On The Road In the 1970's: Part 71

The second memory I still have of my experience in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class during my junior year at Broad Ripple High School is that, before class, while we were all waiting for Mr. Posten to eventually appear in the classroom to lead the mostly sophomore students (who were mostly not very interested in singing and music), there was a lot of discussion about the initial Sonny Liston vs. "Cassius Clay" heavyweight champion boxing match of early 1964. Both before the professional fight and after "Cassius Clay"'s 7th-round upset victory.

Living in New York City in the 1950's and early 1960's, while attending elementary school and junior high school in Queens, I was--like most of the other guys in school--a TV addict who watched a lot of television professional boxing matches each week that were then on either network television or the local New York City television stations. On shows like the Gillette Friday night "Fight of the Week" and a local TV show that televised professional boxing matches from St. Nicholas Arena in New York City.

My parents weren't as into watching the Friday night shows or the St. Nicholas Arena boxing matches on television as I was in the late 1950's and early 1960's. But our family had two black and white television sets, one with a 24-inch screen in the living room, that my parents would watch, and one, with a 12-inch television screen in my room, which I could watch when I wasn't interested in what my parents were watching in the living room. So I was generally able to go into my own room and watch the televised boxing matches whenever I wanted to, when at home.

In addition, when I was in elementary school and junior high school in the 1950's and early 1960's, I was heavily into reading current and back issues of Sport magazine and reading the sports pages of two or three daily and Sunday newspapers of New York City, on a regular basis. In addition, I was also into reading many public library book biographies or autobiographies of sports figures, like professional boxing champions or historical books about sports like professional boxing, fictional books for teenage readers with sports themes written by writers like John Tunis and book anthologies of "The Best Sports Stories" from a particular year, that had previously been published in different U.S. magazines or U.S. newspaper sports sections.

So, although I had never had any interest in, personally, spending any portion of my time outside of public school learning to box (so I could compete in amateur contests like the Golden Gloves, etc.) as a teenager before I was in high school, in 1964 I probably still knew as much about the past and current professional boxers and professional boxing history as most other professional boxing fans.

And, despite having read in the newspapers about how Benny "Kid" Paret and Davey Moore were killed in the boxing ring in the early 1960's, it wasn't until after I entered college that I came to feel that professional boxing should be legally banned in the United States. Although before Muhammad Ali retired in the late 1970's, I retained some interest in watching matches in which he participated on television, whenever I lived in an apartment in which there was a television set.

Prior to his first fight with Liston, all the guys in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class, including me, didn't think "Cassius Clay" had a chance to win. Yet most of the other guys in the class spoke about the upcoming Liston-"Clay" boxing match with exciting anticipation. Mainly because, in the years between the time he won his gold medal in boxing for representing the USA in the 1960 Olympics and early 1964, "Cassius Clay" had been seen on television interview shows a lot, rapping and claiming that he was "the greatest," in a poetic, bragging way; at the same time he seemed to be defeating all the other heavyweight boxing opponents he had been matched up with, prior to facing Sonny Liston.

What I, myself, did not realize, before Muhammad Ali fought Liston for the first time in early 1964, was that--besides being a skillful boxer and athlete who also seemed to be, somewhat, like an entertaining clown--Muhammad Ali was apparently, even then, more intellectually hip than he had let on to being, despite probably not being much of a reader at that time. And he had, shrewdly, apparently realized that, if he imitated the braggart personality of some of the 1950's professional white wrestlers like "Gorgeous George," that he had watched on TV as a child and acted, somewhat like a clown, the promoters of professional championship boxing matches would consider him a more "colorful" and entertaining personality than the other potential challengers for Sonny Liston's title.

And, therefore, they would likely then more quickly give him a chance to fight Liston in a professional heavyweight championship title bout.

Having rooted for "Cassius Clay" more because he was the underdog (rather than because I had been particularly impressed with "Cassius Clay"'s pre-publicly-announced conversion to Islam's "rap poetry" and braggart, pre-1964 persona), I was happy that he defeated Liston in 7 rounds in early 1964. At first, though, I didn't understand in 1964 why he had decided to become a Nation of Islam religious adherent.

But after he refused to serve in the U.S. military a few years later, during the Vietnam War Era, I did come to agree that Muhammad Ali was, indeed, "the greatest person," morally, politically and athletically, to ever win the world heavyweight professional boxing championship in 20th-century professional boxing history.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 70

 I no longer remember whether I was in a Boys Chorus I class that Mr. Posten taught during the second semester of my junior or during the first semester of my junior year. This Boys Chorus I course was one of the music or art-related coures that Broad Ripple required its male students to take in order to receive a diploma. And it was a course I was not particularly interested in taking. But I still have a few particular memories related to being in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus I class in one of those semesters of my junior year, in which I think most of the other high school guys in the class were still sophomores.

Being in a public school glee club had never particularly interested me, prior to moving to Indianapolis; especially because I had previously been much more interested in both playing basketball, stickball and touch football or older teenager-organized football with the other neighborhood guys in Queens, when not inside school, and playing a musical instrument like the saxophone in a band, than in being part of some kind of school choral group, like a glee club.

Yet I had enjoyed singing songs along with others around the campfire, after each meal in the camp cafeteria, and on long-distance hikes in Boy Scout summer camp; and I also had enjoyed being one of the Boy Scout members who helped lead the other scouts in songs in Troop 363 in Queens between 1960 and the end of 1962. In addition, during the two years before my Bar Mitzvah, I used to regularly attend the junior congregation services that were held in the basement of the Marathon Jewish Community Center synagogue each Saturday morning, fairly regularly during the fall, winter and spring.

To do so, I would have to get dressed up each Saturday morning, walk up the hill to the synogogue that was located about 15 minutes by foot from my family's garden apartment in the Beech Hills Development. And, once there, I would sing the prayers, whose Hebrew texts were printed in the Conservative Jewish prayer book we used, along with the other, mainly pre-13 year-old guys, including my two closest friends at the time, Marc and Eugene.

Also, the synagogue cantor, Mr. Rackoff, who gave me Bar Mitzvah lessons, had felt that I had a good voice. So, besides singing the Haf Torah section at the Sarturday morning religious service when I was bar mitzvahed, I also was assigned to lead the congregation in some of the collective singing of the regular Sabbath service prayers.

But in Mr. Posten's Boys Chorus class, he instructed you to sing songs from the printed music song scores, not in the more natural way I would normally sing a song, but in a more artificial, voice-trained way. For exemple, if you needed to hold a particular word of a song for more than one musical beat, the vowels of the word would need to be pronounced, when singing the word, differently than how you pronounced the word when speaking or when singing naturally.

I could not foresee in my junior year of high school--when the thought that I would spend so much of my leisure time, in the decades after 1966, singing songs that I or other songwriters had written, in the various apartments in which I lived, while accompanying myself on guitar, did not exist in my mind--that  becoming a non-commercially-motivated, amateur protest folk singer-songwriter, rather than a playwright, would be the kind of artist I turned out to be during my life. But even if I had foreseen this, the kind of singing that Mr. Posten taught in this chorus class would not have been that relevant to the style of singing I ended up using in singing both my protest folk songs and songs written by other folks.

Like I may have already indicated, Mr. Posten was a tall, white guy, who seemed to be in his 30's. He had been a drum major of the Indiana University marching band, before later living in New York City for awhile, while obtaining a master's degree in music or music education from Columbia University; and eventually ending up being the teacher who headed Broad Ripple High School's music department in Indianapolis.

Mr. Posten seemed to enjoy the music program-related job he had at Broad Ripple H.S.. He was a high school teacher who seemed also to prioritize spending time working with and interacting a lot with the Broad Ripple students at school whom he considered most musically talented; rather than just seeing his high school music teaching job as being a day job he only did because he couldn't make as much money doing some other music-related job or because he wasn't able to earn a living as a professional musician, concert conductor, composer of music, professional songwriter or professional entertainer.

And, despite sometimes relating to the students in his Boys Chorus I class who weren't much into having to take a required music class in too authoritarian, too strict or too sarcastically humorous or condescending a way, Mr. Posten was a skillful music teacher.

So many decades afer being in Mr. Postn's Boys Chorus I class for a term in my junior year at Broad Ripple High School, I now have only two particular memories of what I experienced, related to taking his class.

My first memory related to his Boys Chorus class is that, besides requiring us to read and sing Irving Berlin's "Say It With Music" song from printed sheet music, Mr. Posten also required us to read and sing a religious song whose lyrics praised Jesus Christ, expressed the religiously sectarian viewpoint that Jesus Christ was the son of God and included something like the phrase "Thy Holy name, be ever blessed, praise, Lord, adoration, Oh, Christ the Lord."

In the early 1960's, however, the Supreme Court had made some court decisions to the effect that the separation of church and state provisions of the U.S. Constitution meant that religion should be kept out of the public schools; and that students should not be required to join other students in saying or listening to religious prayers that did not reflect their own philosophical or religious beliefs.

Because I had been a television daily evening news show junkie and a regular reader of daily newspaper headlines since 1960, I had some familiarity with these early 1960's U.S. Supreme Court decisions. In addition, by late 1963 or early 1964 I had read Paul Blanshard's book about the influence of the Catholic Church in the USA and elsewhere, probably because, when JFK campaigned for U.S. president, there was some discussion on the corporate television airways about whether or not democracy in the USA would be more "endangered" if someone of Catholic religious background was then elected as the first U.S. president of Catholic religious background.

So, as someone who was not of Christian religious background and who then had not yet particularly questioned the assumed conservative Jewish religious or liberal pro-Zionist family tradition I had been born into, until I was attending college, I, naturally, didn't feel it was morally or legally right for Mr. Posten to require me to sing a religious song that praised Jesus Christ, inside a public school classroom. And after Boys Chorus I class one day, I mentioned my objection to Mr. Posten about being required to sing a religious song that contradicted my own religious beliefs in his classroom.

Because I was apparently the first student of Jewish religious background that Mr. Posten instructed in a Boys Chorus class who had ever objected to having to sing a religious song in his public school class, Mr. Posten didn't seem to really comprehend why I was objecting to singing the religious song; and, in order to pass the Boys Chorus I class, I ended up having to continue to sing the religious song in class that I had objected to singing.

But perhaps because I was from New York City, I reminded Mr. Posten of him having lived in the Big Apple when he had attended Columbia University, before returning to teach in Indiana; and for that reason, perhaps, he didn't seem to go out of his way to penalize me with a lower grade for expressing my objection to being required to sing the song that praised Jesus Christ inside his public school classroom, despite the early 1960's U.S. Supreme Court decisions related to separation of church and state issues.

 

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 69

In 1964, after the first semester of my junior year of high school in Indianapolis inside Broad Ripple H.S. between February and June, I continued to be in the "G" class for the more academically-oriented high school junior students in English, that Mrs. Deering still taught and in the third-year Spanish class that Mrs. Diaz still taught. But in a "G" class for the more academically-oriented students in Intermediate Algebra II that I continued to be in, my teacher was now a tall guy named Mr. Morgan, who seemed about 15 to 20 years younger than my Intermediate Algebra I "G" class teacher in the previous semester, Mr. Mahin, had been.

As in the fall term, the high school woman student named Sandy still seemed to be the highest-achieving student in this "G" Intermediate Algebra II class that Mr. Morgan taught. But, so many years later, I can't recall anything about what happened inside Mr. Morgan's class during that term. Since there was never any classroom disruption of Mr. Morgan's classroom lessons by any students during the whole term, and because I pretty much did the assigned Intermediate Algebra II homework every day and studied a bit before each scheduled classroom text or quiz, my recollection is that, as in Intermediate Algebra I, I received a final grade of either A or A- from Mr. Morgan in this Intermediate Algebra II course.

In my memory, my second term of 3rd-year Spanish in Mrs. Diaz's "G" class pretty much blends in with the first term. In both terms, I think Mrs. Diaz gave me a final grade of either A- or B-plus, becuase I usually scored around 90 percent on the written Spanish tests and handed in all the homework assignments; although I don't think I was that good at learning to speak the language well enough to have much of a conversation with a native Spanish-speaker.

I now have only two particular memories related to my spring 1964 term in this Spanish language class. One memory is that Mrs. Diaz tried to interest me and my "G" Spanish classmates in joining her during the summer of 1964 in some kind of Spanish language immersion course for U.S. high school students in Mexico City; which would include visiting some Mexican tourist sites, as well as Spanish language study in a country where everyone spoke Spanish.

In later decades, I think it became more common for public high school students to spend their summers studying in a foreign country or at a talent, arts or music-oriented summer camp. But in 1964, most of the high school students I had known who ever spent their summers taking a course (unless the course they were taking was drivers' education) were only doing so because they needed to retake a course they had flunked, in order to eventually qualify for their high school diploma.

So there was no way in 1964 that someone like me--who, as early as first grade, had always disliked the authoritarian aspects of being compelled to attend school during the fall, winter and spring--would consider giving up a portion of a summer vacation from school in order to study and do school work in Mexico City. Especially since none of the other nearly all high school women classmates in this Spanish class had shown any particular interest in getting to know me better either before or after each Spanish class session (in which a lot of time was spent reading excerpts from a Spanish language edition of Don Quijote by Cerventes), during either the Fall 1963 or Spring 1964 semester.

The second particular memory related to Mrs. Diaz's Spanish "G" class I have from the spring semester of 1964 is of bumping into by chance, unexpectedly, one of my classmates in this class, Suzi, at the Glendale Shopping Center one weekday evening, near the end of the school term.

Suzi was then a senior who would be graduating from Broad Ripple High School in less than a month; and she was someone who was likely to have been considered very pretty and physically attractive by most of the high school guys in the school. And my assumption in the spring of 1964 was that Suzi, who had been one of the school's "homecoming Queen" candidates in either the fall of 1963 or fall of 1964, had no difficulty attracting guys at Broad Ripple in her senior class, like the athletes or the various school activity club student leaders, who most of the high school women in the school would feel were the guys most then worth dating in 1964.

Suzi was about 5 foot-2 and seemed to always put on make-up and lipstick and dressup in a fashionable way for each school day. And-- because, as I've indicated previously, in high school I hadn't yet come to regard women who wore make-up and lipstick, and were into dressing-up, as less attractive and more plastic than women who didn't use make-up or lipstick--I also then considered Suzi to be a physically beautiful woman.

Suzi did say "hello" to me and smiled in a friendly way when we bumped into each other, outside of school, at the Glendale Shopping Center. But I realized that, since inside school during the 1963-1964 school year she had never indicated any particular interest in getting to know me and probably already had a lot of senior class guys asking her for dates, her friendliness towards me at the shopping center did not mean that whe was inviting me to ask her for her telephone number or for a date.

In addition, like most high school guys who were juniors in 1964, I automatically assumed that a high school woman who was a high school senior would not be interested in ever dating a guy who was only a high school junior; and, if you were a guy who was a high school junior, the only high school women you should be asking out for dates would be other high school juniors or high school sophomore or freshman class women.

Ironically, in doing some background research for these recollections of my experiences in Indianapolis in 1963 and 1964, I noticed that, like me, Suzi was apparently of assimilated Jewish religious background. But because her family had a last name that was not as easily identified as being a "Jewish" last name as mine, in 1964 I did not realize that Suzi was also of "Jewish" religious background.

Still, because Suzi was a popular senior class student, as well as much less of an alienated, "isolato," outsider and internally non-conformist student at Broad Ripple than I was in 1964, I don't think there would have ever been any likelihood that Suzi would have ever been interested in dating me in 1963 or 1964--despite our common assimilated family religious backgrounds. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 68

In 1964 I still spent a lot of time, in the evening and on weekends at home, watching the corporate media TV programs; and, like most people in the USA, I was still somewhat of a TV addict. So, not surprisingly, I probably spent all day and early evening on January 1, 1964 in Indianapolis watching the televised Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl and Rose Bowl college football games on television. And I probably spent a lot of weekend time, when I was at home, during the early months of 1964, watching some kind of televised sports event each afternoon.

It wasn't until the summer of 1964, after reading a book called The Great Time-Killer, which was critical of the cultural quality of what was now being broadcast on "post-Golden Age of TV" by the CBS, NBC and ABC networks, that I started to become less of a TV addict than I still was in January 1964, at least with respect to watching television shows (other than each day's evening news, weekend evening news shows or tv series shows like The Defenders or weekend evening variety shows like The Jackie Gleason Show or Sunday morning discussion shows like Meet The Press and Face The Nation or Sunday night discussion shows like The David Susskind Show or weekend sports shows) that much, until I entered college in the fall of 1965.

And although I had been heavily into listening to AM hit records radio stations in NYC on my transister radio in the late 1950's, in Indianapolis during the first six months of 1964 I didn't listen to AM hit records radio stations. By that time, I was into mainly still listening to the vinyl records of the Broadway musical hits and flops, movie soundtracks and 1940's big band records that I had purchased the previous year with the money I had earned from delivering the Indianapolis Times; and, by then, I felt the lyrics of the songs that were being played on AM radio (in an era before most people, like me, had FM radios and could listen to FM radio stations) were intellectually shallow and uninteresting.

So I really didn't start listening to pop hits on the radio in the 1960's on a regular basis, for awhile, until I was living in a single dorm room in Livingston Hall on Columbia University's campus in the fall of 1965; where I listened each day, for a bit, to each week's top-40 hit records that WABC-AM DJ's and WMCA's "Good Guys" DJs played, whenever I happened to find myself spending some time in the dorm room during the day or evening.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 67

I no longer recall much else of what happened historically in the world between the late November 1963 days of mourning for JFK and the end of my first term as a high school junior at Broad Ripple High School in early 1964. And about the only thing I now recall doing in December 1963 in Indianapolis, during Christmas Vacation that year, was taking a bus alone to Downtown Indianapolis; and, alone, spending an afternoon rainy day inside a downtown movie theater, watching an anti-war movie, titled "The Victors."

This movie, The Victors, reinforced my feeling that helping to preserve world peace and avoid another war was the most important thing for me to be concerned about, politically, in 1964. 

Yet after viewing The Victors film, I still believed in early 1964 that the main possible threat to world peace came from the foreign policies and actions of the Soviet Union, other communist governments and communists in non-communist "Free World" countries being willing to wage guerrilla war to establish authoritarian, undemocratic "communist dictatorships" in these countries; rather than from the foreign policies and actions of the United States government.

In 1964 I still then, mistakenly, regarded the United States government as a government whose main foreign policy motivation was to preserve world peace and defend freedom around the world against the alleged "threat" to world peace and freedom posed by "world communism." For I was still just an anti-communist liberal, politically, in 1964.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 66

Most people, like me, who watched the Establishment television news departments' coverage of what was happening inside the Dallas police station, between the time of Oswald's arrest on Friday, November 22, 1963 and his elimination on Sunday morning on November 24, 1963, did not focus more on the possible involvement of "The Company" or former "Company"-linked people in JFK's elimination. A major reason was because none of the Establishment mass media reporters seemed to indicate to viewers that the Mayor of Dallas on November 22, 1963 was the brother of the former CIA Deputy Director, Charles Cabell, that JFK had fired, along with then-CIA Director and later Warren Commission member Allen Dulles, following the failure of the CIA-organized 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to overthrow the Castroo-led government in Cuba.

According to Henry Hurt's 1985 book Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation Into The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, it was "known that Cabell and his associates were vehement in their rage toward what they perceived as President Kennedy's `desertion' on the morning of the invasion--the President's refusal to send in military forcee to ensure victory." And according to former New Orleans Distric Attorney's On The Trail Of The Assassins book, after JFK fired then-Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell's brother in 1961, "General Cabell's subsequent hatred of John F. Kennedy became an open secret in Washington."

In addition, when then-Dallas Civil Liberties Union President Olds and other local ACLU officials met in Dallas's Plaza Hotel in the late evening of November 22, 1963--after then-Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz had refused Old's request to be allowed to meet with Oswald--"someone suggested `Call the Mayor,'" according to Jim Bishop's The Day Kennedy Was Shot book. Yet when the then-Dallas Civil Liberties Union President "Olds got on the phone again and asked for Mayor Earl Cabell, former Deputy CIA Director Charles Cabell's brother, and "gave his name and rank," he was "told that the mayor was busy;" and he "wondered what could keep a mayor busy after 11 p.m.," according to the same book.

Then on November 24, 1963, at the very moment Oswald was silenced by Jack Ruby, "Chief Curry, ludicrously, was upstairs in his office responding to a phone call from Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, and had not checked for himself to see if orders were being carried out properly in the basement," according to the Who Was Jack Ruby? book by Seth Kantor. Yet when he testified before the Warren Commission on July 13, 1964, the former CIA Deputy Director Cabell's brother apparently falsely claimed that Dallas Police Chief Curry telephoned him at the very moment Oswald was being transferred.

But, although "in most countries, a powerful individual who also had a top position in a major espionage apparatus and had been at odds with the departed leader would be high on the list of suspects," according to former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's On The Trail Of The Assassins book, the brother of Dallas's mayor on November 22, 1963, "who fit the description perfectly, was never even called as a witness before the Warren Commission." And none of the network television news department reporters covering JFK's elimination on TV between November 22, 1963 and November 25, 1963 seemed to inform viewers that Dallas's then-mayor was the brother of the CIA Deputy Director whom JFK had fired.

So only after Oliver Stone's JFK movie was released in the early 1990's, and it then seemed safer to personally do more research about what actually happened in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, did I, myself, realize that Dallas's then-mayor was the brother of the CIA deputy director whom JFK had fired.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 65

Prior to the spring of 1967 and reading Ramparts magazine's article about New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's re-investigation of what actually happened in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, I had neither read Mark Lane's best-selling Rush to Judgement book nor seen the Rush To Judgement movie that Emile De Antonio and Mark Lane had produced, which raised questions aout the accuracy of the Warren Commision Report's assertion (endorsed by the U.S. Establishment's New York Times, CBS News and all U.S. corporate media news departments) that "Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed both JFK and Tippit." And that only irrational "JFK conspiracy theory-buffs" could doubt the truth of the Warren Commision's case against Oswald and the official U.S. Establishment story about how JFK was eliminated and why Oswald was, in turn, eliminated by Jack Ruby. 

Because De Antonio's Rush To Judgement movie in the 1960's was not broadcast on any U.S. television channel, whether corporate tv network or PBS-affiliated, and did not seem to be shown in many U.S. movie theaters in the USA during the 1960's, it wasn't until decades later that I actually watched De Antonio's Rush To Judgement movie.

But after reading Mark Lane's book in the late 1960's or early 1970's, I did come to agree with Mark Lane's assertion that Oswald's claim after his arrest, that he was just "the patsy" and hadn't shot either JFK or Texas Governor Connolly on November 22, 1963, was true. After all, if, as Lane's book indicates, Oswald was seen by a Dallas cop sitting in the second floor lunchroom of the Texas School Book Depository with a coke bottle in his hand so soon after JFK was shot, there's no way he could have been the one firing any shots from the 6th floor only minutes before; and if the shots that killed JFK came from the grassy knoll, according to the witnesses closest to the scene of JFK's elimination that Mark Lane discovered, Oswald could not have been the person who, alone and individually, eliminated JFK.

Mark Lane was sometimes seen on televisiion disputing the Warren Commission's official version of JFK's elimination in the 1960's. But, because witnesses and journalists (like Dorothy Kilgallen, for example) who too publicly raised questions about the Warren Commission Report's accuracy seemed to end up dead more frequently than the witnesses and journalists who accepted the official story, during the 1960, people like myself tended to say away from doing much independent research or writing about the "Who Killed JFK?" topic during the 1960's. It then still seemed like a personally dangerous topic to get into or a topic which, even if you were willing to risk your life to research or write about, might quickly cause you to become the victim of "conspiracy theorist-baiting" by Establishment journalists, and even by some politically left-liberal "anti-Establishment" journalists, during that decade.

By 1973 and 1974, however, when Richard Nixon was being more heavily investigated for his role in the "Watergate Scandal," and eventually forced by "The Company" liberals and its corporate mass media to resign the U.S. presidency and be replaced by former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford as U..S. president and Billionaire Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president, a lot more people, especially in counter-cultural newspaper or magazine circles were questioning the Warren Commission Report's conclusions. And it then felt personally safer to assert more publicly that Oswald had been framed and was "the patsy" for what happened on November 22, 1963.

Yet even as late as 1973, when I wrote a folk song titled "Young Oswald" (after reading all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission Report that were in one of the CUNY community college libraries in Queens), which reflected my belief that Oswald was innocent of the allegation that he had fired the shots at JFK and eliminated JFK 10 years before, I still did not then question the Warren Comission Report and corporate media's assertion that Oswald was a "leftist who supported the Cuban Revolution in 1963;" at the time he was apparently framed as being JFK's assassin by Hoover's FBI.

The biography of Oswald that the Warren Commission Report writers and FBI investigators had put togeher and my listening to a vinyl record of Oswald defending the Cuban Revolution on a summer of 1963 New Orleans radio show (when he was portraying himself as a "Fair Play For Cuba" spokesperson in New Orleans), that I had purchased, had led me, prior to 1973, to mistakenly believe that Oswald in November 1963 was (like the Rosenbergs) framed by Hoover's FBI for a crime he did not commit; in order, apparently, to blame JFK's elimination on shots fired from a building where the FBI could then falsely claim there was an authentic U.S. leftist working there who had fired the shots.

And even after JFK elimination conspiracy investigators began publicizing more evidence in 1974 that the pro-Cuban Revolution leaflets Oswald was handing out in New Orleans, when he was interfered with by anti-Castro right-wing Cuban exiles on the street there, indicated an address that linked Oswald, himself, to right-wing CIA-backed anti-Castro exiles and their right-wing U.S. supporters, I still wondered why--if Oswald was a CIA agent or asset who had been posing as some kind of Marxist and leftist, from the time he first "defected" to the Soviet Union until he was eliminated by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963--Oswald, once he realized after his arrest that he had been set up as "the patsy" in JFK's elimination, he didn't immediately scream out to the reporters in the police station that he had been posing as a Castro supporter, on orders from the CIA?

But late in the 1970's, after the Church Commitee's U.S. Senate investigation indicated the degree to which "The Company" was involved with others in illegal plots to eliminate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, etc., however, I began to feel that Oswald might have thought that, despite being the CIA's patsy, it might still be safer for him to continue posing as a leftist/Fair Play For Cuba group supporter, until he was able to speak at length to a lawyer; rather than risk being immediately eliminated by some CIA-aligned gunman, himself, to punish him for possibly revealing his top-secret connection to "The Company"?

After his arrest on November 22, 1963, Oswald may perhaps have failed to realize that appaarently once he told reporters that he was "the patsy" and innocent of eliminating either Patrolman Tippit or JFK earlier that day, there was no way that the men who apparently conspired to eliminate JFK in Dallas on November 22, 1963 were going to risk letting him remain alive to stand trial.