Reclaiming History (130 page)

After about six months, when Marguerite, despite the reduced rent, continued to complain it was too high, and was already a month in arrears, even her good friend Myrtle had had enough. “It seemed,” Myrtle said, “that the situation was getting worse all the time, so I thought maybe it would be better if I didn’t have them around. So…she upped and moved, and that’s when she moved to Exchange Alley.” It was around April of 1955, and Myrtle never saw her friend Marguerite again.
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Number 126 Exchange Place—earlier known as Exchange Alley—is in the Vieux Carré, the heart of inner New Orleans, and the apartment was located just above a pool hall. The apartment was nice, according to Lillian, who noted that the downtown district, in spite of its rough character, was attractive to many people, so rents tended to be high there, although she thought Marguerite’s was modest enough, particularly in view of the bedroom, bath, large living room, and breakfast room she had. Lee got the bedroom, and Marguerite, who was working at a department store on Canal Street, slept on a studio couch in the living room. She also fixed the apartment up “real nice,” according to her sister.
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There’s little evidence that Lee partook of the seaminess of the neighborhood, beyond the occasional game of pool or darts in the poolroom below.
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He continued to behave much as he had in New York, returning home from school alone long before Marguerite came in from work and spending his time in solitary pursuits, including reading books he brought home from the library.
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Aunt Lillian continued to give him money to rent a bicycle in the park, which he seemed to enjoy a lot, and he sometimes visited museums or walked in the park by himself.
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The picture people had of Lee in the eighth and ninth grades at Beauregard Junior High School in 1954–1955 when Lee was fourteen and fifteen years old is not so much muddled as it is dim. He made very little impression on his schoolmates. After the assassination, when a local television station tried to find people who had known Lee Oswald at that time, they were mostly reduced to canvassing neighbors who had merely seen him around. Three girls who did remember him from junior and senior high school—Bennierita Smith, Anna Alexander Langlois, and Peggy Zimmerman—had to put their heads together to remember much of anything at all about him, and that mostly was about the way he dressed (distinctively unfashionably, in jeans and sweater vests), his erect carriage, his aloofness—he never belonged to any of the cliques that young people are prone to form in these years—and “he was always getting in fights.”
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One fight at school brought him the only real friend he made in those years. At Beauregard, Lee ran afoul of the Neumeyer brothers—John Neumeyer claimed that Lee had been picking on his little brother Michael. One day after school, Lee and John fought in the street in a long, rambling battle that crossed sidewalks and lawns, was broken by adults who tried to intervene, and then started up again. Edward Voebel witnessed the fight, largely because it followed the route he took home from school. Eventually little Mike Neumeyer came to the aid of his older brother, Lee hit Mike in the mouth hard enough to start blood, and the crowd turned against Lee, apparently because Mike was so much smaller than he, but Voebel thought Lee had every right to defend himself. It was, after all, two against one.
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Voebel went home, but a couple of days later he found himself right behind Lee when they left the school building. An older boy, Robin Riley—Voebel thought he must have been a high school kid—punched Lee in the mouth without warning, possibly in retaliation for the Neumeyer fracas. In the schoolyard slang of the day, this was called “passing the post” on Lee, but it was a serious blow that cut Lee’s lip and loosened his teeth, possibly even causing him to lose one; Voebel and a couple of other boys took Lee to the boy’s restroom and tried to clean him up. Aunt Lillian paid the dentist bill.
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Voebel, blond and corpulent, came from a family of florists—mother, uncle, and grandmother—and eventually went to work in the family business. He played both the piano and the clarinet in junior high school and, like Lee, had no interest in belonging to any clique. On several occasions he went with Lee to Exchange Place, where they played darts and pool.
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They never became really close friends, but Voebel appears to be the only school friend Oswald had ever had, and he visited Oswald at home and met Marguerite, but Lee never visited Voebel at his home. Voebel, who went out of his way to avoid trouble with the gangs in and around the school, admired Oswald’s willingness to stand up for himself. “He didn’t take anything from anybody,” Voebel said. Another difference between them was that Voebel had a lot of friends and acquaintances, while Lee simply did not make friends. “People…just didn’t interest him generally,” Voebel said. “He was just living in his own world.”
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One day, when the two of them went over to the local high school, Easton, for an orientation for students about to graduate from Beauregard, Lee shocked Voebel by presenting him with a plan to steal a pistol from a shop on Rampart Street. Voebel didn’t pay too much attention to Lee, but several days later at Lee’s home Lee broached the plan again, bringing out a glass cutter and a plastic pistol, presumably to use in the heist. Voebel had recently heard of thefts from Canal Street jewelry stores by thieves who cut through the show windows. He was flabbergasted but agreed to accompany Lee to the store to see the pistol. “Well, what do you think?” Lee asked. Voebel didn’t know what to say, until he noticed the metal tape of the burglar alarm running through the glass. He pointed out that any attempt to cut the glass—unlikely as it was that anyone could get through plate glass with a cheap glass cutter—would set off the alarm. Voebel heard no more about the scheme, and he suspected that Lee had really wanted to be talked out of it.
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While the boys were still in junior high school, they were recruited into the Civil Air Patrol, largely by a schoolmate and athlete named Frederick O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan concentrated on three of his classmates, Joseph Thompson, Edward Voebel, and Lee. Lee had impressed him by his military bearing, “head straight, shoulders back,” and O’Sullivan thought he would not only be an asset to the squadron’s drill team but might make a pretty good leader. He talked all of them into coming out to New Orleans Airport (Lakefront Airport) to attend a couple of meetings. Thompson stayed with the squadron, but after a few meetings, Voebel and Oswald left and joined the Civil Air Patrol group at New Orleans’s Moisant International Airport.
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Voebel recalled talking Lee into joining and that Lee may even have taken a paper route to earn enough money to buy a uniform, but he dropped out after attending two or three meetings. Voebel sensed Lee liked the uniform more than the classes they had to attend.
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During this period, Marguerite worked for a time at Burt’s Shoe Store on Canal Street in New Orleans and then for the Dolly Shoe Company.
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Her employer at Dolly Shoe, Maury Goodman, recalled her as a pleasant person and a good worker, and he agreed when she asked him to employ Lee to help keep the boy off the streets and out of trouble. He found Lee to be a “nice, pleasant little boy, but not with much sense.” Lee worked for about ten weeks in 1955, mostly on Saturdays and an occasional weekday, as a stock boy. They tried to train him to be a salesman, but with no success.
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At the end of the ninth grade at Beauregard, in June of 1955, he filled out a “personal history” form. On it, he indicated that the subjects he liked the best were “Civics, Science, Math”; those the least as “English, Art.” His vocational preferences were listed as biology and mechanical drawing. His plans after high school were checked off as “military service” and “undecided.” Reading and outdoor sports were given as his recreational activities, with football being his favorite sport. He said he had no close friends in school. Lee was five feet five inches tall at the time and weighed 135 pounds.
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Lee’s ninth grade at Beauregard was marked by a rising scholastic average, getting a 70 in English, 70 in mathematics, 81 in art, 83 in civics, 76 in science, and 78 in physical education, for an average grade of 76. And again, his attendance wasn’t bad, for him. He missed math class the most, nine times, the other classes no more than five.
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However, on an aptitude and achievement test, his scores were 49 in reading, 48 on vocabulary, and 43 on mathematics.
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The averages in New Orleans schools on these tests were 62, 63, and 63. The national averages were 60, 60, and 68.
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In July of 1955, Robert was discharged from his three-year enlistment in the Marine Corps. On his return from Korea he went to Fort Worth, where he intended to live and work, but after a couple of days seeing old friends he bought a 1951 Chevy and drove to New Orleans to visit his mother and brother, arriving there on July 14 and staying with Marguerite and Lee at Exchange Place. It was midsummer and Lee had no job, so the two boys spent a good bit of time together wandering the city—Audubon Park and City Park, the French Quarter, and along the waterfront. Lee pumped Robert mercilessly about the Marine Corps. He intended to enlist as soon as he was old enough, less than a year and a half away.
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In the fall of 1955, Lee entered tenth grade at Warren Easton High School. On October 7, he presented the school with a handwritten letter that he had signed with his mother’s name:

To whom it may concern,

Becaus we are moving to San Diego in the middle of this month Lee must quit school now. Also, please send by him any papers such as his birth certificate that you may have. Thank you.

Sincirely

Mrs. M. Oswald
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Marguerite was astonished when the principal of the school called her a few days later at Kreeger’s Specialty Shop on Canal Street, where she was then working, to verify the note. Marguerite went along with it and covered for Lee, who later that afternoon showed up at the shop with the news that he was quitting school and, although he was still a few days short of his sixteenth birthday, wanted to join the Marines. He begged her to falsify his birth certificate. Although an old childhood friend who was now an attorney advised her not to do it, eventually she signed an affidavit to the effect that she lost Lee’s birth certificate and that he was born in 1938 rather than 1939. A few days after his birthday he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps. He even went off to the recruiting station with a packed duffel bag, but he was sent home again—though it is not known why the recruiters did not accept the affidavit.
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According to Marguerite, Lee continued to live for the day when he could join the Marines, and he read and reread the Marine Corps manual, even got her to hold the book and quiz him on it—“He knew it by heart,” she said. She also recalled a “small book” from the library that was “about Communism.” (Oswald later told newswoman Priscilla Johnson McMillan, when she interviewed him in 1959 in Moscow, that he began at this time to get books out of the New Orleans library by “Marx, Engels, and American Communist writers,” although he couldn’t think of any other authors’ names.)
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On October 10, three days after he wrote the forged note, Lee dropped out of Warren Easton High School, where he had been getting Cs and Ds,
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and the next month he got his first full-time job. On November 10, he started work as a messenger boy for a Canal Street shipping company, Gerald F. Tujague Inc., where he earned $130 a month.
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For a little over two months, Lee delivered shipping papers to the U.S. Customshouse export office, steamship lines, and foreign consulates. He kept to himself, apart from the other employees, and usually went home for lunch, as Exchange Place was nearby. Mr. Tujague recalled Oswald complaining that the work was too strenuous, but he didn’t remember why Lee left his employ on January 14, 1956, and the company’s employment records only noted tersely that Oswald had resigned.
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Robert recalled that Lee had started well at Tujague’s, that he was “eager, animated, and genuinely enthusiastic” about his job. He liked having money to spend and used some of it to buy presents for his mother. “The very first pay that Lee got from this job at Tujague,” Marguerite told the Warren Commission, “he came home with a birdcage on a stand that had a planter. It had ivy in the planter, it had the parakeet, and it had a complete set of food for the parakeet.” It was the first money that Lee had ever earned. “And then he paid his room and board.”

He also bought Marguerite a thirty-five-dollar coat and opened a savings account with the hope of going on some sort of tour with a group of young people. With his regular earnings, he also bought an electric football machine, a bow-and-arrow set, and a real gun.
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Robert remembered the gun well. It was a Marlin bolt-action .22 caliber clip-fed rifle—that didn’t work. The firing pin was broken. Robert recalled that Lee had paid sixteen or eighteen dollars for it, about what he spent a few years later for the Carcano rifle, and that he eventually bought it from Lee for ten dollars and had it fixed.
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Three days after leaving Tujague’s, Lee went to work as an office boy and runner at another Canal Street firm, J. B. Michaels Inc. Two weeks later he was gone, and by the time of the assassination no one at the company remembered him at all. Even Marguerite forgot he had worked there.
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Shortly thereafter he went to work as a messenger for the Pfisterer Dental Laboratory.
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There, he finally succeeded in striking up something of a friendship with a fellow messenger, Palmer McBride, a boy nearly two years older who was struggling hard to get an education. McBride, learning of Oswald’s interest in classical music, invited him to his home to listen to records. When the talk turned to the world situation, McBride offered the opinion that President Eisenhower was actually doing quite well, although McBride felt there should be more emphasis on the space program. He was taken completely aback when Lee denounced Eisenhower as one of the exploiters of the working class and that he would like to kill him. McBride didn’t take the remark seriously enough to notify the authorities because he didn’t believe Oswald’s statement was made in the nature of an actual threat on the president’s life, but he didn’t think Oswald had made the remark in jest either. He realized that Lee was quite serious about the virtues of Communism. Lee praised Khrushchev for improving the lot of the workers in the Soviet Union and predicted that the workers of the world would soon rise up and throw off their chains
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—heavy sentiments for a teenage boy in the depths of the cold war, at a time when Joe McCarthy had passed from the scene, but McCarthyism in America had not yet been laid to rest.