Baylor library’s JFK archive grows into one of nation’s premier collections

Baylor library’s JFK archive grows into one of nation’s premier collections
By DAVID TARRANT
The Dallas Morning News
dtarrant@dallasnews.com
Published: 05 January 2013 10:23 PM

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Thousands will descend on Dealey Plaza in November for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But one of the most intriguing sites related to the tragedy is 95 miles south, tucked away at Baylor University in Waco.

The W.R. Poage Legislative Library contains a JFK assassination archive that is quietly growing into one of the nation’s premier collections.

In recent years, more than a dozen researchers, authors and experts on the assassination have donated work accumulated over their lifetimes. The files include hundreds of thousands of public documents, photos, recordings, reel-to-reel films and other materials about the tragedy and subsequent investigation — or, depending on your point of view, government cover-up.

In 2012, the Poage Library scored several major acquisitions, including a shipment of 103 boxes of materials from the Mary Ferrell Foundation, named for the Dallas legal secretary who was considered a central figure among JFK assassination experts. By the time of her death in 2004, she had amassed a large database on the subject, including more than 40,000 index cards with names and details that she eventually computerized…

Other Dallas-area university libraries and institutions, including The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, have JFK-related materials. Most are focused on one or two singular collections. For example, Texas Christian University has the Marguerite Oswald Collection, the papers and documents of the accused assassin’s mother.

Passing generation

…Many of the researchers in the Poage collection disputed the 1964 findings by the Warren Commission, the federal government’s official investigation concluding that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman.

Rogers thinks many of these citizen investigations were spurred on by a 1979 report by the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations “that left the door open to a conspiracy,” he said.

The JFK collection began in 2004, when Rogers acquired the papers of the late Penn Jones Jr., the former publisher of the Midlothian Mirror and a legendary skeptic of the government’s investigation. Jones spent the last 35 years of his life trying to prove the assassination was a conspiracy.

In addition to the Penn Jones collection, the library also has the work of Jack White, a photographer who consulted for the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Oliver Stone film JFK.

Wherever possible, the material is made available to the public online. The library has a public electronic archive accessible at www.baylor.edu/lib/poage/jfk/…

Oswald photos

The library also recently received a set of rare photographs, thought to be lost to history for more than four decades. The photos show Parkland Memorial Hospital’s ER doctors trying to save Lee Harvey Oswald, after he was gunned down by Jack Ruby.

In 2004, Shaw, the Cleburne architect, received nine rolls of undeveloped film from a retired Parkland hospital administrator. The film had been taken two days after the assassination, when Oswald was undergoing emergency surgery after being shot by Ruby…

AT A GLANCE: JFK Resource Consortium

In November, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza launched the JFK Resource Consortium, a Web portal with links to various JFK-related collections and archives around Texas. Along with Baylor University’s Poage Library, the site includes links to two dozen institutions, including many universities in North Texas.

Each institution has something different to offer researchers pursuing an angle on the Kennedy assassination, said Krishna Shenoy, librarian of The Reading Room at the Sixth Floor Museum.

The DeGolyer Library at SMU includes the papers of civic leader Stanley Marcus and Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of the assassination. “If you want to know what the city was like at the time, you’d want to go there,” Shenoy said.

The Sixth Floor Museum is also an archival and research institution, Shenoy said. “We have over 40,000 items in the museum collection, including over 1,000 oral histories, and 5,500 in the library collection.” To learn more, visit http://www.jfk.org/go/reading-room/consortium.

There is a video tour Poage which shows our archives at dallasnews.com/video