us to give the news as best we can.

Her response:  "I don't feel like it."

The sympathetic Floyd Richards told her, "that's fine.  Give us a call when you can."

By that time, the major networks were either on the air or getting ready to go on the air.  Within moments of Roz Fishman's hanging up, WTIC switched over to the NBC Radio feed, much to the relief of Richards and Ellsworth.

The period from November 22 to November 25, 1963, is often called the death of American innocence.  One can argue whether American innocence really died that day or if it had ever existed in the first place.

But when you listen to the WTIC broadcast of "Mikeline" with its questions about recipes and household hints, and read the captions showing the parallel events in Dallas, it brings home how the world, in less than half an hour, was totally transformed.  

I don't know if Roz Fishman ever called back with her recipe.  Perhaps, by the time the events of that awful weekend in 1963 were over, the world had just changed too much.  

German chocolate cake just doesn't seem that important when three shots in six seconds ended innocence.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.