3 X 22 November

This year Thanksgiving is November 22.  That day is also my son Karl’s 58th birthday.  Also, the 49th anniversary of the day President Kennedy was shot. 

Yesterday my son David rented a car at DFW Airport when he arrived from California.  This morning we will drive to Decatur, Texas, for dinner with my friend Sally and her family.  I will give thanks for friends, especially Sally, who has been a devoted friend since high school.  (We graduated in 1946!)  Karl will not be with us. 

In 1963 Karl was nine years old.  I was down in the basement of our house in Birmingham, Michigan, hanging up balloons for the after-school party, when the door bell rang.  I ran upstairs.  My next door neighbor, Dottie Kendall, had come to tell me about the tragedy in Dallas.  I ran to the radio in our high-fi cabinet, and we listened together as Walter Cronkite told us that the President was dead.

After school, ten little boys in Cub Scout uniforms, arrived, all of them jumpy and upset.  One little boy said, “Mrs. Gaarsoe, did the Communists kill the President?”

Being a former Texan, I thought I knew Dallas.  I told him, “No.  Dallas is a very conservative city.  There are people in Dallas who hate the President just because he is a Democrat.  They wanted to see him dead.”

I was wrong.  Kennedy was killed by a nut, Lee Harvey Oswald.  He went to Russia where the Communists wanted nothing to do with that psychopath.  Contrary to what some people believe, the Russians were happy to send him and his Russian wife back to the U.S.  He was not a Communist agent, but as a loose cannon that they wanted to get ride of.  

Two years later Wally was transferred.  We went to Michigan with two small children.  We left with three.  David was less than a year old when we moved to Dallas. 

One of the first places I went after we moved into our house in Irving was to a DAR meeting.  I bought a new hat, a fake fur pill box, to sit among those conservative old women and hear a woman lecture us about the Russian conspiracy to kill Kennedy.  She said ominously, “Mrs. Paine had a Russian typewriter.”

Ruth Paine was described by the media as “Marina Oswald’s landlady.”  While we lived in Irving, we became acquainted.   This slim, dark-haired young woman – a newly-wed, younger than me – was a Quaker, a Pacifist, who devoted her life to helping people.  She felt sorry for this young Russian girl who was abused by her husband.  .Ruth took Marina and her babies into her home out of the goodness of her heart, without any compensation. 

In my next blog I’ll tell how Ruth happened to write two letters to me, which I found last week when I cleaned out my office closet.