Happy Halloween!

 

Birthday II: Sixth Floor Museum

 

For my birthday celebration Little One came over on Saturday and she, the Mrs, and I drove down to Dallas. After five years in Texas I was finally going to visit the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza. The museum resides in what was once known as the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald worked 63 years ago, and on the sixth floor he fired the lethal rifle shots that killed President John F. Kennedy.

About fifteen years ago I did a huge deep dive into the JFK assassination. Before that I had seen the Oliver Stone film in the theaters, and over one Memorial Day weekend five or six years later analyzed the book Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson. Over a two-year period around 2009 / 2010 I put away a dozen books on the event. The most convincing ones I found were Case Closed  by Gerald Posner and the magnum opus 1,650-page Reclaiming History by prosecutor-turned-researcher Vincent Bugliosi (I did not read all 1,650 pages).

I believe with about 95 percent certainty that Oswald was the lone gunman. However, all those connections he had – with the military, the CIA, the mafia, the left-wing, the Soviet Union – seem almost beyond coincident and its understandable why so many fall down this tantalizingly intriguing conspiracy rabbit hole.

Here are some pics (of the 135 I took!) from my visit to the museum:

This is a scale model of Dealey Plaza used by the FBI during the initial investigation back in 1963. Forget the exact scale, but it was something like 1 inch = 3 feet. The diorama was huge, maybe 10 feet by 10 feet by 6 feet in height.

Me looking at the Sniper's Perch, that sunlit corner twelve or fifteen feet beyond the glass partition, where Oswald fired the shots from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

Took this pic because I have never seen it anywhere else: the interior of the 1961 Lincoln Continental which drove JFK, Jackie, Governor Connelly and his wife, and two secret service men on that terrible day. You can sort of see how the jump seats in the middle, which look folded up, are slightly lower and more centered, than the rear seat in which JFK sat. 

There were lots of memorabilia for JFK, Oswald, and Ruby. For some odd reason I found these brass knuckles and pistol holster, found in Ruby's car after killing Oswald, interesting. He really was a rough fellow, mob connections and strip club ownership and all.

Since the sixth floor Sniper's Perch was closed off by a glass partition, you had to go up to the seventh floor to look out for the approximate view Oswald would have had. It's not as far as you'd think. There are five vehicles following the curve on the right side, Elm Street. The middle vehicle just passed the X mark where JFK suffered the fatal head shot.

Directly outside the Texas School Book Depository, renamed the Dallas County Administrative Building many decades now. Oswald fired from the square window six stories up from ground level on the far right.

The famous Grassy Knoll. The fence, where there may or may not have been another shooter, has been replaced several times in the past 63 years, but always with a replica for historical reasons. The knoll itself is a slight incline of about 20 degrees, and it's about sixty or seventy feet from the sidewalk on Elm to the wooden fence.

Hopper posing at the wooden fence, smiling at photographer Little One after scouring the ground for any evidence which might have been overlooked of a second gunman.

The spot in the middle of Elm Street where JFK received the fatal wound.

Birthday I

 

My birthday fell in the middle of the week a few days back. Unfortunately, I was the only one around. Well, me and the dog. The Mrs. was in Houston. My oldest was 45 minutes away in her apartment still adjusting to her new teaching gig. My youngest was 1,640 miles away at college. So it was just me. Which I don’t mind. I shun the limelight. However, I was plummeting head over heels into full-blown sickness.

That sickness is viral bronchitis. I’ve gotten it several times over the past decade; in fact, it’s pretty much the only way I get sick. However, and maybe this is due to the dry heat of Texas, I haven’t gotten it in over three years, whereas up in Jersey I was lucky if a winter went by without me catching it.

So I knew it – knew it! – back on Monday when I first felt a little … off. The wife had just left to drive the four hours to Houston, where she’d be inspecting her team and counters down there until Thursday night. I got a bite to eat and when I got home something didn’t feel right. A little dizzy, a little woozy, but nothing debilitating. I thought nothing further of it.

The next two days I went in to work. The first day I was fine. The second day I felt a little fatigued. When I got home, the coughing started. Not much, but just enough to set my warning bells off. There was a family FaceTime to wish my youngest a happy 18th birthday (she was born the day before my birthday). After hanging up, I decided to take a hot bath, because suddenly I was flat out exhausted.

I slept mostly through the night, though drained of energy. The coughing deepened and grew more frequent, and I became aware of phlegm or mucus in my chest that needed to come out. I had taken the day as PTO, so with nothing pressing I basically sat in a chair for three hours and watched YouTube videos. Finally I mustered strength to drive to CVS in the 95 degree heat. I bought Robitussin, four orange Vitamin Waters, and powdered vitamin C, and began aggressively self-medicating.  

My daughter planned on driving over to watch a movie with me, but I canceled. Didn’t want her to get sick and, well, just didn’t feel up to it. The next two days I struggled and while I didn’t get better, I didn’t get worse. But I had to get better for the birthday weekend, because we had things planned. So off to CareNow I went, in search of potent medication.

In the past azithromycin always cured me. But for some reason the doctors never want to give that to me. Yes, it’s an antibiotic and the bronchitis is viral, but from what I understand, the sickness begins as viral and transitions to a bacterial form. Usually after 7-10 days of infection. Well, I was on Day 6, and I wanted a z-pack.

They insisted on giving me a … ready for this … a Covid test. Now I know I didn’t have Covid. I was more than familiar with how a bronchial infection feels and what it does. But I guess the good folks at CareNow get reimbursed $$$ for every Covid test they administer, so they take every opportunity to administer a test. As expected, it came back negative. The doctor gave me a prescription for azithromycin, and off I went.

Before he left I asked for some off-the-cuff speculation: Could my pulmonary vein stenosis problems after my atrial fibrillation ablations fifteen years ago make me more susceptible to bronchial infections? He admitted that yes, what I went through could have “changed the architecture” of my pulmonary system where it cannot clean out infections as optimally as it should. Though he caveated this was not his specialty, and I assured him I wouldn’t hold him to his opinion.

Now, less than 24 hours later, I am a thousand times better, though still coughing. The new cough suppressant allowed me to sleep mostly though the night (I was getting 4.5 hours a night the previous three days). Plus the z-pack is knocking the infection out very quickly, as it always does. I’m ready to go back to work tomorrow. Well, physically that is.

Coming next: Parts II and III, where I detail what we did for my birthday, with pictures. It made a lousy birthday a million times better. In fact, it was probably the funnest birthday I’ve had down here in Texas.