13-11-2014, 05:44 PM
The raw testimony tends to corroborate JVB:
Quote:Jackson
The first witness to testify was Edwin Lea McGehee, a barber from Jackson, Louisiana. He stated that on a day "in the last of August [or] the early part of September . . . along toward the evening," an "old . . . battered" car drove up to his barbershop and Lee Harvey Oswald came inside for a haircut. McGehee recalled, "There was a woman sitting on the front seat [of the car] . . . and in the back seat what I noticed was -- looked like a [baby] bassinet. . . it was an old car, it was battered, it was a dark colored car -- it might have been dark green -- but the make of it I just couldn't remember, it was an old car, real old. . . it resembled a Kaiser or a Frazer or an Old Nash."[SUP](2)[/SUP]
McGehee said he conversed with Oswald for approximately fifteen minutes about the prospect of a job at the nearby East Louisiana State Hospital. McGehee said he suggested that Oswald pay a visit to a friend of his, State Representative Reeves Morgan, who himself worked as a guard at the hospital. He also referred Oswald to his friend Henry Earl Palmer, the Registrar of Voters in nearby Clinton.[SUP](3)[/SUP]
McGehee specified that the encounter would have occurred in either late August or the first two weeks of September, adding that "I had my door open, the air-conditioning was off and it was rather cool." He noted that he and his customers frequently talked about the weather, and this was one of the reasons he could estimate the date of the incident.[SUP](4)[/SUP]
McGehee's statement is consistent with his more detailed account of June 17, 1967. One thing he stated in 1967 and would reaffirm in his 1978 interview with the HSCA is that Oswald kept staring at a picture on the wall, "a big picture of Martin Luther King at a Communist training school."[SUP](5)[/SUP]
The next witness was Reeves Morgan, who had been a member of the Louisiana
State Legislature in 1952-56 and 1960-64. He testified that Lee Oswald had visited him at his home outside Jackson for about twenty or twenty-five minutes one evening in either late August or early September 1963.[SUP](6)[/SUP]
Morgan said he'd informed Oswald that he couldn't help him get a job at the hospital ahead of his constituents, but advised him to take a Civil Service exam, and added that registering to vote nearby couldn't hurt. He testified that he remembered Oswald's name because he knew a fellow whose first name was Oswald, and he'd wondered if they might not be related.[SUP](7)[/SUP]
Morgan said he was estimating late August or early September for the meeting because of the temperature that day: it "wasn't cold weather and it wasn't hot weather, because when Oswald came to my house that evening I was burning the trash out of my fireplace and it didn't feel too bad. . . . It just felt good sitting there by it, and we both sat there and watched it burn."[SUP](8)[/SUP]
Morgan's story is consistent with his earlier statement of May 29, 1967, which also states that the visit occurred in the evening, "around dark."[SUP](9)[/SUP]
Though she was not called to testify, Morgan's daughter Mary, a student at Louisiana State University in 1967, also remembered Oswald's visit. She told the DA's office that "she did not pay much attention to the incident[,] as it was all very normal for lots of people to drop in her dad's home in order to get some help for employment." She said that "when Oswald was in the house talking with her dad, she happened to walk towards the screen door and went onto the porch and just casually noticed that there was a dark colored car parked under the tree in front of the house." It was dark outside and "she didn't really pay much attention to the car. . . . as best she can remember, it was an old car and the model was somewhere in the Fifties." She remembered "seeing a woman in the car. She did not pay much attention to the whole situation."[SUP](10)[/SUP]
Edwin Lea McGehee and Reeves Morgan's testimony placed Lee Harvey Oswald in Jackson, Louisiana, on a cool evening[SUP](11)[/SUP] in late August or early September, in an old car with a woman and, according to McGehee, a baby bassinet.[SUP](12)[/SUP]