Did Lee Harvwy Oswald Brother Wife And Kids Change Their Last Name
The Texas Chili Parlor is a neighborhood bar without a neighborhood. Stuck in the no-man'due south-state betwixt the country capitol and the University of Texas campus, the Chili Parlor is so steeped in Austin tradition that its decision several years agone to brainstorm offering chili with beans got coverage on the local Television receiver news. The bar's decor consists chiefly of scuffed wooden tables and junkyard scraps nailed to the walls—rusted license plates, cow skulls, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a hand-scrawled sign higher up the cash register noting that "Tipping is not a city in China." Onetime Life magazine photographs used to hang on the walls, including one of Jack Blood-red shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. "I don't call up anybody I worked with ever idea twice well-nigh it," Rachel Oswald said. "You run into that image everywhere; information technology's easy to have it for granted. But it was still depressing, seeing my begetter shot every time I came to work."
For seven years Rachel was a waitress at the Chili Parlor while she put herself through nursing schoolhouse. One night at the terminate of her shift, she and I shared a bowl of queso, chips, and $2 Bloody Marys. I asked Rachel how many people in the bar knew who she was.
"Who I am?" she asked. "Or who my father was?"
I nodded that I appreciated the distinction.
"The people I've worked with the longest know. A few of the regulars."
The late-nighttime air had become a distinctive Texas medley of cigarette smoke and twenty-four hour period-old chili fumes. Stevie Ray Vaughan was turned upwards loud on the radio. In a bar filled with pretty women, Rachel was striking enough to turn heads. She wore a majestic clothes from a vintage clothing store, platform shoes, and a black string choker. Even at 29, she had a tomboyish quality, and when she laughed, she seemed to be all elbows and collarbones. In conversation, Rachel could be both reserved and outgoing, and though she speaks with a tedious drawl, her dark eyes, high cheeks, and thick, heavy eyebrows make information technology clear she is of Slavic descent. She looks a bit like Helena Bonham Carter, who, coincidentally, played her mother, Marina, in a 1993 TV movie about the Oswald family unit.
It is difficult to imagine what life must exist like for the kid of a celebrity—having a recognizable last proper name, a childhood in the spotlight. But imagine the life of a child fathered by a villain, a child cursed with a name similar Berth or Oswald. Especially Oswald. Even at present, iii decades after President Kennedy's decease, the name still stirs up strong emotions—particularly in Texas. To much of the globe, Texas is Dallas, the place where JFK was shot. Well-nigh Texans resent this with a passion, and many of them blame Rachel'southward father.
"You know, it's interesting if you think about information technology," Rachel said, lighting a cigarette. "Probably the only other people in America who have to routinely see motion-picture show images of their begetter being killed are the children of President Kennedy." She blew a long stream of fume toward the ceiling. "Kinda strange, huh?"
Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald was 33 days former when President Kennedy was killed, 35 days former when Jack Ruby killed her male parent. She was born in Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where both Kennedy and her begetter were transported afterward existence shot.
Rachel'south female parent, Marina, then barely in her twenties, had arrived from Minsk, Russia, but a twelvemonth earlier and spoke very picayune English. According to Rachel, in the months immediately after Lee's murder, Marina, Rachel, and her ii-year-quondam sister survived chiefly on the charity of churches in the Dallas suburb of Richardson.
I asked what it was like being named Oswald and growing upwards so close to Dallas.
Rachel thought for a moment. "I didn't know my family was any dissimilar until I was about seven. One twenty-four hour period, my mother sat my sis and me down on our large green couch and told us that the man who had raised united states equally our begetter—our stepfather, Kenneth—was not, yous know, our existent male parent, and that our existent father's name was Lee Oswald and that he had, well, that he had been accused of killing the president of the United States." Rachel smiled. "This helped explain why our school bus was sometimes followed by news teams, why our mailbox got shot at, why kids at school would ask, 'Did your daddy shoot the president?' At dwelling we rarely discussed Lee. We were merely trying to be a normal family. Every one time in a while my mother would say that I looked similar him, that I ate like him, that my legs looked similar his legs, but for the nigh part we simply didn't talk nearly it."
I asked her what else she remembered about growing up.
"I remember that my female parent was very beautiful, that she had been written upwards in Life magazine. When we moved to Rockwall, which was much smaller than Richardson—people there lived on farming and football game—everyone in town knew my female parent. She was this fragile Russian dazzler, widowed by a human being who shot the president. We were of interest to people. For the most part, folks were nice, but they were e'er whispering things. I recollect that helicopters flew over my female parent'due south wedding to my stepfather, that it was sort of a large deal in the news."
In 1982 a national tabloid newspaper ran an unauthorized embrace story on Rachel and her sister claiming, OSWALD KIDS DON'T HAVE DOGS OR DATES. The word "Oswald" was stamped in ruddy ink over photographs of the two girls. According to the story, Rachel was a miserable, solitary child—her dogs had been poisoned, she had never been asked out on a engagement, she had no friends, her family couldn't even afford to purchase albums for her record thespian. In truth, Rachel was a healthy, active teenager. She studied gymnastics and ballet, fabricated good grades, was a varsity cheerleader, and was even voted most pop student by her classmates.
"Don't go me incorrect," Rachel said, blushing a piddling. "I was shy—and I chose not to date much—but plenty of the commodity was imitation that nosotros filed a lawsuit and they settled out of court. I mean, things weren't completely normal. Sometimes when the cheerleading team went to football games in different towns, people in the stands would shout stuff at me—you know, 'Your daddy shot Kennedy' or 'Good thing your daddy'south expressionless and buried.' Simply more often than not things were pretty normal. The kids didn't intendance much 1 manner or the other. It was normally the parents who did weird stuff."
Equally Van Morrison'southward "Moondance" started upwardly on the radio, Rachel danced her shoulders a little and then lit some other cigarette. "Dating was a little tricky," she said. "There was always the question of whether I should tell the guy almost Lee. If so, do I tell him on the first date or the tertiary? What if I don't tell him at all? Believe it or not, a couple of guys at UT refused to ask me out again after I told them about my dad. One guy I told actually thought I was crazy. He got really scared and wanted to take me to a infirmary. I gauge it was easier for him to believe that I was insane than that Lee was my father. I've had assassination buffs send me roses and love letters. One guy tracked me down to the Chili Parlor and for a while was coming in several nights a week. I've listened to customers talk about Lee and the shooting, peculiarly after JFK came out, without them knowing who I was. I actually once had a customer decline to tip me. He said, 'I know who your male parent is,' and then he just got up and shook his head and left. What it boils down to is that every time I meet someone—every person at a party, every customer I wait on, every classmate, every teacher, every would-exist friend—I ask myself: Practice they know who I am? Are they looking at me that way because of me or because I'm the daughter of Lee Harvey Oswald?"
Over a final round of drinks we started talking virtually the movie JFK. I asked her what she thought of Gary Oldman'south portrayal of her father.
The question brought her up from her Bloody Mary. "The first fourth dimension I met Gary," she said, "I was visiting my mother in Dallas. She told me that there was going to exist a pic fabricated about the bump-off and asked if I wanted to take dejeuner that afternoon with Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner—my mother didn't even know who they were—and I was thinking to myself, 'Oh, my gosh, I'm going to have lunch with Oliver Rock and Kevin Costner!' So we meet them at a Chinese restaurant. It was and then exciting, you know, me being a young woman and everything. At the time I didn't know Gary was involved in the picture show, in fact I didn't really even know who he was. But when he walked into the restaurant, he had come direct from rehearsal and seemed really tired—they were doing the scene where Lee was held in jail—and he was wearing the same white T-shirt and blueish overshirt that Lee had been wearing, his hair was cut similar Lee's, and the way he walked—he looked exactly like him. Then he sat down. I got really embarrassed, but every time I looked up we would catch each other's eye. I think he was checking me out considering I wait very much similar my father, and I call up he was trying to become a experience for my dad by looking at me. And then at ane indicate, while he's asking my mother questions about Lee, he starts to cry. He said that he had been in jail for hours doing this scene—that he had been in handcuffs since dawn, that he'd been beaten up and spit at—and that he had come up to really empathize with what had happened to my begetter, and that now, looking at his wife and girl, it really broke his center to know what we had all gone through. We were terribly moved by this. As far as his portrayal in the movie, let me tell you—Gary Oldman is an player. I retrieve my sis and I going to his hotel room and seeing twelve books near my male parent on the nightstand. Apparently he had even gone to my father'southward grave. I mean, I've never gone to my father'south grave."
"Is the moving picture accurate and then?"
"Everything nigh my begetter is authentic."
"So, what exercise you recollect really happened? Do you lot recall your begetter pulled the trigger?"
Rachel was placidity for a moment. "I recollect Lee was this twenty-iv-yr-onetime guy, this youngster, who got himself in over his head. Lee was intelligent, just he was no genius. I don't know who else was involved, only clearly information technology was also large of a bargain for one twenty-four-twelvemonth-old kid to do by himself. For example, right before the shooting someone asked my mother to accept a picture of Lee property a burglarize, and then right after the shooting, the moving picture is confiscated, and everyone says, 'Look, at that place's the gun, there's the guy who did it, instance closed.' And plainly there were police recordings of someone maxim Jack Cherry-red was planning to kill Lee, and sure enough, the next day Jack Ruby makes his manner through all the constabulary and kills Lee alive on national Television receiver. I hateful, think about it. There are just too many loose ends for it all to be dumped on my begetter. It was just also large of a deal. Until I was 20-3, I didn't even know there were alternative theories. I've merely read a couple of books most it. I'm sad for my father's pain, just basically I simply want it to exist over, ane fashion or another, especially by the time I have kids.
"It's hard having things written about y'all that aren't true. For case, this TV moving-picture show almost my family. When I read the script, I was really angry. Information technology's set in 1978, when I was xv and my sister was seventeen. The writers portray me as this traumatized, victimized kid—there's a scene of me having a birthday party that no one comes to—only me in my birthday chapeau all by myself. That never happened. In the final scene they accept my sister and me walking paw in hand to the Kennedy Memorial, singing 'We Shall Overcome.' That never happened either. I've never even been to the Kennedy Memorial. The writers never talked to me or my sister about our lives. I guess they decided we must exist a certain fashion and then wrote it. That kind of stuff makes you lot feel violated. I've tried not to make a big deal about things. I've never tried to turn a profit from whatever of this—I've waited tables for the concluding six years, making mayhap forty or l bucks a nighttime, to pay my fashion through higher and nursing school. I have a available's degree in natural sciences. I drive a beat-up auto. I'm but a regular person. Simply there are still people who refuse to believe that I could exist normal. That'due south what I hope my kids will never have to go through."
"Do you lot accept whatsoever pictures of you and your father?"
"No. All of our family pictures were confiscated."
The bartenders were endmost up, and Rachel said she needed to telephone call it a night. In that location was more I wanted to enquire, simply it was clear from her face up that she was wondering if she hadn't shared as well much already. Looking at her, I was struck again past the peculiarity of the moment. I was sitting side by side to the daughter of a presidential assassin, an attractive and salubrious woman who apparently wanted nothing more from life than to be a skillful nurse. (Rachel went on to graduate from nursing school and find a chore in the field.) If it is true that verse is the silence between words, so at that place is something genuinely poetic about the life Rachel Oswald is quietly leading between the headlines.
Source: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/lee-harveys-legacy/
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