Connection between Robert G. Storey, Jr., Dal-Tex Bldg. and H.L. Hunt

 When John Stuart Hunt married in 1946, the rehearsal dinner was hosted by Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Hunt in their home on Lawther Drive. A bridesmaid was the daughter-in-law of Robert G. Storey, who was the former
Elizabeth Anne Toline (daughter of Basil Irving Toline). Toline, incredibly enough was from Moline (Rock Island) Illinois and was assistant sales manager for the farm implement company (John Deere) in 1930. Elizabeth had been born in Moline, IL in 1921. Once they moved to Dallas, B.I. Toline, as he was called, became president of the Dallas Agricultural Club.

501 Elm Street built in 1902
Originally ~ The John Deere Plow Company 

Dallas Textile ("Dal-Tex") Building (Kingman-Texas Building)
(John Deere Plow Company Building^)
501 Elm Street

Taken from "The Dallas Morning News" Friday, June 7, 1946

BEST BIB AND TUCKER KEPT BUSY

Best bonnets and prettiest dresses are being worked overtime this week going to parties for brides-to-be.

A rehearsal dinner will be given Friday evening by Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Hunt, Mr. and Mrs. Al Hill and Mr. and Mrs. Loyd Sands at the Hunt home on Lawther Drive in honor of Miss Jeanne Gannon and John Stuart Hunt, who will be married Saturday evening. Complimenting Miss Mary Hillman, bride-elect of Robert Heidrick, Miss Susan Diggie will entertain with a kitchen shower Friday at her home, 5101 Swiss Avenue. Miss Hillman has announced that her bridal attendants will be Miss Margaret Nell Carlisle, maid of honor; Mrs. Vernon Coe, sister of the bride-elect, matron of honor; Mrs. R. G. Storey, Jr., Mrs. Charles F. Heidrick Jr., of Beaumont, Miss Lenora Rose and Miss Houston Tripp, bridesmaids. Mr. Heidrick's best man will be his brother, Charles F. Heidrick Jr. Ushers will be Vernon Coe, Thomas Hanlon of Scarsdale, N.Y., James Tollison of Amarillo, Harry Underwood of Lubbock and Ronnie B. Cousin Jr. of Austin.  

Madison, Wisconsin THE CAPITAL TIMES, Thursday, April 19,1962

Ex-Chairman of

ABA Is Dead

DALLAS (UPI) — Robert G. Storey Jr., 50, past chairman of the American Bar Association, died Wednesday. Storey, a prominent attorney, was the son of Robert G. Storey Sr., president of the Southwestern Legal Foundation and a former dean of Southern "Methodist University law school.

John Stuart Hunt, whose father was Sherman Hunt, graduated from the University of Texas in 1943, a member of the same fraternity and class as James McQueen Moroney, Jr., who with his father worked with the Dealeys at the Dallas Morning News. Sherman Hunt was an elder brother of Harold Lafayette Hunt, the Dallas oil millionaire. Both were sons of Haraldson Lafayette Hunt, a South Carolinian who had relocated to Illinois before 1880 and reared his family there. Sherman had moved to Montana, where he established a family before moving them to Dallas in the 1930s after his brother H.L. discovered oil in East Texas. However, Sherman had previously traveled on business to Mexico, as shown by his passport application below:

Official Contends Gas

Company Defied Order

By United Press 

EL PASO HERALD-POST - Jan. 23, 1947

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 23.—Joseph J. McHugh, Louisana conservation commissioner, charged today that natural gas was being piped to coal-producing regions outside the state through the Little Inch line in defiance of an order canceling a previously-granted permit. McKugh said that wells owned by H. L. Hunt, Texas millionaire" oil and gas man were running "full blast." The gas removal permit had been issued to the Tennessee Gas and Transmission Co., to transfer 50,000,000 cubic feet of gas daily to northern coal fields.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stevens Point (Wis.) Daily Journal - Thursday, March 3, 1977

FBI has letter Oswald wrote

to H.L. Hunt 

DALLAS (AP) — The FBI acknowledges that it has obtained a letter which Lee Harvey Oswald reportedly wrote to a Dallas millionaire, two weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
asking about Oswald's "position"' before any "steps" were taken.
A spokesman for the FBI said here that the letter was "being investigated" and declined to comment on any findings since it was received. He indicated the letter was obtained only recently.
The FBI spokesman said Wednesday that the letter apparently came from a former aide to H. L. Hunt, a late Dallas millionaire who was a strong financial supporter of conservative causes. The brief letter, dated Nov. 8, 1963, said:

"Dear Mr. Hunt:"I would like information concerning my position. I am asking only for information. I am suggesting that we discuss the matter, fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else. Thank you." 

A comparison of the handwritten note with samples of Oswald's handwriting led investigators to conclude that it was written by Oswald or someone who could imitate his handwriting. Oswald, according to the Warren Commission which investigated the assassination, fired the shots that killed Kennedy. Earlier this week published reports said a copy of the letter had been sent to a retired Texas newspaper editor, Penn Jones, at Midlothian. Tex., by an unidentified source in Mexico City. Jones said the source sent an accompanying letter explaining that he had given a copy of the letter to FBI director Clarence Kelly in 1977, but had received no response. Jones quoted the source as saying that because he had received no answer he was afraid something bad "might happen to me" and had decided to leave the country temporarily. Jones said he wrote to the address in Mexico City, but never heard from the man again. Oswald's widow, Marina, testified in 1964 before the Warren Commission that about two weeks before the assassination Oswald had mentioned he had found a job opening that would provide "more interesting work."

HUNT, HAROLDSON LAFAYETTE (1889-1974). 

H. L. Hunt, oil tycoon, the youngest of eight children of Haroldson Lafayette and Ella Rose (Myers) Hunt, was born in Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois, on February 17, 1889. He was educated at home. In 1905 he traveled through Colorado, California, and Texas. By 1912 he had settled in Arkansas, where he ran a cotton plantation that was flooded out by 1917. In 1921 he joined the oil boom in El Dorado, Arkansas, where he became a lease broker and promoted his first well, Hunt-Pickering No. 1. He claimed to have attained a "fortune of $600,000" by 1925, the year he bought a whole block in El Dorado and built a three-story house for his family. His El Dorado investments and a venture called Smackover taught Hunt lessons about the cost of wasteful practices and excessive drilling. Both fields were depleted rapidly. He also lost money on the Florida land boom, and by the time he got interested in the East Texas oilfield(qv) in 1930, he seems to have been broke again.

Hunt is in the famous photograph that immortalizes the drill test for Daisy Bradford No. 3 and the opening of the East Texas oilfield. On November 26, 1930, he made a deal with Columbus M. "Dad" Joinerqv that made him owner of the well and all Joiner's surrounding leases. Hunt used $30,000 that belonged to P. G. Lake, a clothier from El Dorado, and planned to make subsequent payments from revenue to buy out Joiner. He knew Joiner was beset by problems of oversold interests in the well. By December 1, 1930, Hunt had his own pipeline, the Panola Pipe Line, to run oil from the East Texas field. By 1932 the Hunt Production Company had 900 wells in East Texas.

In 1935 H. L. Hunt, Incorporated, was superseded by Placid Oil Company, and the shares were divided into trusts for Hunt's six children. In late 1936 Hunt acquired the Excelsior Refining Company in Rusk County and changed the name to Parade Refining Company. It was residue gas from this company's lines that caused the New London Explosion on March 18, 1937. Most of the people involved in that catastrophe were employees of H. L. Hunt. In 1937 or 1938 the family moved to Dallas. On April 5, 1948, Fortune printed a story on Hunt that labeled him the richest man in the United States. It estimated the value of his oil properties at $263 million and the daily production of crude from his wells at 65,000 barrels.

John Stuart Hunt

A Final Tribute to Stuart Hunt

John Stuart Hunt was born on July 6, 1921, and passed away on March 18, 2011. He was born in Miles City, Mont., to "Tot" and Sherman Hunt Sr. He arrived in Tyler at the age of 9. His brother, Sherman Jr., drove the entire distance from Montana to Texas at the age of 14 to meet with their father at the beginning of the East Texas Oil Boom. The family moved to Dallas in 1939.

He attended Washington and Lee University for two years before returning to Texas to be close to home at the outbreak of World War II, and graduated from The University of Texas in 1942. He was a proud member of the United States Marine Air Corps. Upon his return to Dallas after active duty, he married Jeanne Gannon in 1946. He remarked that he would marry the love of his life after seeing her enter the ballroom of the Dallas Country Club, before he ever knew her name.

His lengthy and colorful career ran the gamut of endeavors. He started in the oil industry, purchasing leases at the age of 18 after convincing a judge to remove his status as a minor. Stuart participated in the prosperity and growth of Dallas after World War II. He owned, operated or served on the boards of numerous corporations and businesses in banking, to insurance, ranching and real estate development.

In looking over his 70 years as a businessman, his greatest personal achievement was the founding of Preston Trails Golf Club. He was the visionary behind the concept and the driving force to see it through to fruition. Preston Trails was opened in 1965 and is continually regarded as one of the most respected private golf clubs in the United States. Mr. Hunt's crowning recognition came about last year on the first tee box, upon the reopening of the golf course. He was honored as the last living founder of Preston Trails. A man of few words, he expressed humble appreciation for the spirit and camaraderie that has existed throughout the life of the club. He further stated that this "brotherhood" had exceeded his wildest dreams, and for this he was most grateful.

He is survived by his three children, John Ward Hunt, Elizabeth Hara Hunt, Hilre Lucille Hunt; six grandchildren, Elizabeth Gannon Hunt, John Ward Hunt Jr., Andrew Stuart Hunt, Margaret Camille Hunt, William Kent Hunt, Henry William Frost V; one great-grandchild, Beau Turner Jr.; two nephews, Clay McLean Hunt and Todd McLean Hunt, sons of the late Mary and [his brother] Sherman Hunt Jr.

Ted Dealey Steps Up to Dallas 

News Board Chairman

MARCH 17, 1960  

DALLAS (AP) — E. M. (Ted) Dealey has stepped up to become chairman of the board and publisher of the Dallas Morning News. Joseph M. Dealey succeeded his father as president of The News and its associated enterprises, WFAA television and radio. The announcement Tuesday by the board of directors of A. H. Belo Corp., formal name of the company, also said that Managing Editor Jack Krueger, formerly of The Associated Press, had been named one of three new directors.
The board elevated James M. Moroney Sr. from senior vice president to vice chairman of the board; elected Ben H. Decherd Jr. and James M. Moroney Jr. to vice presidents, and elevated Joe Lubben from vice president to senior vice president. Other than Krueger, the new directors named include A. Earl Cullum Jr., prominent in radio and television engineering; D. Gordon Rupe, a leader in investment banking and civic affairs, and Sol M. Katz, circulation manager of The News.

 The man whose wedding rehearsal dinner would be hosted by his uncle, oil millionaire H.L. Hunt, lived in the same fraternity house at the University of Texas with James M. Moroney, Jr., whose father had long worked with the Dealey family at the Dallas Morning News.

Bedford Wynne's Connections to Dallas Lawyers and Military Intelligence

Bedford Wynne's In-Laws

In 1944 Bedford Shelmire Wynne married Juanita Jean Love, the daughter of T. Stafford Love, a medical doctor. Her grandfather (Thomas Bell Love) had been an attorney, insurance executive and a Democratic politician and bureaucrat in Dallas until his death in 1948, with an office (in the 1940s) at 1922 Republic Bank Building while residing in the Argyle Apartments at 3212 Oak Lawn. Dr. Love's office was in the Medical Arts Building and at 4239 Prescott Ave., while living at the south side of Cochran Chapel Road at Midway, a short distance east of Dallas' Love Field. The marriage between Bedford and Nita lasted until 1971, when they divorced. She was a member of Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas when she died in 2006.

Paternal Grandfather of Juanita Jean Love (Mrs. Bedford S. Wynne, 1943)

Thomas Bell Love (1870-1948), lawyer and Democratic politician, the son of Thomas Calvin and Sarah Jane (Rodgers) Love, was born in Webster County, Missouri, on June 23, 1870. He graduated with a B.S. degree from Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, in 1891. He was married to Mattie Roberta Goode on June 11, 1892, and they had three children. Before moving to Dallas in 1899, he was city attorney of Springfield, Missouri (1892-94), a member of the board of managers of Missouri State Hospital, and secretary of the Democratic State Central Committee of Missouri (1896-98).

Love was a prominent figure in Texas political life for the first three decades of the twentieth century. He was elected to the Texas House of Representatives from Dallas County in 1902, 1904, and 1906; the last term he served as speaker of the House of Representatives. He was an expert on taxes, insurance, and banking and had an important role in the passage of the reform legislation of 1905 and 1907 related to these issues. At the conclusion of the 1907 legislative session, Governor Thomas Mitchell Campbell appointed him commissioner of the newly formed Department of Insurance and Banking. Love resigned from the office in 1910 to resume law practice in Dallas and to become associated with Southwestern Life Insurance Company and Western Indemnity Company.

He did not retire from politics, however, for he was a leading spokesman for the prohibition forces in the 1911 submission campaign, and he was an early supporter of Woodrow Wilson for the Democratic nomination in 1912. In 1917 President Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the Treasury Department and placed him in charge of the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Returning to Texas in 1919, Love was elected national Democratic committeeman from Texas in 1920, and he served in that capacity until 1924. He was a leader of the anti-Ferguson forces in the gubernatorial campaign of that year. In 1928 he opposed the nomination of Alfred E. Smith and bolted the party during the election to help organize the Hoover-Democrat clubs that went into the Republican column that year. The last elected office he held was that of state senator (1927-31). Love died in Dallas on September 17, 1948.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Norman D. Brown, Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug: Texas Politics, 1921-1928 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1984). Lewis L. Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973; rpt., Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1992).

As we reported in a previous blog post, Bedford had attended in 1938 a very small private school in Dallas, the Texas Country Day School, which had been founded with only 10 students in 1934. One of the best recruiting devices for the school was the hiring as its football coach then-famous Heisman-Trophy winner and All-America football star from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Davey O'Brien, who had graduated from Dallas' Woodrow Wilson High School in 1932. As Barr McClellan mentions in his book, Blood, Money & Power, among Davey's fellow students during the 1930s were Congressman Jim Collins and Malcolm (Mac) Wallace.

Davey grew up with his divorced mother, Ella May O'Brien in the home of her parents Robert P. Keith and his wife Ola Poole Keith from Tennessee. Ella was born in Cleburne, Texas in 1890, where the family lived until they moved to Dallas after 1900, and Robert changed from selling insurance in Cleburne to working as a salesman for a wholesale produce company. By 1920 the entire family was still living together--Ella's brother, Boyd M. Keith, bringing his wife to live with the family for a decade before buying a house next door. Ella herself had married and divorced while Davey was still a young toddler; Davey had an older brother named Boyd O'Brien. Ella May taught at a private school by then, and her brother had a florist shop. Their closest neighbors on Tokalon Drive were the family of Robert G. Storey, a lawyer, who had two sons a few years younger than Davey.

Lt. Col. Robert G. Storey

Robert Gerald Storey (1893-1981) was a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force during World War II and was Executive Trial Counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg Trial of major Axis War Criminals. He personally interrogated Rudoph Hess, Hitler's Deputy and Nazi Party Leader. In 1947, Mr Storey founded the Southwestern Legal Foundation, serving as President (without compensation) from 1947 to 1972. He served as Dean of SMU School of Law from 1947 to 1959, President of the American Bar Association 1952-1953, President of the Inter-American Bar Association 1954-1956, Member of the Commission to Reorganize Executive Branch of U.S. Government (Hoover Commission) 1953-1955, Member and Chairman, Board of Foreign Scholarships (Fulbright Commission) 1956-1962, and Vice Chairman, United States Civil Rights Commission 1957-1963. He served and received awards from numerous local, state, national and international organizations. In 1969 the World Peace Through Law Center presented him its World Lawyer Award in Bagkok, Thailand.

 It is very possible Bedford Wynne's father Angus G. Wynne, who was the first president of the State Bar of Texas (1939-40) knew Storey, who served in that same capacity (1948-49). Robert, Jr. died in 1962 at the tender age of 41. In 1964, however, the elder Robert G. Storey appeared with colleague Leon Jaworski and others to hear testimony of Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade concerning whether or not there was any evidence that Lee Oswald had been an informant.

ROBERT GERALD STOREY AND LEON JAWORSKI

Herbert J. Miller helped choose Leon Jaworski to head the Texas Commission of Inquiry into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Commission consisted of Jaworski, Texas State Attorney General Waggoner Carr, and Attorney Robert Gerald Storey. Robert Gerald Storey was Assistant Attorney [General?] of Texas for Criminal Appeals from 1921 to 1923. From 1945 to 1946, he was an Executive Trial Counsel for the United States, Nuremberg, Trial of Major Axis War Criminals, 1945 - 1946. From 1953 to 1955, he was a member of the Commission to Reorganize the Executive Branch of United States Government (Hoover Commission). Storey was an advisor to the Korean Government on the judicial and legal profession in 1954. In 1959 he worked at the Korean Legal Center. From 1954 to 1955 Storey was State Department representative in the Far East and the Middle East to assist legal profession of friendly free nations. From 1958 to 1962 Storey was the Chairman of the Board of Foreign Scholarships (International Education Exchange).

Waggoner Carr stated that the purpose of the Commission of Inquiry was to have several lawyers who were independent of the Government, monitor the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

Leon Jaworksi was a former prosecutor at Nazi war crimes trials in Hadamar and Darmstardt. In 1962 Jaworski was appointed Special Prosecutor in the contempt case against Segregationist Governor, Ross Barnett. Leon Jaworski was an associate of John DeMenil. Leon Jaworski was a trustee of the M.D. Anderson Foundation. Congressional Representative Wright Patman's (Dem.-TX.) Subcommittee on Foundations revealed the M.D Anderson acted as a conduit for CIA funds. It granted the American Fund for Free Jurists a half million dollars to further its work. Leon Jaworski refused to comment about his CIA connections. Jaworski was also a Director of the Republic National Bank. [Washington Post 2.18.67]

The Warren Commission took testimony from 550 witnesses, but Leon Jaworski was present at the interrogation of only nine. [Dallas Morning News 1.5.64 p14 sec. 4] Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen reported that Jaworski was present at the interrogation of JACK RUBY, who asked to be transported to Washington, D.C., so he could talk directly with the President. As a representative of the Attorney General of the State of Texas Jaworski had the power to allow RUBY to do this. He said nothing. Jaworski told the FBI he was not present during the interrogation of Ruby, however, his associate, Robert Storey, was. [FBI Inter. W/Jaworski 8.24.64 Houston, Texas] On August 24, 1964, the New York Times reported that Jaworski was being considered for the position of Attorney General of the United States should Robert Kennedy decide to run for the United States Senate in New York State.

At the wedding of Mary Margaret Ferris, and David Cochran Neale in May 1950 in Corsicana: Bedford S. Wynne was best man while the groomsmen were Thomas Moroney, James Moroney, Clint W. Murchison, Jr., Frank W. Campbell, Kenneth A. Swanson, Robert S. Watson, and Dick Reynolds. Seating guests were Royal A. Ferris, Tom Norsworthy and Manson Harris. Dallas Country Club was the
setting for a reception where string music entertained the guests.

Letters to Editor - Bennington Banner, Saturday, May 25, 1974

Propaganda from the right

It is strange that with all the upset about "what must not be read," the MAUHS Curriculum Committee has not come up with at least one suggestion as to what might be good reading. I have a candidate: "Rush to
Judgment" by Mark Lane, published by Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston.
There are no "dirty" words in this book, it has social concern, literary merit, and seeks to answer one of the most vital questions in America today — what forces conspired in the assassination of a very beloved American leader, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The reader cannot fail to sense that this book is responsible for some of the conviction on many peoples' part that the Warren Commission report was the rawest whitewash that has occurred in recent years. Recently a California attorney attempted to secure release of the testimony for scholarly research of the commission's findings, and appealed as high as the Supreme Court. The Court ruled that the records must be held sealed for the originally stipulated period of 75 years.

Lane is the attorney who was to have defended Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin. His presentation is one of documented evidence that Oswald was killed to prevent a trial which would have exposed the plot as a product of ultraconservative forces in this country.
There appears to be a strong connection between Jack Ruby, Oswald's killer, Larrie Schmidt, executive secretary of the John Birch Society, and Joseph Grinnan, a regional coordinator of the John Birch Society.

Why I am linking this book to the school is that I suspect that a member of the John Birch Society, is on the Curriculum Committee and the society has a long "banned-book" list of political subjects that might pollute young minds (but not with dirty words). I expect the list will shortly include insidious "Marxist" subversive
literature such as the Steinbeck novels and, such a dangerous, divisive piece of literature as the little gem entitled "Rush to Judgment."
One might ask how I would identify a member of the Curriculum Committee as a John Birchist. Simple! Where I work, in North Adams, we have a John Birch district coordinator who receives canned propaganda, and within a week after a subject is issued, our trusty local redneck puts in a letter to the editor on the same subject in the same language. It has happened three times in two years.
Censorship will rush us headlong toward the day of a local "Beer Hall Putsch." The putsch in Germany was a
takeover of the local schools and administrative units of government in Munich by a group of 

1.  German rednecks who were not taken seriously
2. Beer hall patrons who were only sporadically employed, and who found time to plot and get fat at society's expense
3. who were school dropouts, mostly unskilled, and hated college-trained intellectuals.
4. who were against the corrupting Influence of liberal Jews.

As It appears now, our society is too benevolent, and we are too well off to take this seriously. The story may be different if we have another depression caused by a conservative administration. Our local clods
might well be issued clubs and the authority to "come down hard" on dissenters. At any rate I will be a marked man for all this, and it would be better "to be dead than so led."

FRANKLIN FRANTZ

Woodford.

WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1963

By RONNIE DUGGER

Oswald Seen At Two Rallies

DALLAS (Special - TPNS) —Ironies continue to multiply in the wake of the assassination here. It now appears that Lee H. Oswald, the accused assassin, attended not only a rally addressed by Gen. Edwin Walker Oct. 23, but also one addressed by UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson Oct. 24.
A Dallas woman, who was seated close to Oswald at the Oct. 25 meeting of the Dallas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), says here that when the Stevenson meeting of the night before was being discussed, Oswald nodded his head and said, "I was there." Oswald said this in an aside to Michael Paine, who had brought him to the meeting, the woman clearly recalled. Oswald's wife and children lived with Mr. Paine's estranged wife in Irving.

Larrie Schmidt — a conservative Dallas insurance salesman, now identified with Bernard Weissman of Mount Vernon, New York, who placed a full-page anti - Kennedy advertisement in the Dallas News the morning of the assassination — was also in attendance at the Stevenson meeting — leading a group of picketers against Mr: Stevenson. Mr. Schmidt refused to comment Sunday on anything having to do with his part in the placement of the ad that was signed Mr. Weissman. (In a New York newspaper interview Saturday, Mr. Weissman named Mr. Schmidt as the man who had telephoned him, after the Stevenson scene, and asked him to come to Dallas to help.him out in the aftermath). But Mr. Schmidt does acknowledge that in advance of the Oct. 24 Stevenson speech, he telephoned  "a friend of mine in a local university" and asked if the friend could help him find people to demonstrate against the UN.

The friend came up with 14 young picketers, and a "peaceful picketing" was organized, Mr. Schmidt said.
The persons who spat on Mr. Stevenson and struck him with a picket sign had nothing to do with his well-dressed and orderly group, Mr. Schmidt said Sunday. "We deplore and certainly do not condone the actions of those people," Mr. Schmidt says.
Mrs. Cora Richardson, the woman who held the picket sign that struck Mr. Stevenson, contends somebody "flipped" her elbow. She said. Sunday that another group were out front of the auditorium, picketing for the United Nations; she said she is convinced that the widely-publicized scene was a frame-up of some kind. As the Washington Post reported Saturday, Oswald rose during the open discussion at the ACLU  meeting and remarked  that he had attended the Walker speech two nights before and had observed anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic symptoms there. A man who attended the ACLU meeting as a guest and who sat directly beside Oswald, has been located and corroborates other recollections about Oswald's remarks at the ACLU meeting, but does not want to be identified. Mr. Paine introduced Oswald to him as "Lee Harvey Oswald." 

"Oswald stood up," the man sitting beside him said, "and said, 'well, we know about this guy Gen. Walker, he's not only anti-Semitic, he's also anti-Catholic, judging from his comments on the Pope.' "

What Oswald Said
This is exactly what Oswald said, at least in substance; and he said a few other things along this line, the man sitting beside him, said. "This source confirms his wife's recollection that Oswald said in the aside that he had attended the Stevenson rally, too. Therefore, even though they, too, refuse to be named, statements by two Dallas women that they thought they saw Oswald at the Stevenson rally become more interesting.
A Dallas businesswoman said: "In my opinion, I did see him (at the scene of the Stevenson speech). I didn't see him anywhere else, but in the lobby. He was picketing."
She had arrived early and first saw a group of well-dressed, neat youths; she remembered a sign, "Wanted For Treason," among them. Then a second group came into the lobby.
"This boy (the one she believes was Oswald) was ahead of this second line. These were different type of people. Some were young, some were old. There were five to seven of them and they were seedy looking. He was clean, but he was very shabbily dressed. I remember thinking how pathetic he was," the businesswoman said. "He was the only one who did a military-type turn. This called my attention to him," she said. Also, he had "a real, different type neck -- he walked like a soldier, did an about-face. He had a very pleased expression with himself, but not a smile."
This woman said that she became "absolutely certain" that it was Oswald she had seen, at the Stevenson scene when she saw a picture of Oswald on TV before he had been, bruised during his arrest after the assassination. She believed Oswald's group picketed and left before the disturbance broke out against Stevenson. A second Dallas, woman, a housewife, said: "I believe, he was there and he was carrying a picket sign in the lobby." Her description of  what he wore matched  the business woman's -- black leather gloves, a suit jacket with unmatching pants. She, too, mentioned his unusual neck and his military gait.

The Big Bust

George Washington Owen, Jr. started life on August 14, 1925 as the son of a Texas couple near the Corsicana oil fields in small town Emhouse. They moved to the big city of Dallas while he was in high school, graduating from Crozier Tech, formerly Oak Cliff High, in the historic downtown area in 1947. At that point he moved up to playing college basketball for Southern Methodist University, also in Dallas, from 1948 through 1951. As the photo below indicates, his basketball team was successful, taking him all the way to New York to play in Madison Square Garden in his junior year. A guard, he was often there on the rebound and sometimes saved the game, at least according to the newspapers reporting the game results.

At least George was enough of a star at SMU to catch the eye, and for a time the heart, of Nell McGrew, country girl from Rotan, near Abilene. Perhaps she was impressed by the fact he was six years older when they married in their junior year in college; he had taken several years after high school to serve in the war. But the newspaper photos would not have impressed her. She already had a huge portfolio of her own.

They appeared to be the perfect couple by the time Candy Barr appeared on the scene in Dallas. The story we hear from all the reporters who talked to Owen is that he was a young, innocent boy when Pat Gannaway's men showed up at Candy's place and were about to haul George off to jail. They say he was the reason Candy took the bottle of weed out of her bra, for which she was later incarcerated after she lost all her appeals. But we have to realize this so-called innocent boy was every bit of 32 years old, a married man with two sons, creator of a chemical business in Dallas, although what type of chemicals he manufactured remains a mystery.

Capt. W. Pat Gannaway in charge of CI unit on narcotics matters. He had been busting Dallas' underworld for over ten years by the time he got Candy Barr for possession of marijuana in 1957. Eleven years earlier he was written up in Texas newspapers for arresting a preacher who was luring young girls up to his hotel room to take nude pictures of them.

Gannaway had gone from being a lieutenant in 1955 to a captain in 1959. In between those years was his arrest of Candy Barr. It was that big bust (no pun intended) which may have made the difference.

Candy Barr, who danced at the Weinstein brothers' high-class joint next door to Jack Ruby's Carousel Club, was the big time for Gannaway. He liked high-profile arrests. Every cop does, if the truth be known. Big arrests mean better pay, more power. Gary Cartwright's story was posted previously on this blog, but it is worth repeating.

Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend

Copyright 1976 by Gary Cartwright 

Texas Monthly (December 1976)

Juanita Dale Slusher encountered the joy of sex at age five with the aid and comfort of an eighteen-year-old neighbor named Ernest. She remembers that he was gentle, and not at all unpleasant. It wasn’t until she encountered the Dallas police force some years later that Juanita Dale associated sex with guilt. When she was nine her mother died and her father remarried: Doc Slusher, brick mason and handyman, a whiskey-drinking harmonica player and all-around rowdy, already had five kids, and right away there were four more, then two more after that. With all those Slushers around, you’d think the work would get done, but it never seemed to…. At age thirteen and painfully confused, Juanita Dale took her baby-sitting money and grabbed a bus out of Edna, an independent decision that would become socially acceptable, even laudable, to future generations, but an act worse than rebellion in those days: it was the act of a bad girl. For a while she lived with an older sister in Oklahoma City, then a year or so later moved to live with another sister in Dallas. The Dallas sister soon hooked up with a man, and Juanita Dale was on her own….

To be technically correct, it was the old Liquor Control Board (LCB) that first discovered the girl who would become Candy Barr. They discovered her posing as an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress—the minimum legal age. She wouldn’t be eighteen for another four years, but girls from tough backgrounds develop early, or they don’t develop at all. She kept changing jobs, and the LCB kept discovering her. Once they sent her home to Edna, but she caught the next bus back to Dallas…. Candy’s first husband, Billy Debbs, was a graduate of Shorty’s academy. Billy was a good lover but a poor student. He went to the pen, got out, then got shot to death. Somewhere in there—she can’t fix the exact time—a pimp spotted her jitterbugging in a joint called the Round-Up Club and launched Candy’s movie career. She must have been about fifteen when Smart Aleck was filmed. The thousands (perhaps millions) who have seen this American classic will recall that she was a brunette then. Smart Aleck was America’s first blue movie, the Deep Throat of its era, only infinitely more erotic and less pretentious. It was just straight old motel room sex; the audience supplied its own sounds….

One of the fringe benefits of being in films was that Candy got invited to all the best stag parties. Several prominent and wealthy Dallas business and professional men, on my oath that their names would not be revealed, recalled a Junior Chamber of Commerce stag where Candy was the star attraction. One auto dealer told me, “She went for two hundred, three hundred, even five hundred bucks. There was a banker who paid five hundred every time he put a hand on Candy.” … The Colony was the Stork Club of Dallas, the Cocoanut Grove, the butterfly of the Commerce Street neon patch where Jack Ruby ran the sleazy Carousel and conventioneers intermingled with cops and hustlers and drug merchants.

…Nobody in the Dallas Police Department wanted to talk about a marijuana case from twenty years ago, and Pat Gannaway, who retired a few years ago to join the Texas Criminal Justice Division, wasn’t available for an interview. But I know this: Pat Gannaway spent a lot of man-hours bringing one stripper to justice. The confluence of these two forces—Candy Barr, desecrater of all that is decent, and Pat Gannaway, the terrible swift sword—is surely the quintessence of a morality frozen in time.

Captain Pat Gannaway was referred to in newspaper accounts of the time as “Mr. Narcotics.” As a lad he had been so eager to join the Dallas Police Department that he lied about his age. For twelve years, until he was kicked upstairs (he was put in charge of rearranging the Property Room) in the 1968 department shake-up, he ran the special services bureau as his private fiefdom. He reported only to the chief. “His passion,” reporter James Ewell wrote in the Dallas Morning News on the occasion of Gannaway’s retirement, “was police work, down on the streets with his men.”

He loved the Army, too. He served in Army intelligence and was an expert wiretapper. When he wasn’t swooping down on the vermin that afflicted his city, Gannaway and his entire force were making speeches to civic clubs, warning of the peril. Those recent 1,000-year sentences that made Dallas juries such a novelty may have been the direct result of Pat Gannaway’s tireless crusade. Gannaway told James Ewell: “It was always a good feeling to see someone on those juries you recalled being at one of those talks. We always told our audiences if you got rid of an addict or pusher, you were also getting rid of a burglar, a thief, or a robber.”

In the autumn of 1957 Gannaway assigned Red Souter (now an assistant chief) and another of his agents, Harvey Totten (now retired), to rent an apartment near Candy Barr’s apartment and establish surveillance. A telephone repairman would testify later that he discovered a “jumper tie-up” connecting Candy’s telephone to the telephone in the apartment occupied by Souter and Totten, but the jury either ignored this or didn’t believe it. A few days after the surveillance began, Candy received a visit from a friend, a stripper named Helen Kay Smith, who laid out a story about her mother coming to visit and asked Candy Barr to hide her stash—the Alka-Seltzer bottle of marijuana. Candy agreed and slipped the bottle inside her bra, next to her big heart. Two hours later, as Candy was talking on the telephone to a gentleman friend (and therefore obviously at home, in case anyone with a search warrant wanted to drop in), there was a knock at the door. Candy’s defense attorneys claimed the search warrant was a blank that Gannaway filled in after the arrest, but the court didn’t buy that either.

Candy’s gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified, told me what happened next: “Candy said hold on, someone is knocking at the door. I heard some noises and someone hung up the phone. All I could think of was she’s in some kind of trouble. I got over to her place. When I walked in I saw Gannaway, Totten, Red Souter, Jack Revill, and I think one other narcotics officer.
Gannaway picked up a chair and said something like, ‘Well, well, that looks like a joint on the floor.’ I swear to you, it was the first marijuana cigarette I ever saw. That’s when Candy, God bless her, said to Gannaway, ‘He’s just a square john kid. He doesn’t know anything about this. If you let him go, I’ll give you what you came for.’ She reached in and pulled out the bottle. Gannaway decided he would take me in anyway, and that’s when Jack Revill said, ‘Captain, if you do that, I’m turning in my badge.’ So they took her away.”

Candy’s four-day trial the following February was a farce, which didn’t prevent it from also being a sensation. 

In its year-end review the Dallas Morning News headline read: Candy’s Trial Led ‘58 Scene.
Judge Joe B. Brown, who would later make his mark as the buffoon judge in the Jack Ruby trial, borrowed a camera and during one of the recesses snapped pictures of “the shapely defendant.” Defense attorneys Bill Braecklein and Lester May realized from the beginning that their problem was much larger than a bottle of marijuana, although, as May explained, “In those days marijuana was worse than cancer.”

“It was a time when the pendulum had swung far to the right,” May told me. “If the police decided you were guilty of something, they made a case and you were found guilty. It was just that simple. Candy’s real crime was she wouldn’t cooperate with the vice squad.”

No, the real problem wasn’t the marijuana, it was Candy Barr herself. It wasn’t merely her reputation, though God knows that was strong enough to kill a rogue elephant, it was that combative stubbornness, that unwillingness to throw herself at the feet of the jury and beg forgiveness. Chief prosecutor James Allen offered her two years for a guilty plea, and if Les May hadn’t got her out of the room she would have spit in his eye, or worse.

They decided not to put her on the stand; without her testimony, of course, it would be almost impossible to challenge state witnesses: she was in possession of marijuana, regardless of Helen Kay Smith’s testimony. That mysterious cigarette on the floor, though, was something else entirely. The attorneys worked out a way to let Candy make a statement to the jury without actually testifying, which meant that she could not be cross-examined. No one remembers Candy’s exact words, but it must have been a stirring oration. When she had finished, the jury just retired and voted her fifteen years in the Big Rodeo. It was Valentine’s day 1958.
“She was a very naive young lady,” Braecklein recalled. “While we were waiting to come to trial, she was out in Las Vegas, doing her act. Just one week before we came to trial, I got word that she was going to be a bridesmaid in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s wedding [to a white actress]. Anyone who grew up in Texas knew …

Although they didn’t anticipate anything approaching fifteen years, the defense team had braced itself for a verdict of guilty. They had already drafted a list of reversible errors that would have choked the Star Chamber. The real shock came when they lost a 2—1 decision in the State Court of Criminal Appeals. In the eleven months that separated the trial from the appeals verdict, Candy had reinforced her public image by moving in with hoodlum Mickey Cohen: one assumes justice is blind, but just how blind is an open question.

… I offered her one of my cigarettes and asked about Mickey Cohen. Cohen had personally guaranteed her $15,000 bond while the marijuana appeal ran its course. In a cruel way, those were the peak years for Candy Barr. She lived in a villa in the notorious Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and earned up to $2000 a week stripping there and in Vegas. Simultaneously, a pack of lawmen and profiteers howled like hungry dogs in her shadow—FBI agents, CIA agents, treasury agents, IRS agents, L.A. cops, Vegas cops, Dallas cops. The pressure was so enormous that the El Rancho Vegas had her replaced with Nelson Eddy. She was also in and out of the hospital with hepatitis. Candy recalled that the first time she ever heard of Mickey Cohen was when he sent an orchid in a champagne glass to her hospital room in L.A., along with this note: “Don’t worry, little girl, you got a friend.”

I had heard from good sources that the reason that Cohen got rid of Candy was she was giving him a bad press. The vast majority of those agents were interested in Mickey Cohen, not his girl friend. Word came down from “the Eastern organization” that if Cohen didn’t drop Candy, they would. Somewhere between Catalina Island and Hawaii….

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Aug 14, 1925 - Jul 20, 2000
  OWEN, GEORGE W.

Age 74. Born in Emhouse, TX, August 14, 1925 and passed away July 20, 2000. After graduation from Crozier Tech High School, Dallas, he served three years U.S. Army, First Infantry Division, including the Battle of the Bulge in WWII. He attended Arlington State, before transferring to SMU where he played varsity basketball and was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha. After graduation, he started Mustang Chemical and other business ventures. During the mid '60s, he was the Player Relations Director for the startup franchise, New Orleans Saints. Later, he was a commercial and residential builder in North Dallas before retiring.

He is survived by children: Mitchell Owen and wife Suzzane, of Dallas; Bart Owen and wife Sheron of Garland, Kyle Owen, Wynne Owen and Mark Owen all of Dallas, and grandchildren: Haley Owen, Jenna Owen, and Scott Owen.

SERVICES: Restland Memorial Chapel at 10:00 AM, Sat, July 22, 2000. Interment to follow in Restland Memorial Park. Family will receive friends from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM Friday, July 21, 2000 at Restland Funeral Home, located on Greenville Avenue, 1/2 mile North of L.B.J.