A JFK Story

My grandfather-in-law, Chris Elson, knew Jack Ruby. Chris was the owner-operator of the Kings Club, the restaurant in Dallas's Adolphus Hotel. As a restauranteur, he knew everyone that served food and hired waitresses in Dallas. Ruby ran the Carousel Club, a burlesque bar across the street from the Adolphus.

On the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I asked Chris what he thought of Jack Ruby, when he knew him back in the day.

Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald, who shot JFK.

"He was a pimp," said Chris. "He hired a lot of girls who had money problems, drug problems, and pimped them out at his bar." Chris didn't like him at all.

Chris was interviewed by the Warren Commission about any discussions or sightings of Jack Ruby's roommate, George Senator,  after the JFK assassination. Here's the only thing he mentioned to the Commission:

CHRIS ELSON, owner and operator of the Kings Club and the Burgurdy Room, Adolphus hotel, advised the Burgundy Room located on the lobby floor and the Kings club located on the sixth floor of the Adolphus Hotel are owned and operated by him.  Neither of the clubs opens until noon. ELSON advised that immediately after the assassination of President KENNEDY on November 22, 1963, he contacted the manager of the Adolphus Hotel and found that the Century Room would not open on November 22 and 23, 1963, and he immediately contacted all of his employees who work in the Burgundy Room and Kings Club and advised them that neither would be opened until Monday, November 25, 1963.

ELSON advised that on November 28, 1963, GEORGE SENATOR contacted him personally at the Kings Club and stated he had a complaint to make against the piano player in the Burgundy Room. On the evening of November 28, 1963, the piano player allegedly made a remark about JACK RUBY and ELSON contacted all employees and it was determined  that none of the employees had seen JACK RUBY, RALPH PAUL, GEORGE SENATOR, or EVA GRANT from November 22 to November 28, 1963.
The employees of the Burgundy Room advised they were reading the headlines of a  newspaper regarding JACK RUBY and this was the basis for the complaint by GEORGE SENATOR.

Senator made a claim that he had met with associates of Jack Ruby at the Kings Club on the 23rd of November, but since Chris explained that the restaurant was closed, this meeting couldn't have happened there. Not a big deal, but it's a discrepancy in testimony that conspiracy theorists try to hang things on.

A Story about November 22nd

I asked Chris what he remembered about November 22nd. Did he see the motorcade? "Oh yes," said Chris, "it was right in front of the restaurant." Here's the memory he shared about that day:

"I never really liked Kennedy," he said. "Don't know why, I just didn't like him. We figured lunch would be late that day because everyone downtown would want to see the President, so we decided to hold off the restaurant opening until 12:30."

"Outside the hotel, we had an awning over the sidewalk that wrapped around the whole building. Some of the girls (waitresses) wanted to get a good look at Jackie, so they went upstairs to walk out on top of the awning. They said I should come and see the President, so I went, too."

The Adolphus Hotel today. Note the balcony awning.

"We climbed through the windows on the second floor and stepped out on the awning just as the motorcycles started coming down the street. The President's car was right up front and we saw him and Jackie and all the other people."

"Now, the President would do this thing where he'd point to a group of people on the sidewalk and they'd all wave and he'd wave back at them. And he kept doing this as their car drove down the street. And then he pointed up at the awning with all of us standing there, and we all started waving back at him. I was surprised I was waving, because I didn't really like the guy."

"So, then the cars all passed by and we started climbing back in the windows to go downstairs and open for lunch. So I'm the last one downstairs. As I'm walking down the stairs, I think to myself: why don't I like that guy? He seems like a nice man, he has a pretty wife, they both seem really happy. I could like that guy!"

"As I walk into the bar area, we had a TV on that was showing the parade. All of a sudden, the man on the TV said the President's been shot. And I think to myself: I really just got to like that guy, and now he's dead."

I've been writing articles and essays about the Kennedy assassination since I was twelve years old. There's a whole industry of conspiracy crazies who debate testimony and evidence Oswald acted alone. After decades of reading all the theories and seeing the places where events occurred, the only rational conclusion I think anyone can draw is that Oswald imagined himself to be a revolutionary and had the unfortunate luck of working in a tall building on a day when the President of the United States would be driving by his office. Fifty years of arguments hasn't made a compelling case against Oswald's guilt, and I've decided not to write about the subject any more.

As to the minutiae that people argue about: I think it's all based on the same thing Chris said: we all really just got to know the President, and now he's dead. It's therapy, not revelation.

Live in the World of Tomorrow...Today!

Norman W. Edmund passed away last Tuesday at the age of 93. Any American boy who grew up in the 1950's and 60's knows the company he founded: Edmund Scientific. His business made home science projects affordable and accessible across the country.

Norman W. Edmund

 Mr. Edmund knew how to connect with the inner scientist in boys everywhere. Rather than playing off the current fad of painting science as something for geeky "outsiders," Norman Edmund portrayed his customers as a group of industry "insiders" who suddenly had access to high-quality science gear at affordable prices. His catalogs, hawked regularly in magazines such as Boys Life, were punctuated with bullet lists of applications for each of his military surplus equipment. What young scientist wouldn't want a Audio Phase Discriminator with resolution down to 200 cycles? And for only $15 plus shipping - - why not order one and find out how to use it when it arrived?

And if you saved up enough money: LASERS!

My first purchase from Mr. Edmund's catalog was a set of six prisms. The glass was Army surplus, originally used as part of a lens set for an armored personnel carrier's periscope, and was virtually impervious to cracking - - even if dropped on a sidewalk. With the simple prisms, I learned how to recreate Isaac Newton's studies of light diffraction and wavelengths. I found out how to aim the prisms to cast rainbows on my bedroom walls, and how to stack prisms to restore the rainbows back to plain white light. All this science for about $3 including shipping.

I didn't buy the most common Edmund product, but many of my friends did: the official surplus military weather balloon with auxiliary helium tank. Many balloons (with an attached Spy Camera with Delayed Shutter Timer) were lost in the New Jersey stratosphere, all in the hope of returning pictures of a near-space panorama. Somewhere in the Raritan River basin, there must be dozens of rusting cameras full of moldy Ektachrome film reels, the remains of many failed junior meteorology experiments.

It's a Professional weather balloon!

Einstein, Salk, von Braun, and Sagan inspired many people my age to become scientists, but the case could be made that Norman W. Edmund inspired more future scientists than all those other men combined.

Steve Jobs

I've never purchased an Apple product. My cellphone is a Droid, my computers are Windows-based or Ubuntu machines built by HP, and my music isn't stored in an i-anything.

Yet, Apple has been a part of my life since the late 70's. I sold TRS-80 computers for Radio Shack, and frequently heard comparisons to Apple's 6502 microprocessor machine.  Their systems always seemed more robust and had many more third-party hardware and software companies than the Radio Shack line. The few people I knew back then who owned Apple machines seemed to be even more enthusiastic about their machines than the TRS-80 owners.

Although I've never purchased an Apple computer, I did own one for about a year. It was a Lisa, the failed precursor to the Macintosh. A friend of Michelle's had bought several then-new Macs for his office and asked me if I'd like his old Lisa. I took it home and fired it up. It was a pretty amazing computer, considering it came out about the same time as the IBM PC-XT. The icon-based screens, reflecting Steve Jobs' successful co-opting of the Xerox Palo Alto GUI, was years beyond anything on other manufacturers' machines. Windows --- the kind of GUI experience already present in the Lisa -- wouldn't arrive until almost a decade later.

Steve Jobs didn't invent all of this, but he brought together the kinds of minds who could build this for the world. Jobs was a promoter even more than he was an inventor. He could sell his vision to others, and show people how wonderful, how simple, and how smart computers could be. In short, Steve Jobs made the future happen - - even for those of us who never bought his products.

A lot of obituaries this evening are making comparisons between Jobs and Thomas Edison, but I think there's a closer comparison between Jobs and Wernher von Braun. Edison focused on the present, but von Braun, and Jobs, sold us on the future - - a future that few could ever imagine happening.

RIP, Steve.