The Voice Of Pat Hall

From a recent book on the case called THE LONE STAR  SPEAKS.


THE VOICE OF PAT HALL
“My mother called and said, ‘One of your boarders is being arrested for something.’”

Pat Hall and her brothers were unfamiliar with the name “Lee Harvey Oswald.” They knew him as “Mr. Lee.” Unlike some of Oswald’s associates, they have happy memories of Mr. Lee, one of the many boarders who rented a room in October l963 from Pat Hall’s grandparents, Gladys and Arthur Carl Johnson.

The Johnsons owned a café as well as a boarding house, so they hired Earlene Roberts to manage the boarding house on Beckley Avenue in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas. The boarding house was such a safe place that Gladys Johnson’s daughter,Pat Hall was eleven years old when “Mr. Lee” became a tenant at her grandmother’s boarding house. Her brothers were ten and six, and the new boarder was nice enough to play catch with them while they waited for their mother to pick them up after her photography studio closed for the day.

“I wasn’t excluded,” Hall explained, “but in those days, it was more appropriate for a young man to play with boys rather than girls.” She remembered Mr. Lee as being a good-natured, polite man who got along well with children, as well as with the other boarders. She also remembered him  being treated differently than the other boarders. His room was a glorified closet, barely large enough for a narrow bed and a dresser.

According to the Johnsons, this small area was added on to the original house as a small library. The four large windows provided plenty of sunlight, so the room appeared larger than it was. In their depositions to the Warren Commission on April 1, 1964, Gladys and A. C. Johnson both stated that the large windows were covered with curtains hung on curtain rods.

Behind the curtains were Venetian blinds. Arthur Johnson was asked whether the curtains which had hung in Oswald’s room were still there on April 1, 1964.
Mr. Belin: “Would those curtains still be on there today? Or might you have different ones now?”
Mr. Johnson: “No, we’d have different curtains now.”

He offered no explanation for replacing the curtains, and there were no follow-up questions concerning why these curtains had been changed. Questions about curtains in Oswald’s small living area were crucial because, according to Buel Wesley Frazier,who drove Oswald to work on November 22, Oswald said he was going to Irving the night before the assassination to get some curtain rods for his room. The interviews of the Johnsons do not appear in the indexed Warren Report;instead, they are found in the non-indexed Volume X of the 26-volume addendum, making them difficult to find.

The Warren Commission attorneys interviewed both the Johnsons and their housekeeper, Earlene Roberts. Pat Hall
remembered tension between her grandmother and Roberts,apparently due to Roberts overstepping her boundaries, she recalled. However, the couple depended on Roberts to rent rooms, to collect and record rent fees, and to clean the boarding house.

“I remember she sometimes made decisions without asking my grandparents,” Hall commented. But in Oswald’s case,
Gladys Johnson herself approved him as a boarder, not Roberts; Johnson discussed the possibility of him renting from
her about three weeks before he actually did so. However, Johnson left the paperwork to Earlene Roberts, so she was the person who officially rented the small room to Lee Harvey Oswald. (Ironically, Stella Puckett’s mother, Gladys Johnson, was the woman who will always be remembered for renting a room to a man soon to be accused of killing President Kennedy.)

To Be Continued

Though the Johnsons did not own a true “boarding house”—boarders were expected to provide their own food—Oswald was allowed to use the family refrigerator. “I remember him putting sandwich meat in the ice box,” Hall recalled. She also remembered Mr. Lee being an avid reader,though she now suspects he might have been dyslexic. She remembered Oswald, when he wasn’t reading, joining the other boarders in the living room to watch television, and he often walked to a nearby library to check out books. Coincidentally,this same library is where Dallas police were first sent to arrest the killer of Officer J. D. Tippit.

“Stella Fay Puckett” is a name unknown to many Kennedy assassination researchers; she was Gladys Johnson’s daughter,and she happened to witness Oswald’s arrest on the afternoon of November 22. As the owner of Puckett Photography, which was located directly across the street from the Texas Theatre, Puckett had a front-row seat to Oswald’s arrest.

That afternoon, she glanced out her studio’s front window and saw police officers forcefully dragging a man to a waiting police car. She did not know the man’s name, but she did recognize his face. Many afternoons that fall, she had seen him playing football with her young sons in the front yard of 1026 North Beckley

After observing the police push Oswald into a police car,Puckett immediately phoned her mother at the family’s business,Johnson’s Café. No one answered. She later learned that the Johnsons, upset at the news of the President’s shooting, had closed their restaurant as soon as the announcement of his death had been made and returned to Beckley Avenue.

Puckett’s second call was to her mother’s boarding house.When her mother answered, Puckett calmly informed her, “One of your boarders is being arrested for something.” The response Puckett received surprised her as much as the scene still unfolding in front of her eyes.

“Well, that explains why the FBI is here searching his room,”her mother replied.This is how the Johnsons learned that  the quiet, unassuming boarder paying $8.00 a week for a small, semi-private room in their boarding house was really named “Lee Harvey Oswald” and possibly was connected to the shooting of a Dallas police officer and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What they never learned was how Dallas police officers and the FBI knew to come to their Oak Cliff boarding house.

After all, as far the Johnsons or anyone else in the boarding house knew, the man being arrested was “O. H. Lee,” and not “Lee Oswald.” Also, the address Oswald had given his employer at the Depository was the address of Ruth Paine’s house in Irving. Even local FBI agent James Hosty, who was keeping tabs on Oswald, thought Oswald was living in Irving and had only recently learned he was living in some boarding house in Oak Cliff. He did not know exactly where. It is still unclear how the Dallas police and the Dallas FBI agents knew to descend on 1026 North Beckley Street in Oak Cliff. Pat Hall smiled and said to the authors, “Another anomaly!”

Although the Johnsons and Earlene Roberts may have been thrust into history simply because they rented a room to a young man later accused of killing the President and a Dallas police officer, there are some questions concerning facts the Warren Commissioners chose to ignore. For example, Gladys Johnson admitted she had not brought her rent registers with her to her deposition in April of 1964. These registers should have contained the names and signatures of every person who had boarded at 1026 North Beckley for the last five to ten years. These documents would have been required by the IRS in case of an audit. They should have recorded every boarder;police could have checked these names to see if any of them were associated with Oswald, or if any might have been anti-Castro Cubans or anti-Kennedy right-wingers.

It is hard to imagine why the Commissioners did not insist on examining these important records. Earlene Roberts showed the most recent records to the Dallas FBI agents on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. The agents were surprised to find no entry for a “Lee Harvey Oswald.” At the time, they apparently did not associate “O. H. Lee” with “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Of course, neither did the Johnsons or Earlene Roberts; none of them made the connection until an image of Lee Harvey Oswald appeared on their television set. That was when all three identified the man at the Dallas Police Department as their “O. H. Lee.”

By April of 1964, the Warren Commissioners knew how vital it was to know everything about Oswald’s associates. However,they seemed uninterested in boarders who shared living quarters with the accused assassin. They did not analyze the signature “O. H. Lee” on the scrap of paper Roberts used to record a rental receipt; they did not bother to compare it to the signature of the man they had arrested. They allowed Gladys Johnson to bring nothing to her deposition hearing except a scrap of paper with the name “O. H. Lee” written on it. The Commissioners took her word that Oswald had written this name on a piece of paper on paying his first week’s rent.

They did not ask if there were other “records” kept on scraps of paper like this one. Perhaps there were other names on the rental records the Commissioners wanted hidden. Some Warren Commission critics have even questioned whether this boarding house at 1026 North Beckley might have been used as a “safe house” for some organization. In that case, the names of informants or their aliases might have appeared on the official registers, and therefore the reason why no one in authority demanded to see them.

Another fact either overlooked or ignored by the Warren Commission was a statement made by the Johnsons concerning housekeeper Earlene Roberts. Approximately three weeks before the Johnsons’ deposition, Roberts mysteriously left their boarding house in the middle of the night and never returned. Both Gladys and A.C. Johnson seemed confused by her actions. They told the Commissioners they had no idea why she left so abruptly and so secretively. Roberts apparently waited until all the boarders had gone to bed; she then disappeared silently into the night.

According to the Johnsons, a phone call to Roberts’ sister, Bertha Cheek, provided very little information. Roberts apparently made a single phone call to her sister, but did not explain why she left her job. Cheek admitted to scolding Roberts for leaving such nice people as the Johnsons. However,she claimed she did not know her sister’s whereabouts. Obviously, someone in authority quickly located Earlene Roberts, because one week after the Johnsons mentioned her disappearance in their depositions, Roberts was providing a deposition herself. In it, she simply stated that the Johnsons were requiring too much hard work from her, so she left.

There was no explanation for why she chose to leave in the middle of the night without leaving a resignation note or speaking to the Johnsons. Another piece of information that Roberts did not mention in her deposition was that her sister, Bertha Cheek, was acquainted with a now infamous man—Jack Ruby. Cheek owned a boarding house on Swiss Avenue in Dallas.

Supposedly, Jack Ruby had approached her in the fall of 1963 about a business proposition. It is possible that Earlene Roberts chose not to disclose this because she felt too closely connected to important figures in the Kennedy assassination. By now, the public knew she had rented Oswald a room and had interacted with him, to a certain extent. She had been the last person in the boarding house to see him alive. Her testimony about his
actions and behavior, as well as about a Dallas police car she had seen stop in front of the boarding house while Oswald was changing clothes, brought her to the attention of numerous officials. The last straw may have been that her sister knew Jack Ruby. Perhaps Earlene Roberts’ midnight escape was a desperate attempt to flee from the attention some accused her of seeking.

Questions linger about the 1963 tenants in the boarding house at 1026 North Beckley that may never be answered unless the tenant registers are finally located. When asked about these records, Pat Hall indicated that they were destroyed years ago. It is difficult to believe that the registers
for 1963 would have been casually thrown away. After all, these were historical records. Oswald’s signature alone would have been worth quite a bit of money. However, if his alias of “O. H. Lee” did not appear in the register, the Johnsons surely would have been asked why, and some sort of explanation would have been expected.

Vinny wrote:From a recent book on the case called THE LONE STAR  SPEAKS.


THE VOICE OF PAT HALL
“My mother called and said, ‘One of your boarders is being arrested for something.’”

Pat Hall and her brothers were unfamiliar with the name “Lee Harvey Oswald.” They knew him as “Mr. Lee.” Unlike some of Oswald’s associates, they have happy memories of Mr. Lee, one of the many boarders who rented a room in October l963 from Pat Hall’s grandparents, Gladys and Arthur Carl Johnson.

The Johnsons owned a café as well as a boarding house, so they hired Earlene Roberts to manage the boarding house on Beckley Avenue in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas. The boarding house was such a safe place that Gladys Johnson’s daughter,Pat Hall was eleven years old when “Mr. Lee” became a tenant at her grandmother’s boarding house. Her brothers were ten and six, and the new boarder was nice enough to play catch with them while they waited for their mother to pick them up after her photography studio closed for the day.

“I wasn’t excluded,” Hall explained, “but in those days, it was more appropriate for a young man to play with boys rather than girls.” She remembered Mr. Lee as being a good-natured, polite man who got along well with children, as well as with the other boarders. She also remembered him  being treated differently than the other boarders. His room was a glorified closet, barely large enough for a narrow bed and a dresser.

According to the Johnsons, this small area was added on to the original house as a small library. The four large windows provided plenty of sunlight, so the room appeared larger than it was. In their depositions to the Warren Commission on April 1, 1964, Gladys and A. C. Johnson both stated that the large windows were covered with curtains hung on curtain rods.

Behind the curtains were Venetian blinds. Arthur Johnson was asked whether the curtains which had hung in Oswald’s room were still there on April 1, 1964.
Mr. Belin: “Would those curtains still be on there today? Or might you have different ones now?”
Mr. Johnson: “No, we’d have different curtains now.”

He offered no explanation for replacing the curtains, and there were no follow-up questions concerning why these curtains had been changed. Questions about curtains in Oswald’s small living area were crucial because, according to Buel Wesley Frazier,who drove Oswald to work on November 22, Oswald said he was going to Irving the night before the assassination to get some curtain rods for his room. The interviews of the Johnsons do not appear in the indexed Warren Report;instead, they are found in the non-indexed Volume X of the 26-volume addendum, making them difficult to find.

The Warren Commission attorneys interviewed both the Johnsons and their housekeeper, Earlene Roberts. Pat Hall
remembered tension between her grandmother and Roberts,apparently due to Roberts overstepping her boundaries, she recalled. However, the couple depended on Roberts to rent rooms, to collect and record rent fees, and to clean the boarding house.

“I remember she sometimes made decisions without asking my grandparents,” Hall commented. But in Oswald’s case,
Gladys Johnson herself approved him as a boarder, not Roberts; Johnson discussed the possibility of him renting from
her about three weeks before he actually did so. However, Johnson left the paperwork to Earlene Roberts, so she was the person who officially rented the small room to Lee Harvey Oswald. (Ironically, Stella Puckett’s mother, Gladys Johnson, was the woman who will always be remembered for renting a room to a man soon to be accused of killing President Kennedy.)

To Be Continued

Thanks for doing this, Vinny.

Officially, the Johnsons got a call from a friend who happened to be a railway cop and a reserve Captain in the DPD. The official story goes that he phoned them to tell them about the assassination.

Did he have nothing better to do at a time like this for a cop, than phone all of his relatives and friends about the assassination? Or did he just phone the Johnsns? If so, why?  

I believe he phoned them to let them know that Fay had called him after "recognising" Oswald as a lodger at her parents house. He probably adviised them to get home because he would be passing the address onto Fritz and Fritz will no doubt send men out to search the room.

So they skeddadle home and wait for the cops. Again, why else would they rush home. Did everyone in Dallas rush home?

The story got changed to hide the real srquence of events. What Pat Hall now likes to joke is an anaomoly (how the police knew aout the place so quick), is explicable if you just switch who phoned who and when - and that there was most likely a reason for the Johnsons rushing home when most business owners stayed on the job.

Though the Johnsons did not own a true “boarding house”—boarders were expected to provide their own food—Oswald was allowed to use the family refrigerator. 

As someone who worked with legal definitions of such terms for the government... technically, it was not a boarding house at all. It was a lodging house (a bed only). Boarding is bed and meals.

I do not believe the "he was allowed to use the refrigerator..." Why? What was so special about him. Pat never explains that bit. There was nothing special. It never happened. They had to say he could use the fridge because the can't have the cheapskae Oswald eating out three times a day. It breaks his budget.

Questions linger about the 1963 tenants in the boarding house at 1026 North Beckley that may never be answered unless the tenant registers are finally located. When asked about these records, Pat Hall indicated that they were destroyed years ago. It is difficult to believe that the registers

Yet I get the feeling these authors have not even looked to find the few names we know of people who stayed there. Names like H. Lee. If they had looked, and fired up the brain cell they share, they may have cottoned on to what was really happening.

Unless they did this in another part of the book, it is just another missed opportunity to scrape away the bullshit and replace it with something much closer to the truth.

Welcome Greg. Will share more from the book later.