Joel Ratliff Oral History

Object number2008.001.0005

Date01/28/2008

ClassificationsOral Histories

Oral history interview subject Joel Ratliff

Oral history interviewer Stephen Fagin

ObjectOral history

Credit LineOral History Collection/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

MediumBorn digital (.wav file)

DimensionsDuration: 45 Minutes

Terms

Collections

DescriptionAudio oral history interview with Joel Ratliff. As an officer with the Dallas Police Department in the early 1970s, Ratliff knew many of the detectives that had worked on the Kennedy assassination investigation a decade earlier. Thirteen years old in 1963, Ratliff observed the Kennedy motorcade on Main Street. His late father, Dallas police patrolman Marshall Ratliff, was assigned to the presidential luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart. Interview conducted by telephone on January 28, 2008 by Stephen Fagin. The interview is forty-four minutes long.

Curatorial Commentary

Joel Ratliff's late father, Marshall J. Ratliff, was one of twenty officers working in the Warrant Section of the Service Division of the Dallas Police Department in 1963. He, along with seventy other law enforcement officials from the Dallas Police Department, the Dallas County Sheriff's Department and the Department of Public Safety, was assigned to the security detail on the first floor of the Dallas Trade Mart for the scheduled presidential luncheon on November 22, 1963. - Stephen Fagin, Curator