Drew Phipps Wrote:It's also a shame that the names of the alert Postal Office employees that contributed so much to the overall swift initiation of the case against Oswald have never (AFAIK) been mentioned. According to DJ's timeline and article, you have one employee that recognized Oswald's name immediately and began digging out his postal records a matter of minutes after he is arrested, and another one that helps the intrepid Inspector Holmes determine the correct amount of the mystery money order.
Given the fact that many of the names of bit players in the investigation are now familiar words, I find this anomalous. You'd think that some enterprising Dallas reporter at least might determine who they were and do a feature on them, or that the WC might have uncovered their identities. Were the 60's (and Inspector Holmes) really misogynistic/paternalistic enough to not bother to find out who they were?
Or perhaps Holmes' "team" was a figment of his imagination.
"Or perhaps Holmes' "team" was a figment of his imagination."
IMO this is the most probably scenario give what we truly know about the creation and discovery of the PMO.
Nothing he says makes any sense for the morning of the 23rd given what was happening in Kansas City, Chicago, Dallas and DC.
He also conveneintly skips over the fact that shipping was $1.50. That the total was $21.45.
Yet another of the stories has them looking thru undelivered magazines, NOT spending $10 on recent issues.
http://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/History/The_d...olmes.html
The next morning, on Saturday, when I came in, the inspector who was on duty in the lobby watching the boxes told me, "You've got an inspector up there sitting in your office."
I said, "
Well, I guess it's so and so"; I've since forgotten his name
So he said, "Well, if it were issued, it had to have been issued if it was a postal money order here in Dallas." So I immediately put a crew to work on it.
In those days, postal money orders were issued in a book of paper money orders which, when you bought a money order, the clerk put the amount and the date, then you had a template that you put on that tore off at $10, not more than $15, or whatever. The clerk then ripped that off and handed it to the customer while the stub was retained which matched the money. All this was to be filled out in your own handwriting.
So I said, "Well, how much was it?"
They didn't have a number for the money order, but they had an amount. They had me looking for a money order issued in
the amount of $18.95 which we couldn't turn up. I had all the manpower and I wanted to examine all these stubs. I said, "Where did you get your information?"
"Out of a sporting goods magazine," they told me.
So I gave one of my secretaries a $10 bill and sent her next door to Union Station which had one of those rotating things they used to have in railroad stations with postcards and magazines. I told her, "
You buy every sporting magazine you can find over there and bring them back." So she brought about six of them back, something like that, and I assigned each one of them to whoever was around, inspectors and secretaries, and took one myself. "Now you thumb through those," I said, "and when you come to Klein's Sporting Goods, let's see what it looks like."
It wasn't but a couple of minutes that one of the girls hollered, "Here it is!" So I looked at it and down at the bottom of the ad it said that that particular rifle was such and such amount. But if it could not be carried on a person, such as a pistol, like a shotgun or a rifle, t
hen it was $1.25 or $1.37 extra. Shipping charges were also added, so I added those together, took that figure and called around to all the different stations and the main office where these crews were checking stubs.
It wasn't ten minutes that they hollered, "Eureka!" They had the stub!
I called it in immediately to
the chief on the open line to Washington and said, "I've got the money order number that Oswald used to buy this gun, and according to the records up there, they had shipped it to this box that he had rented at the main office in Dallas at that time, which he later closed and opened another at the Terminal Annex because it was closer to the School Book Depository."
So he said, "Well, we'll
run that right through the correlators or whatever they do up there."
In about an hour, he called back and said, "We've got it! Both the FBI and the Secret Service labs have positively identified the handwriting as being that of Oswald."
The PMO, found in Alexandria at 10pm EST on the 23rd is now supposed to be the same as what Holmes here is describing - which occurs in the morning of the 23rd and does not involve any of the SS, Harold Marks or Robert Jackson...
DJ
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