A Nurse from Dallas

Last week I underwent minor surgery to correct a deviated septum. As I write this, I’ve just had the hollow, conical splints that were jammed up each nostril removed; they kept my nose in shape, quite literally, for the first five days of convalescence.

After the procedure they wheeled me into the recovery room, where I gradually began to emerge from sedation. One of the nurses began chattering away at me. I got the sense she wanted to gauge my alertness; to calculate, maybe, how long before I could be discharged.

In any case, she said at one point that she was from Dallas.

“Oh yeah?” I replied, muddy-minded.

“So is another nurse on this ward.”

“Oh.”

“In fact, I used to work at Parkland Hospital.”

“No kidding,” I said through a fog.

“That’s the one where JFK died.”

“That’s true.” It also closed a few months ago, and will be demolished.

“I guess because of that, I’ve always been interested in that case. I read almost everything about it I can.”

“No kidding?” I muttered.

“No kidding!”

So I told her that it was an interest of mine, too; that in fact, I’d written a book about it. Ordinarily I would have kept this to myself, but I was still floating on anesthesia. She seemed genuinely interested. Hard to tell, because I was so out of it from the drugs.

She wanted to know the title, and said she wanted to read it. I told her and she wrote it down. She already had my name on a medical chart.

We talked some more. “There’s no way one guy could have got off all those shots in, what was it? – five or six seconds?” I agreed, then gave her my grand summary: which is the importance of distinguishing between conspiracy and culpability. Demonstrating conspiracy is the easy part, I slurred. The whodunnit is trickier.

Maybe this suggested I was mentally alert. A few minutes later I heard her calling my wife to say I was ready; she could come get me now. “We had a really interesting conversation about JFK!” she said. Le spouse has heard it all before.

As we drove home the aftereffects of the anesthesia got to me and, aggravated by motion, I puked. Caught it all in a plastic bag, on hand just in case. Got home, felt better, took some pain meds, and drifted in and out of consciousness during Thursday Night Football. The Broncos lost to Indianapolis.

Recovery continues.

Material Transfer Agreement

After twenty-something years, Praise From a Future Generation: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the First Generation Critics of the Warren Report is nearly out of my life.

Finally. I’m tempted to add that word to the first sentence. But that may sound a bit mocking, or scornful.

Yet the publisher has paid me off and officially declared the book out of print. The last surviving critic, Vincent J. Salandria (pictured), who some have also called the first critic, died in the summer of 2020.

Now, it all belongs to the ages.

During the book’s research and writing phase I amassed quite a bit of physical data. The project was completed years ago, but – much to the consternation of my wife – this data has sat and sat and sat, and taken up space, in what used to be my office but is now her office.

My ace in the hole was Baylor University in Waco, TX. Or so I thought. Some years back a curator of Baylor’s Penn Jones collection told me he’d be happy to take this stuff off my hands when the time came. But I waited too long; this fellow is no longer there, and Baylor is no longer accepting material like this.

But Hood College is. They’re in Frederick, Maryland. The papers of Harold Weisberg (with goose), Sylvia Meagher, and Ray Marcus are already there; I plundered them way back when. Weisberg’s vast collection has been mostly digitized and is accessible via the web. At least some of the Sylvia Meagher material is online but is far less organized. I don’t know the status of the Marcus material.

And now Hood is taking my stuff. It includes the papers of Vince Salandria, one of several foundations for my book. Long ago, when I first agreed to accept it, Vince told me his wife would otherwise burn it as soon as he was dead. Happily, it has been spared that fate.

I have sorted out the most important stuff from redundant stuff and expect to hand it off to a Hood representative sometime this spring. It consists mostly of correspondence, books, clippings, magazines, and a few oddities.

Praise From a Future Generation will never, of course, be completely out of my life – in spite of what I wrote at the top. How could it be? It will likely be a year or two before any of the materials destined for Hood are accessible to interested parties. Not that I anticipate a flood, or even a trickle, of interest. I’m just glad it won’t end up in a fire pit, or a landfill, which was my fear after Baylor and several other institutions took a pass. (My dream is for this material, and everything relating to the early Warren Report critics, to be in a central location – the Smithsonian, say. Another topic for another time.)

As I write this, most of my collection has been boxed up. Legally it may not be what is called a material transfer agreement – but I am giving, and Hood is accepting. I have signed a Deed of Gift. What remains is for the Hood curator and me to align our schedules and figure out a workable plan to meet at an undisclosed location halfway across the country, to transfer boxes from my vehicle to his.