Homer Jennings Oral History

Homer Jennings passed away on March 4, 2022. - Stephen Fagin, Curator

Since 2010, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza has actively engaged in community outreach to grow the institution's ongoing Oral History Project. Unlike the one-on-one interviews recorded onsite at the Museum or via Zoom or telephone, community outreach recordings are typically brief, on-the-spot reflections of President Kennedy and the weekend of the assassination that, on average, run between five to fifteen minutes. During a typical outreach visit to a retirement home, church or community center, I give a half-hour presentation about the assassination and the Museum's project and encourage those in attendance to add their voices to this tapestry of living memory. Following the program, somewhat like a doctor's office, I call on volunteers to sit down with me one-on-one, one after another to briefly share their memories. These impromptu recordings have, over the years, uncovered a wealth of untold stories and hidden gems. Among the dozens of everyday memories of hearing about the Kennedy assassination at work, in a restaurant or at school, are a number of Kennedy motorcade spectators, Parkland Hospital personnel, attendees of the Fort Worth breakfast or Dallas Trade Mart luncheon, acquaintances of Jack Ruby, Peace Corps volunteers, civil rights activists and even one local FBI agent, long since retired from the Bureau. It has been an honor to record these and other unique stories related to the life, death and legacy of President Kennedy and the broader history and culture of the 1960s. If you live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and are interested in scheduling an oral history outreach visit for your retirement community or organization, please contact oralhistory@jfk.org. - Stephen Fagin, Curator

Of all of the Dallas/Fort Worth retirement communities that I have visited for oral history outreach over the years, I am most familiar with Brookdale Club Hill (formerly Chambrel at Club Hill) in Garland, Texas. In addition to being the home of my grandmother for more than fifteen years (Wanda Shaw, interviewed in 2013), it was also the longtime home of retired Dallas police detective Jim Leavelle, who was famously handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when Jack Ruby shot Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters on Sunday, November 24, 1963. - Stephen Fagin, Curator