This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

It is hard for me not to write about Dallas on November 22, 1963. It is personal and was my first brush with world political events and my political awakening, and I was but a boy in short pants. My family has always been very politically active. My Grandfather was a union organizer, and my father was? I’m not completely certain what my father was or why exactly we were in Texas.

Ostensibly, my father was a mechanical and electrical engineer. My father was a WW2 navy veteran who flew covert missions on blimps with radar. As a kid, I had wished he’d flown a P-51 or B-17 over Germany, it wasn’t until I was older that I began to understand. Flight engineer + Radar + Night Missions + Top Secret.

Most people when they hear a juicy secret can’t wait to share it. My father was the type that could keep that secret. He enjoyed knowing something you didn’t know and casually smiling and looking away. My father was the designer of railroad equipment who then abruptly takes a job with a paper company, and we move to Dallas, Texas, in the summer of 1962.

My mother tells my sister and I that the President was coming to town. And we would be missing school tomorrow to go downtown and see JFK! All I really heard was “no school!” But sadly, the next morning thunderstorms. Unwilling to stand under an umbrella with two kids, the adventure was called off, and we were packed off to school.

I remember the school principal coming to the door and motioning the teacher out into the hall. For a school boy it was a clear warning sign that someone was in big trouble. But the teacher came back and quietly dismissed the class in mid-day in mid lesson. “If you walked or rode your bike to school, go immediately home. If you rode the bus, report to the lunchroom for your bus route.” I couldn’t believe my luck; I had escaped school after all.

They must have felt we were too young to explain an assassination to us. I had no idea what had happened, until I reached home and saw my tear-stained mother. My father? He was in the Trade Mart in Ft. Worth of course, waiting to hear Kennedy speak. He’d heard and met Kennedy before at a private fundraiser in Chicago. He’d met a lot of political figures, like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Hubert Humphrey. We were on Richard J. Daley’s Christmas card list but so were lots of people. Thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands.

When the old man got home, he was upset. He was generally a quiet man, but he was more upset than angry. He said he had wondered why the Secret Service wasn’t getting ready. That the Presidential seal hadn’t been placed on the podium like it should have been. The world stopped to hold its breath. The television was off the air and all regular programming was suspended except for news broadcasts and memorials.

I remember watching a news broadcast eating my cereal in front of the TV. They were moving Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby shot and killed him live on local television. I went to tell my parents what I had just witnessed, but they dismissed me. “You must have heard that wrong.” Eventually being vindicated, but when the name Jack Ruby surfaced my father said, “Jack Ruby! He’s a bag man for the mob.” I was amazed, we hadn’t lived in Dallas all that long and Daddy knew who Jack Ruby was.

Neither of my parents bought into the lone nut with a rifle theory. My father, being my father, took us down to Dealy Plaza as soon as the roads were opened. I asked my father what those silver-gray marks on the pavement were and he explained “Bullet marks.” Bullet marks on Houston Street, history says don’t exist, but I saw them, and the police had marked them.

Years later, I was watching Oliver Stone’s film JFK. The explanation of the New Orleans connection when it suddenly occurred to me. Gee, we visited New Orleans right after the Kennedy assassination too! My father was on a business trip…right? And so, we all flew down to join him for the weekend. What business did my father have in New Orleans? I don’t know.

But soon, we moved again from Dallas for Montgomery, Alabama. Just in time for the Civil Rights struggle. Coincidence? My father took us to Selma to see the Edmund Pettus Bridge just a week after Bloody Sunday. He took us to see Martin Luther King lead the march from Selma to Montgomery. My dad always just seemed to know about things going on outside of his lane. He showed us where Viola Liuzzo was murdered, an odd thing for an engineer to know.

Then we moved back to Chicago and my father returned to his previous employer with a promotion to Vice-President. Part of his new duties involved entertaining out of town company guests. It was Chicago with an open wallet. Sports, shows, live music but always the entertainment was a political speaker.

In 1967, my parents were invited to tour Europe with the possibility of relocating there. Their itinerary hit all the high spots, London, Paris, Rome, Dublin, East Berlin. Now as the cover story was told to me. My parents were visiting West Berlin when the East German border guards suddenly opened the gates and invited western tourists in for a visit. An American engineer and his wife visit beautiful East Berlin and checkpoint Charlie at the height of the Cold War.

They flew to Berlin and my mother hated flying with a passion. Flying in a puddle jumper for a two-day junket in Berlin? Doesn’t sound very likely to me. I suspect another reason besides tourism. I suspect East Berlin was the sole purpose of their trip. But that’s a suspicion and that’s all I know.

My father, the consummate camera junkie and shutterbug had forgotten to bring along his stereo camera that day. Why sure, that makes perfect sense…not! But the story got even more peculiar as my mother told of trying to pay the check in an East Berlin Coffee Shop at the height of the Cold War. The only reason my mother would be paying the check, would be if my father wasn’t there. Where had he gone? Why did he leave my mother all alone in an East Berlin coffee shop?

Who was this man who was my father? Why was he in Dallas and Montgomery and East Berlin? My own son is big into JFK research. I warn him it’s all too big and too complex to ever try and understand. Too many stories and cover stories and contradictions. How can you solve a mystery that extends right into your own home?

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man … a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.” ― Rod Serling