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

This is really, really important: David Belin could NOT find the mail room on the plat of the first floor, and neither can I. So, he asked the "mail wrapper" Troy West about it, and Troy said that his station, the place that he worked, was in "another building." 

Mr. Belin: This is the map of the first floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Here is Elm Street and here is the front entrance. Here is Mr. Truly’s office, and here is Mr. Shelley’s office. There is the stairway down to the basement, and there are the elevators and the back stairway. There are the toilets there. About where would you wrap mail there? Here is the domino room and the shower. You are looking here, that is north; Elm Street runs this way and Houston Street runs that way. It is shown on that diagram. 
Mr. WEST. Well, my place was in the west side of the other building. 

But, WC Attorney David Belin just ignored that startling statement. He let it sail right over his head. It was like he never heard it. It was like Troy West never said it. Belin just continued, placing the wrapping room where he wanted it to be, on the first floor, and West went along. 

But, there was another building of the TSBD, and here is what I found out about it: 

In addition to its building at Elm and Houston, the Texas School Book Depository Company maintained a second warehouse at 1917 Houston. Several blocks north of the main building, the short four-story structure was well removed from the parade route, half-hidden on an unpaved section of Houston. Oswald's supervisor, Roy Truly, told the Warren Commission that he had had the option to assign Oswald to either building on his first day at work. "I might have sent Oswald to work [there]... Oswald and another fellow reported for work on the same day [October 15] and I needed one of them for the depository building. I picked Oswald.

So, is that what Troy West was talking about, the other warehouse on Houston Street? Because: we are left with the fact that there is no mail room indicated on the map of the 1st floor of the main TSBD building, the one that is famous:

And, you have to put those two facts together: the fact that there is no mail room on this map and the fact that Troy West's explanation for it was that he worked in another building. 

Then, you have the strange situation that it was as though he never said it. David Belin wanted it to be in THIS building on that first floor, and they started talking as though it was, never resolving the contradiction.

It's perplexing. It's disturbing. It's alarming. 

And, it gets worse.

Troy West said that the tape they used had to be moistened, and it was in a machine that moistened it as you pulled it out. They wanted the story to be that Oswald didn't make the bag on the spot in the wrapping room because that would have risked exposure. So, he would have had to remove the roll of tape from the machine, but off as much as he needed, and then re-installed it, the tape, back into the machine. Didn't that also take time? 

So when did he actually make the bag? Did he do it at work that afternoon, hidden away somewhere? Or did he just take the materials to Irving and make it in Ruth Paine's garage? But, neither Frazier, nor Marina, and nor Ruth ever saw the bag or the materials to make the bag. It is especially puzzling that he would hide the bag or its materials from Frazier, since he supposedly told Frazier that he would be returning with "curtain rods," and Oswald presumably knew that Frazier would be seeing the bag the next day anyway. 

So, why hide it? It was a lot of bulky material to hide within his clothes and be seated in a car and ride for 30 minutes or longer.

 But, I want to get back to Troy Eugene West.

  
Even though he said at one point that the place he worked was in the "other building" they (he and Belin) eventually worked it out that it was that building, the one we know, and that it wasn't so much a room but rather an open space on the west side of the first floor, where he had a table to do the wrapping. 

But, it doesn't make sense. This was a company whose sole reason for being was to ship books to schools. So, how could they not have a shipping room? And since it was schools they were shipping to, how could it not be boxes of books? Don't schools have a lot of students? Don't they all need a book? If the book is being used in the class, then everybody gets one. That's how it was when I went to school. 

So, how is it that Troy's entire description involved taking one or a few books and placing them on paper, then wrapping them, then taping the paper, then tying string around it?

It doesn't even make sense economically. There were 75 employees in this company. Think of how many books they had to sell to generate the revenue to pay all those salaries. But, if the outgoing orders could all be handled by one guy who was wrapping a few books in paper, then how could they stay in business? 

You would expect schools to be ordering books by the box-full. Here's a box that only had 24 copies. 

Let's try to make that out. BDG TEST FUN G/O TRICKS? Then on the next line it says 24 COPIES. G738? G2LUS? Then on the next line XTAX8A etc.?  So, Frazier and Oswald and the other order-fillers were supposed to know what that gibberish meant? They were supposed to know what the book was? But, 24 copies isn't that many for a school. So, wouldn't a school order a whole box? And in that case, why would it have to be wrapped in paper? The box got there without being wrapped in paper, so why couldn't it be shipped the same way? 

And why would you use the US Mail? This was freight. Remember the term: freight elevators? They wholesalers. They weren't retailers. They didn't sell to the public. They sold to schools. They were schools all over Texas and Oklahoma. So, all that shipping to two states, one on which was the second biggest after Alaska, was done through the US Mail, and it was all done by this one guy who wrapped everything in paper and tried it with a string?

Think of it like a funnel. The whole operation flowed down to this guy, this one guy, who had to wrap the orders. So, you had all this freight coming in which required a huge dock and wide doors and freight elevators and an army of "order-fillers" but at the end of the train, you had this one guy wrapping all the orders. It all came to him. And he didn't even get a room, but rather an "area" on the first floor where he could "wrap". But, besides the wrapping, what about the labeling? Troy said that he wrapped the books; he taped up the paper, and he tied it all together with a string, but what about the labeling? How is it ready to be mailed without a label? And what about the postage? Who took care of that? Did they actually go the post office and wait online to secure postage for all these books? He repeatedly used the word "mail" and "mail" has a specific meaning: it refers to the US Mail, the US Post Office. This was 1963, and there were postage meters. So, why was there no mention of one? How did they get them postaged?  

Look, people: it's just crap; all crap. It's just the semblance of a shipping operation; not a real one. No company would or could do business this way. What we're seeing here is the facade of a school book shipping operation. But, it's not even a good facade; it's not even a credible facade. It's not close to being practical and functional. It's not close to being real. It was just a front.