Totally Texas -- Exploring Dallas’ great indoors

This week’s rains reminded me that even in drought-stricken Texas, some days aren’t nice for playing outdoors. Still, sometimes you’ve got to get the kids out of the house, preferably somewhere we adults can go without being bored. With that in mind, I compiled a list of indoor attractions in downtown Dallas.

Think you’ve seen all the 45,000 exhibits at the Sixth Floor Museum, 411 Elm Street, commemorating the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy? Think again. New items are added regularly.

Lines are shorter than during last year’s 50^th anniversary commemoration, but online purchase of timed entry tickets (at www.jfk.org/) is still recommended. Tickets are $16 for adults, $14 for those age 65 and older, $13 for youths (ages 6-18). Admission is free for children up to age five. Parking is $5 in the adjacent lot, but the museum is also within easy walking distance of the West End DART station.

The bulk of the exhibits are on the sixth floor, including a reconstruction of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s sniper’s nest and film of the presidential motorcade and its aftermath (which may be too emotionally intense for younger kids). But take a few minutes to visit the seventh floor and view artist Alex Guofeng Cao’s photomosaic portraits of the president and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. The museum is open daily.

Approximately two blocks away from the assassination site, Dallas County’s gloriously gaudy nineteenth century courthouse houses a local history museum, the Old Red Museum, 100 South Houston St. Open 9:00 am to 5:00 pm daily except Thanksgiving Day (November 27 this year), and December 24-25. Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for students and seniors, $5 for children ages 3-16. Kids under age three get in free. See www.oldred.org for information about discounts.

The Old Red Museum has special sections for children, historical timelines and memorabilia, and interactive material, including photos of the ambush slaying of Dallas-area outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. (Some photos may be too gruesome for youngsters. Parental discretion advised.)

Also in this western edge of downtown are two of my family’s favorite attractions¾ the Dallas ,World Aquarium, 1801 North Griffin St., and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, 2201 N. Field St. Adjacent parking is available, but aquarium and science museum are also accessible on the cute (and free) pink buses of the D-Link system, running Monday through Saturday. See
http://dart.org/dlink/dlink.asp/ for D-Link information.

Both the aquarium and science museum provide hours of entertainment for kids and adults. Even my grandsons can get their wiggles out by a walk up, down, and around the aquarium’s exhibits or a workout in front of the science museum’s motion capture panels. Tickets to the Perot are $15 for adults, $10 for children ages 2-11; $12 for older children and for adults age 65 and older. Kids under age two get in free. See www.perotmuseum.org for hours and exhibit information.

Tickets to the aquarium are $20.95 for adults, $16.95 for adults age 65 and older, $12.95 for children age 2-11. Children under two get in free. Sales tax is charged on all paid tickets. The aquarium is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, except Thanksgiving and Christmas. See www.dwazoo.com for information.

Maybe by now you’re saying. I’d like to take the kids out, but I’m broke. How about this? The Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood. General admission price¾ absolutely free. Okay, you can pay extra for the special exhibits. Or for parking, although, again, it’s accessible with a combination of DART and D-Link. Too many kids’ activities to count, or take the youngsters through some of the regular exhibits, or give them space to move around in the outdoor sculpture garden. Open Tuesday through Sunday. See
www.dma.org for programs and hours.

Totally Texas -- Dallas remembers JFK 50 years later

The miserable weather on this fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination reminds me how often destiny depends on such vagaries as Texas weather. If Dallas skies had been cold and rainy fifty years ago, if there had been no open convertible parading slowly through downtown. . . .

But November 22, 1963, was a beautiful day in Dallas until a shot rang out. And whether you plan to attend today’s commemorative ceremony, here’s what you need to know if you’ll be in downtown Dallas today.

Streets around Dealey Plaza have already been closed or rerouted for the ceremony, scheduled to open with music by members of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at 11:30 a.m., and ending at approximately 1 p.m. with a scheduled “missing man” flyover salute, which I’m not optimistic about, given the low visibility in this morning’s skies. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza will delay opening until 3 p.m., remaining open until 8 p.m. Today only, audio guides will not be included with tickets for the museum. Especially today, I recommend buying advance museum tickets at www.jfk.org/.

The 5,000 tickets for the official ceremony in Dealey Plaza have already been awarded, but the events will be broadcast live at three sites in downtown: JFK Memorial Plaza, one block east of Dealey; AT&T Plaza at Victory Park; and Annette Strauss Square, 2403 Flora Street, next to the Winspear Opera House.

Most local TV stations will air live or slightly delayed coverage of the commemoration. Live stream coverage will also take place at several websites, including www.jfk50thevents/.

Downtown bus routes will be rerouted until 4 p.m., when all streets are expected to be reopened to traffic. DART’s Red and Blue lines will be closed between Union Station and West End Stations only between 12:10 p.m. and 1:10 p.m., with shuttle bus service during that time. Orange and Green line trains will continue their regular schedules, but it’s reasonable to expect delays due to the closure of the other two lines. DART will provide free transportation to JFK-related sites downtown and in Oak Cliff on its D-link shuttles. For additional information about DART schedules and services, see
www.dart.org/.

Street closure information is available at several sites. The most easily readable map I’ve found is at www.wfaa.com/.

All Dallas County government buildings will be closed today for the commemoration. For additional related events, see www.jfk50thevents.org/.

Wordcraft -- The face that drove Oswald to kill

The Accidental Victim

by James Reston, Jr.

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It seemed at first a notion both absurd and demeaning to the grandeur of its victim and its enduring tragic consequences -- the idea that President John F. Kennedy might have been only an unfortunate bystander at his own assassination. But that was what author/historian James Reston, Jr., proposed to his audience at last week’s audience from Friends of SMU Libraries. And he made a compelling case.

It’s not another conspiracy theory. Reston expressed dismay over a poll by the History Channel that found eighty-five percent of Americans favoring conspiracy in some form as a factor in President Kennedy’s death. There’s one part of the Warren Commission’s findings Reston’s willing to accept -- that apparent assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. After all, he asked, “what government or mobster would entrust so horrendous an act as presidential assassination to a volatile, unreliable character like Oswald?”

Instead, Reston believes that the true target of Oswald’s bullets was not the president, but the man riding with him as their convertible drove slowly through Dallas that sunny day in 1963 -- Texas Governor John Connally.

Who wouldn’t wonder, why Connally?

To a great extent, Reston said, because as former secretary of the Navy, Connally had given the “classic brush-off” to Oswald’s pathetic, almost illiterate letter asking for help overturning his downgraded discharge from the Marine Corps. The discharge that, in the view of the ninth-grade dropout that Oswald was, kept him from the employment he needed to support his wife and children.

Worse still, Connally’s perfunctory reply, more than a year after Oswald’s letter, arrived in “a campaign envelope, with John Connally for Governor emblazoned on the front, and Connally’s smiling face centered within a Texas star. . . Connally’s face became the face
of the U.S. government.”

The story isn’t complete without mention of the political infighting that put Connally in the same car with Kennedy, the overworked security team that took little notice of Oswald, the Kennedy vanity that sent a slow-moving convertible past the ex-Marine’s place of employment in the Texas School Book Depository, the rigid back brace that left Kennedy an upright, unmoving target as everyone else scrambled for cover following Oswald’s initial bullet.

At the height of the Cold War, how could the Warren Commission bear to label this anything but an act of political terrorism. A deed so horrible, so vast in its potential consequences surely deserves an antagonist grander than a lone emotional misfit -- although lone emotional misfit is the profile of the overwhelming majority of domestic assassins, terrorists and wannabes, from John Wilkes Booth through Squeaky Fromme to Nidal Hasan.

“My entry into the Lee Harvey Oswald story came through my own military service,” Reston said. It was through serving in the military, Reston said, that he understood both Oswald’s anguish over the downgrading of his discharge from the Marine Corps and the factors that really turn a person against his homeland.

One thing he learned to look for in recruiting foreign agents was “a strong emotional reason for doing something dangerous -- an obsession with a sense of belief of being wronged.”

“If my discharge changed from honorable to dishonorable, in a secret process. . . I would be distraught,” Reston. And so, he maintained, was Oswald.

Despite Oswald’s continued lip service to communism, the sense of wrong didn’t send him back to the Soviet Union, didn’t make his anger political rather than personal.

In an entry in Oswald’s diary, given in his original spelling, he wrote, “When I frist went to Russia in the winter of 1959 my funds were very limited. So after a certain time, after the Russians had assured thereselfs that I was really a naïve american who believed in communism, they arranged for me to recive a certain amount of money every month. . . It really was payment for my denudation of the U.S. I have never mentioned the fact of these monthly payments to anyone. I do so in order to stat that I shall never sell myself intentionally or unintentionally to anyone again.”

For more about Reston and his works, including The Accidental Victim, see
www.restonbooks.com/.

Totally Texas -- Artistry of the nativity

Dallas Arboretum

8525 Garland Road, Dallas

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Of all the special displays at the annual Holiday at the Arboretum, none are more loved than the nativity collection of the Harrington family. After collecting hundreds of crèche scenes over a fifty-year period, Dr. and Mrs. Harrington donated their collection to the Dallas Arboretum in 2001. Displayed every three years, it’s back this year, along with an encore display of actor George Dvorsky’s collection.

Both collections fill the DeGolyer House on the Arboretum grounds, on view through December 31. The Arboretum is open from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. daily (closed Christmas Day), with self-guided tours of the DeGolyer House from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

The Dvorsky nativities fill the DeGolyer library with more than 250 scenes from around the world. Fashioned from materials as diverse as crystal, cross stitch, and metal car parts, it ranges from the serene to the whimsical, including one of my favorites -- a penguin crèche, the infant cradled on the mother bird’s feet. Dvorsky’s collection first visited the Arboretum in 2009, when he learned about its displays while appearing in a Dallas Summer Musical production.

Included in the collections this year are large scenes designed by Dallas Opera designer Tommy Bourgeois in the living room, with the work of the late set designer and costumer Peter Hall in the dining room.

The Arboretum also hosts special activities from noon to 4 p.m. each Friday through Sunday through December 23. Visitors can see a live reindeer, take pictures with strolling characters costumed as Frosty and Rudolph, and chat with Santa Claus.

The Chihuly glass exhibits remain on display through December 31, although tickets for the nighttime viewings are now sold out.

Tickets to the Arboretum’s daytime events are $15 for adults, $9 for children (age 3-12), with an additional $10 parking fee. However, discounted tickets and parking are available Monday through Wednesday, through December 19 (next week). See
www.dallasarboretum.org/.

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Today, December 14, is also your chance to get a behind the scenes look at another kind of collection -- the collections database of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. In the “Meet the Museum” program at 11:30 a.m., collections staff present some of their favorite catalogues items related to the JFK assassination and discuss what happens before an item goes into its online database. Free with museum admission or $5 for the program only. The museum is located at 411 Elm Street in Dallas. See its online collections database at http://emuseum.jfk.org/.

Totally Texas -- Shots still echoing

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

411 Elm Street, Dallas

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It was a journalist’s nightmare in the pre-mobile era of 1963 -- an incredible, unexpected story and no way to call it in. Pierce Allman and his co-worker Terrance Ford from local TV station WFAA were among those gathered in downtown Dallas to watch the car carrying President John F. Kennedy, then-Texas governor John Connally, and their wives when shots rang out.

Although they were only two blocks from WFAA (Channel 8), Allman remembered running into the adjacent Texas School Book Depository in search of a phone to call the station. He passed a nondescript-looking young man coming out of the building and apparently thought little of the chance encounter at the time. The young man was later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald, generally believed to be the assassin of President Kennedy.

And the unprepossessing, early twentieth-century brick warehouse where Oswald worked found a place in history when the rifle identified as the one that killed the president was found near a window on its sixth floor.

Almost unbelievably, the building continued to operate as a warehouse for school textbooks until 1970. The Sixth Floor Museum housing exhibits related to the Kennedy assassination opened in 1989 in space leased from the building’s current owner, Dallas County.

The museum is immediately adjacent to Dealey Plaza, the most visited landmark in Dallas. From the plaza, visitors can see the “grassy knoll,” believed by some to be the hiding place for a second gunman in the assassination and later covered with flowers by thousands mourning the president’s death.

The museum’s exhibits include an audio tour narrated by Pierce Allman, who recounts his brush with Oswald, and guides visitors through a vast collection of artifacts detailing the history of Kennedy’s brief presidency, his assassination and its aftermath.

The assassination is one of the events that those who of us alive at the time mark our lives by. I was a sixth grade student in a small town one hundred fifty miles away when a school administrator walked into the classroom full of us eleven and twelve-year-olds to tell us what had happened. We didn’t know how to react. As I sat recently through one of the museum’s short films about the assassination, I wept.

The museum open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hours are 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and noon until 6 p.m. on Monday. Admission is $13.50 for adults, which includes the audio tour. There is a parking lot adjacent to the building, or do what I did -- get off at the Dallas Rapid Transit (DART) West End station and walk about four blocks west. See www.jfk.org or call 214-747-6660 for additional information.