The Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

[Michael Bailey]

You’re talking about the dudes on the Grassy Knoll, right?

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.200814.html


I found an article with new (to me) details, from one who, unlike the Peter
Pinguid Society, takes the “lone assassin” theory as Holy Writ…

https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/the-fourth-tramp/

There was a 4th arrest of a man who claimed to’ve been Oswald’s cell mate,
& heard him say he knew Jack Ruby.

But also, the arrest records for the 3, along with the names they gave, are
(or at least in 1992 were) available, and the Church Commission tried with
‘70s era computers to match them with any known individuals.

(Still, that’s even before the 386 (-; )


To share the flavor with a longish excerpt is beyond my ability to resist:

“[3 others were arrested the same day, including a John Elrod]
Nine months after the assassination, Elrod appeared at the sheriff’s office
in Memphis looking for help. Elrod was an alcoholic and now, though he was
trying to dry out, he had been drinking and contemplated killing his wife.
At the sheriff’s office, he confessed to something else that was bothering
him. He said that while he was in a cell with Oswald the day of the
assassination, a prisoner with a battered face had been brought down the
corridor by guards. According to Elrod, Oswald had said he knew the man
because he had seen him in a motel room a few days earlier discussing
selling stolen guns with four other men, including Jack Ruby. The Memphis
sheriff contacted the FBI. Agents interviewed Elrod and filed reports of
his statements. They sent to Dallas for his arrest records, but the reply
came that there was no record of Elrod’s being arrested on November 22,
1963. The FBI assumed Elrod’s tale was the fantasy of a drunk and proceeded
no further. Now Mary [a researcher] had found proof that he had been
arrested that day after all.

That would not amount to much if there weren’t a few other tantalizing
facts the [researchers] La Fontaines found to support Elrod’s story. Oswald
was put in a cell at some point during the afternoon of his arrest. A log
prisoners were required to sign to make telephone calls showed that Oswald
was in cell F-2. The F cell block was a corridor with three small,
adjoining cells. No known record shows what cell Elrod was in, but in 1993
he told the La Fontaines that “a kid from Tennessee who had stolen a car in
Memphis” was also in the cell. The same phone log shows that Douglas, the
confessed car thief, was in cell F-1. And there really was a prisoner with
a battered face in the jail that day. He was Lawrence Reginald Miller, now
dead, who on November 18 was the passenger in the front seat of a blue
Thunderbird carrying guns stolen from a military arsenal. The car crashed
along Hall Street in downtown Dallas while being pursued by the police.
Newspaper stories the next day refer to Miller’s injured face. And, to
complete the circle with exactly the sort of fact that could mean
everything and could mean nothing, the driver of the Thunderbird, Donnell
Darius Whitter, worked in the garage where Jack Ruby took his car. Indeed,
he had personally worked on Ruby’s car.

This is the kind of tale that makes wading through assassination literature
rewarding. And isn’t it a great story! The three prisoners watching the
convict with the bloody face paraded before them, the meeting in the motel
room with Ruby, the stolen guns, the chase through downtown Dallas in a
blue Thunderbird with Jack Ruby’s mechanic at the wheel…not that I believe
that all this proves anything. Elrod’s story may be true, but there is no
proof he was in the cell with Oswald. He could have, for instance, been in
a cell with the man with the battered face and learned his story from him.
And, even assuming Elrod was in the same cell, there is no proof that
Oswald said a thing. Indeed, why would Oswald, who was smirky and elusive
in everything he is known to have said after the assassination, who was
smirky and elusive during his time in the Marines, in Russia, in Dallas,
and in New Orleans, suddenly start talking cordially and intimately to a
teenage car thief and a drunk. Surely, whether Oswald was part of a plot or
not, he would have suspected that anyone put in a cell with him was there
to inform on him to the authorities and thus would not have volunteered
that he knew Ruby.

By discovering the identities of the three tramps, the La Fontaines have
made a real and important contribution to the history of the assassination.
Few books on Kennedy can make that claim with justice. By discovering
Elrod, they have made an ingenious story based on a few related or
unrelated facts. Most books on Kennedy can make that claim. Oswald killed
Kennedy all alone, but people will never believe it in their hearts. There
are too many bizarre facts, too many deep and foreboding characters, and
too many hypnotic stories to weave around them.


On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 11:40 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> The black tristero agents are hired killers, not anarchists. You are
> conflating The Waste of Oedipa’s SanFramcisco experience with the hired
> murderers of Angelo. The bums in the Dylan song were also hired killers who
> had a remarkable likeness to CIA agents.
>
> > On Jun 20, 2024, at 6:36 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > If the three bums in this great song are loosely associated with the
> anarchists in black then that's yours.
> >
> > They are not to me.....Dylan's bums here are not even close to the
> anarchist associations in Pynchon or his own
> > Watchtower song imo.......
> >
> > These bums are us.....
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 8:08 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto:
> brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
> >> ...
> >> There’s three bums comin’ all dressed in rags
> >> Pick up the pieces and lower the flags...
> >>
> >> They mutilated his body and took out his brain
> >> What more could they do, they piled on the pain
> >> But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at
> >> For the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that
> >> Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me
> >> Hate to tell you, Mister, but only dead men are free
> >>               Murder Most Foul.     Bob Dylan
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Jun 19, 2024, at 5:57 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com <mailto:
> mark.kohut at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> P. "the anarchist dressed all in black"....like Driblette's assassins
> >>> and the Tystero Force....the main part--the essence of it?
> >>>
> >>> Which is why it is disruptive but also sometimes violent?
> >>>
> >>> I often think of Dylan's two men on horseback in *All Along the
> Watchtower*
> >>>
> >>> and Pynchon's two riders in* Against the Day....*
> >>> --
> >>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>>
> >>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>