Photo of the 2nd floor lunchroom in the Texas School Book Depository building

This FBI photographic print was in the personal collection of retired agent Nat A. Pinkston (1915-2011). Pinkston was a Dallas attorney prior to joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He retired from the Dallas FBI office in 1967 after twenty-eight years of service. Pinkston was involved in the local assassination investigation, notably tracing ownership of the Mannlicher-Carcano found in the Depository to employee Lee Harvey Oswald. He was also dispatched to the Texas School Book Depository on December 2, 1963, after Lee Harvey Oswald's clipboard was discovered in the northwest corner of the sixth floor near where the rifle had been found shortly after the assassination. -- Stephen Fagin, Curator

During Dallas County renovations in the late 1970s, the second floor lunchroom was dismantled to make way for government office space. A small grassroots team tasked with creating a future display inside the building about the Kennedy assassination (what would become The Sixth Floor exhibit, opened in 1989) saved furniture and other period elements of the lunchroom in the hopes that the space might someday be reconstructed elsewhere. In fact, original plans for The Sixth Floor exhibit in the early 1980s did include such a reconstruction of the lunchroom, located across from the "Rifle Location" in the northwest corner of the sixth floor. However, as the project developed, designers discarded a lunchroom reconstruction in favor of a small theater space and adjacent display focused on the legacy of President Kennedy. The original lunchroom elements saved in the late 1970s remain part of the Museum's Collection. -- Stephen Fagin, Curator