"One thing that was very interesting," Arnolds said, "was that when she (Mrs. Oswald) left, she left

News Business Sports High School Sports Entertainment Eat, Drink, Cook Living Participate Connect Video Photos maui vacation packages FIND SAVE Obituaries Jobs Autos Real Estate Rentals Classifieds Local Businesses Site Index
Back to Main Menu Crime Courts Politics Education Health Health Care Environment Opinions Traffic, Fires Accidents Weather Hurricane Central Science News by Parish National News Photos Contact a News Reporter maui vacation packages Back to Main Menu Real Estate Transfers Back to Main Menu Saints home LSU home Pelicans home Recruiting Tulane Outdoors Running Horse Racing UNO Golf Zephyrs Southern University NCAA Photos Scoreboards National News Contact a Sports Reporter Back to Main Menu Event Calendar maui vacation packages Music Louisiana Festivals home Movies TV Photos Parties/Society Celebs Arts/Stage Mardi Gras Contact an Entertainment Reporter Back to Main Menu Home and Garden Real Estate Transfers Comics Puzzles Community News Photos Pets Animals Fashion/Wish Travel Horoscopes Back to Main Menu Photo Contests Your Photos Your Videos Live on NOLA Webcams Forums Talk Saints Talk LSU Talk Pelicans Talk Food Dining Talk Outdoors maui vacation packages Contests maui vacation packages Back to Main Menu Subscribe Create a Profile eReplica Contact a Reporter Newsletters Text Alerts RSS Feeds Mobile Apps About Us Back to Main Menu News Video Sports Video Entertainment Video Popular Videos Your Videos Contact a Photographer Back to Main Menu News Photos Sports Photos Entertainment Photos Featured Galleries Your Photos Contact a Photographer maui vacation packages Back to Main Menu Local Grocery Ads Special Sections Local Ads Lagniappe
maui vacation packages It was December 2010 and chilly. I'd hooked up with old friends to do some Christmas caroling/bar hopping. Whenever our beery bunch spotted folks on a balcony maui vacation packages or porch, fa la la la la-ing ensued. As we ended a yuletide maui vacation packages serenade somewhere in the mid-reaches of Magazine Street, a murmur spread through our group: That last house we passed was the one Lee Harvey Oswald lived in before he left for Dallas.
And, because he was shot and killed before he could be brought to trial, he remains the deeply shadowed American enigma -- a loser, a loner, a political maui vacation packages radical, vacillating between causes, and who cheaply changed the course of American history.
I spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday (Nov. 16-18) touring the geography of the killer, his many childhood and adult domiciles, a workplace, the site of his arrest for disturbing the peace by squabbling over Castro's right to rule Cuba and a bar that he might have visited. I like this sort of urban adventuring. I found the hunt fascinating. But I'll tell you up front that I didn't run into anyone who much cares about Oswald's memory one way or another. And if nobody cared just a week before Nov. 22, with televisions everywhere ablaze with 50th anniversary stories, then nobody ever cares.
Oswald's first New Orleans home at 2109 Alvar St. flooded during the 2005 levee failures maui vacation packages and was torn down sometime in the last few years. All that remains is a weedy lot and vague memories. Sharon Valentine, who lives in the cottage beside the site, said that the old woman who once occupied the pale blue house told her about the notorious former resident. The woman has since died. Valentine's adult daughter Shana, who works at the Canal Street IHOP restaurant, said that her mom had never shared the Oswald story: maui vacation packages "I never knew the man who killed John F. Kennedy really stayed right next door to us; that's crazy."
Both of the Valentines were much more interested in telling me that the big, elaborately renovated school building across the street from the Oswald lot is the William Frantz Elementary School where, in 1960, schoolgirl Ruby Bridges played an iconic role in desegregation of New Orleans public maui vacation packages schools. Standing in the humid fall breeze, it struck us that so much 1960s American History maui vacation packages had touched this modest neighborhood.
George Mack, an old-timer who was sitting on his Alvar Street porch nearby, also knew about Oswald's place in neighborhood history. He said the former resident was named Mrs. Brown. maui vacation packages Mack had a rather jaded view of the historical implications maui vacation packages of Oswald's history.
"We can't do nothing about it, because it was before our time," he said. "But it's still happening, you know. We have so much killing and so much everything maui vacation packages happening all around and through our country and our city, so I don't know what it's going to come to be."
Pamela Matthews hadn't heard that her taupe-toned double shotgun at 1242 Congress St. was Oswald's maui vacation packages second home until a NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune photographer told her a few days before. Matthews, who was walking a tiny fluffy dog that she referred to as her grandchild, said she immediately phoned her aunt and mom to tell them the weird news.
"I was in the fourth grade at Valena C. Jones school in the Seventh Ward. I'll never forget, I was on the third floor and we were in the classroom, the classroom way on the end. Yep, we were there, I remember it very well. They turned the little black-and-white TVs on."
Nobody was home at Oswald's third abode, a toy-like single shotgun at 1010 Bartholomew St. in Bywater, painted in shades of violet, jade and eggplant. maui vacation packages The front fence supported a jaunty flowering maui vacation packages vine and a huge, fragrant rosemary bush. A pint-sized, but fierce, Hindu statue stood guard at the door.
This was Oswald's third house before he was 2 years old. His mother's lack of money and abundance of wanderlust would mark his childhood. Marguerite Oswald's nomadic tendencies echoed through her son's adult life as he seemed to cast about for a stable home and identity.
One morning last week, I listened to New Orleans-born National Public Radio political commentator Cokie Roberts maui vacation packages discuss the upcoming anniversary of the Kennedy killing. One of the things the nation lost, she said, was the promise of youthfulness. With the advent of the energetic and stylish Kennedy administration, young people finally felt they had "a place at the table," politically speaking. It occurred to me that Oswald maui vacation packages was the ghastly antithesis of youthful democratic activism -- yet he was young. He would be immortally notorious and dead by age 24.
The exertion of raking leaves had given Philip Arnolds' skin a peachy cast that perfectly matched the orange-pink hue of his home at 831 Pauline St. He was not surprised to find me snooping around his driveway, video camera in hand. After all, he'd been interviewed maui vacation packages by a Times-Picayune reporter at the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination maui vacation packages too.
Edward Boudreaux, the man who sold him the house, had filled Arnolds in on the Oswald story -- after the title transfer was signed, sealed and delivered. Boudreaux had rented half the house to Mrs. Oswald maui vacation packages and her two sons. They weren't unusual, not then anyway.
"One thing that was very interesting," Arnolds said, "was that when she (Mrs. Oswald) left, she left Lee Harvey's crib in the house. He (Boudreaux) kept it and raised all of his children in that crib."
Arnolds said the crib stayed in Boudreaux's family for years, until a daughter auctioned it. After the assassination, Boudreaux had been interviewed by the FBI several times -- that's how thoroughly they searched for clues, Arnolds said.
Oswald's fifth residence is part of a huge early-20th-century frame house that crowds every square inch of the lot at 111 Sherwood Forest Drive in an appropriately oak-shaded neighborhood near City Park. The doorbells to the hive of apartments within were either broken or my ringing was ignored. A child had scribbled with chalk on the pavement across the street. Oswald turned maui vacation packages 3 years old when he lived there. The dual forces of nature and nurture were at work.
No one was home at the 757 French St. double bungalow in Lakeview near Canal Boulevard. When Oswald lived there in 1954, the neighborhood was trendy. The splendid sunken gardens planted on the Canal Boulevard maui vacation packages neutral ground were probably still blooming abundantly. Things probably seemed sunny. Yet dark. Here's where our imaginations meet the real Lee Harvey Oswald for the first time. After leaving Sherwood Forest Drive, the mercurial Mrs. Oswald had dragged the family to Dallas, Fort Worth and New York City, with a brief sojourn to 311 Vermont St. in Covington maui vacation packages somewhere in there. Oswald was a teenager now.
At 1452-54 St. Mary St., a square, gray apartment building sits at the corner of Prytania Street in the Coliseum Square neighborhood. It's been divided into condos. Ross Michels and his wife own the space once occupied by the Oswalds.
"Every once in a while I walk in and think, 'Man, it's so strange that Lee Harvey Oswald was living here,'" maui vacation packages Michaels said. "Maybe (he was) laying his head down on the same side of the room as I do in my bed."
Michels was aware of the Oswald connection before he bought into the condominium, but it didn't turn him away. His parents had their misgivings, he said, but he's only 31 and the Kennedy assassination doesn't have the impact on him that it has on them.
"It really sparked something in them," Michels said of his parents' reaction. "They were apparently really touched by it. ... When you think about the loss of someone that important to the country and I don't know how you react to it now. I don't understand. Surely it affects older folks differently than me."
There's not much to see at Oswald's next residence, 126 Exchange Place, an alley off of Canal Street used mainly as a cabstand. The pool hall Oswald lived above is gone. There are no addresses, just blocked doorways and second-story windows. Oswald could have stared out of any of them into the street below as he considered his next move. It was 1955. Oswald was 16.
The next time Oswald lived in New Orleans was 1963. In the meantime, his political outlook maui vacation packages ping-ponged wildly between poles. In 1956, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps presumably maui vacation packages to defend democracy. In 1959, he moved to what was then the Soviet Union to immerse himself in communism. While in the Marines, maui vacation packages he honed his marksmanship. While in the USSR, he married and had a child.
T