Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

This is a very important statement by the late Harold Norman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXVpmAT5PqE

He said that he saw Oswald 30 minutes before the motorcade on the 1st floor. Well, that's exactly what Oswald said, that he went to the 1st floor lunch room, the domino room, to eat lunch, and he saw Junior (Jarmin) and another negro who was short (Norman). It's in the Fritz Notes.

Morning of the 23rd refers to the time of the interview. 11-21-63 is a mistake; Fritz obviously meant 11-22-63. So, Oswald said that two negroes came in; one was Junior Jarmin, and the other was a short guy (definitely a reference to Norman). It's not clear what "ask?" means, but Oswald's lunch consisted of cheese sandwiches + apple. So, when he was at the 1st floor lunch room, Oswald saw Jarman and Norman. He didn't say that he ate with them, but that he saw them while he was eating or when he went to eat. Oswald didn't eat with anybody. He wasn't very friendly. All that friendliness that he showed to people in Russia never surfaced at the TSBD. He was a loner there; a recluse. The only time he talked to people is when he needed something from them. 

But, the point is that Oswald's spotting and citing of Jarman and Norman was definitely a reference to the 12:00 time frame. Some loudmouthed fools on McAdams forum try to make it that Oswald was sitting in the lunch room close to 12:30 and spotted Jarman and Norman as they re-entered the building to go up to the 5th floor. No, that is not what he said and not what he meant. He was talking about early in the lunch break. Basically: they broke for lunch and Oswald went and ate lunch. And why wouldn't he? He had nothing else to do. And he hadn't eaten that day. All he had that morning at Ruth Paine's house was coffee. So, why would he have put off eating lunch? He wouldn't. He couldn't. He didn't. 

And then there are the foolish Prayermanites who claim that Oswald was eating lunch in the doorway at 12:30, that the "other employees" were the doorway gang, that Oswald was eating with them as he watched the motorcade, a reference to Prayer Man. 

I'll tell you again that the whole Prayer Man clip is HIGHLY suspect. Its incongruities are so great, it should be rejected out of hand as an elaborate fraud. It did not even surface until 29 years after the assassination. And it exists only as a clip- not within an intact film. And there is no excuse for that. It is foolish to think that somebody took scissors to these films. 

Oswald's doings during the lunch break are very simple. He went to the lunch on the first floor in the domino room- which is where he always PUT his lunch when he arrived in the morning and where he always ATE his lunch. So, he ate his lunch there, and when he finished he may have read the newspaper, which he often did. And then he went to the entrance and looked out through the glass, and that is when Carolyn Arnold spotted him through the glass. That's the nice thing about glass; you can see through it. The time is in question. The FBI agent who wrote down what she said made it 12:15, but it was probably later than that, like 12:25. That's what Professor Gerald McKnight thinks. The FBI agent was trying to leave enough time for Oswald to get up to the 6th floor, which is why he made it 12:15. But, the truth is that even 12:15 is extremely exonerating for Oswald, which is why the higher-ups at the FBI got rid of it. They didn't want any reports of anyone seeing Oswald close to the time of the assassination. 

But, after peering through the glass, Oswald went out the door and took a position right in the center of the doorway on the landing. So really, he just went through the door and walked 3 feet to the edge of the landing. And that is where he stood during the motorcade. That is where his image was captured by Ike Altgens and by Dave Wiegman.  And it was from there that he went back through the door and turned right at the stairwell, taking the one-flight of stairs up to the 6th floor, and walking through the office area to the lunch room in the northwest corner, where he had his encounter with Truly and Baker. Oswald reached the lunch room a couple of seconds before Baker. Baker spotted Oswald entering the lunch room from the office side. So, Oswald did NOT come down 4 flights of stairs from the 6th floor on that side of the building; he came up 1 flight of stairs from the opposite side of the building which was caddy-corner. 

And those were all of Oswald's doings from 11:50 to 12:31. He may have had a bathroom stop in-between, but that's it. He didn't go anywhere else, and he didn't do anything else.