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Pete Mellor
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Posts posted by Pete Mellor
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Very many thanks Joe for putting up this video. A superb 3 hours spent listening to this.
The James McCord info was new and fascinating to me.
I highly recommend people should spare the time to watch this.
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12 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:
David Josephs and Greg Parker have raised some interesting questions about the Aussie girls and the McFarlands.
Indeed. I contacted Greg via e-mail some time back & he had traced one or both of the Aussie girls, and he said to me that they would not talk, which I find suspect after the passage of time. He also stated that Dr McFarland had been seconded to work in a hospital in the U.S., prior to the supposed MC trip. Would love to know more on that!
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3 hours ago, Mervyn Hagger said:
I give it an 'okay' and worth putting on a shelf as a means of jogging the memory about things you have read elsewhere.
Well, I had an Amazon gift card so I have only paid £6 for this & Monica Wiesak's 'America's Last President'.
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On 8/14/2023 at 3:35 PM, Joe Bauer said:
From my rather small West Coast high school ( 1200 students ) most ( but not all ) of the boys who went to Vietnam as Marine and Army combat soldiers ( drafted and joined ) were usually not good students and even dropouts and from poorer families, etc.
Conversely it seemed those from more middle class families and those who were better students or at least stayed in school mostly joined the Navy for their draft service.
I don't think one kid that I knew of from well off families ever got drafted and didn't join as well. Even if they got a low draft number, it seemed somehow they all came up with something viable for a deferment.
I was poor. I got my draft notice the day I turned 18. My number was 51.
I didn't run or hide even though I did not want to go to Vietnam. Especially as a combat soldier. Several of our students were killed or seriously injured there. Our Junior High school principal Mr. Ed Plowman ( great guy ) lost his jet fighter pilot son over North Vietnam. His son was one the first jet fighter pilots lost there.
I already had 4 older brothers in the service in 1969. Two others served as well but got out by 1965. All joined from 1960 to 1967.
They did so for basic economic reasons. It was the only economic opportunity they had going for them coming from a single mom on welfare home situation. No money, no college.
4 joined the Navy. 2 joined the Air Force. All enlisted men.
3 were in the Pac theater scene. Troop transport ship and carriers. Radarman, aviation tech and jet mechanic Chief who stayed in for 20 years. Another brother ( Air Force ) was stationed in Japan and Thailand during the Viet Nam war.
I was ordered to arrive at the Salinas, Calif. bus station at 4:00am just days after my birthday on September 21st, 1969.
6 old black buses with darkened windows took a couple hundred of us straight to the induction center in Oakland to be processed.
The second you stepped off the bus Marine uniformed men began yelling at you to march in this line or that. Shut up, no talking. First stop basic arithmetic and reading test. Junior high level. Amazingly many of my fellow draftees seemed to struggle with questions as basic as 20 X 35 divided by two. Many could barely read!
The Army took those guys right away.
Next - remove clothes down to your skivvees. Here's a basket. Carry it, walk the colored lines we tell you to. No questions, MOVE IT, MOVE IT...you dumb SOB's!
One hot headed draftee took offense to the gruff orders and hit a uniformed guard right in the nose! Blood everywhere.
The punch throwing guy was instantly put upon by six other guards who knocked the holy crap out of him and roughly dragged him away.
The rest of us got real big-eyed fear obedient after that.
One checking station after another. Eyes, teeth, sexual orientation.
Finally one for your feet!
By chance I had very deformed feet. They looked like pig knuckles and my arches were so extremely high they never touched the ground. I had dozens of seriously turned ankles throughout my high school sports activities, especially basketball and even simple running.
My ankle tendons were so stretched, torn and damaged and I truly had many bone spurs unlike Trump.
Somehow I figured ahead of time it wouldn't hurt to see an Orthopedic doctor before I got drafted and he took X-rays of my feet and ankles. I took these with me to the induction center with a far out hope that maybe my foot problems might get me a free pass out.
And they did!
At the foot station a gravelly voiced soldier guard yelled out..."anybody here got any problems with their feet?" I went full on Jerry Lewis goofy arm waving animated and squealed..."right here sir, right here!"
I was removed from the big line and escorted to another wing of the building. Still walking in just my underwear and holding my basket and a large manila envelope with my X-rays.
I was seated on a junky old couch in a hallway and left alone for 4 hours. Finally a guard come to me and gave me two theater type tickets. He said get your sorry *** down to this really crappy looking hotel in the worst part of downtown Oakland and check in. I was ordered to return to the induction center 5 or 6 blocks away at 7:am sharp the next morning.
My hotel room was about 8 feet long. The old creaky spring bed looked like it had been in a skid row house of ill repute before this hotel got hold of it.
Shared bathroom down the hall. No TV. Never really slept. Old phone rang without pauses at 6:AM and the clerk simply said..."time to go."
The other ticket was for a breakfast meal at a dive buffet called "Fosters" in between the hotel and the induction center.
It was still dark when I walked in. Lot of street people in there drinking coffee.
Eggs and pancakes were surprisingly tasty.
I soon walked to the induction center. Explained my situation and was ordered to some office exam type room.
Waited 6 hours, again on the same couch.
Finally a person who I assumed was an Orthopedic came and motioned me in. No pleasantries at all.
" Get down and squat. "Now duck walk." "Stand on your tip toes." Walk to the wall and back."
"Let me look at your X-rays."
"Here...take these papers down the long hall to the number ( X? ) window.
Clerk looked at them and soon enough stamped on new papers "1 Y"
Medical deferment!
"Here is a Greyhound bus pass back to your home town. Now get your B** out of here."
On the fairly long walk to the bus station I felt a weird cold breeze on my backside and noticed that at some point earlier ( doing squats in the exam room? ) I had split the back side of my cheap old pants "wide open." My white underwear was sticking out.
I didn't care. I didn't have to go to Viet Nam!
If my long personal Viet Nam draft story offends anyone here as time wasting irrelevant to the forum discussion focus let me know and I will delete all of it except the first few paragraphs.
That's a brilliant piece Joe! I know it's not a funny subject, but made me laugh.
I was hearing Arlo's 'Alice's Restaurant'.
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OMG, so it was Bond on the knoll after all.
If John Hamer's JFKA theories are anything approaching his 'Titanic' was 'Olympic' theory I'd give him a wide berth.
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8 hours ago, Anthony Thorne said:
Looks interesting, though it appears they've stopped selling copies on Amazon.
Amazon U.K. have it available in paperback & Kindle.
Ordered & arriving on Friday.
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On 8/14/2023 at 8:39 PM, Sandy Larsen said:
J. Edgar Hoover assumed that the Mexico City trip really happened but ignored the Cuban/Russian plot. He also removed the automobile trip and Oswald's companions in order to avoid any talk of conspiracy. He and the Mexican authorities fabricated the bus trips to take the place of the automobile.
I've found this perplexing for ages Sandy. I tend to lean toward believing Albert Osborne's statements that he wrote in '64 in a letter to his relatives in U.K. that he did not travel on the Flecha Roja bus sitting next to LHO. On the other hand, we have the supposed fellow travellers Mr & Mrs McFarland from Liverpool and the two Aussie girls Mumford & Winston, who put the two together!
As someone described it, 'it's a swamp'.
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On 8/12/2023 at 12:50 AM, Ron Bulman said:
Thanks Pete. After your post I found both pictures in Robert Groden's The Killing of a President. They both are attributed to Willis there.
Not possible Ron! Willis took his pics on Elm. He would have to fly with a red cape on to snap the other shot...just around 30 Zapruder frames after from Main.
That's Bronson.
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12 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:
Let's start with these images Mervyn posted in Leslie's thread. I'm not sure who took them.
Ron, for what it's worth, from a non expert of these photographs, I think the top one is cropped from Charles Bronson,
and the bottom one is Phil Willis.
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I have the Kindle app on my pc, so bought 'Prayer Man: More Than A Fuzzy Picture' which I finished reading yesterday.
My review:-
Bart Kamp's book presents the reader with documents, photographs and films from W.C. testimonies, newspaper sources, research archives, JFKA published books as well as information from internet forums (including the Education Forum) all aided by the proliferation of links throughout the Kindle text.
In over five hundred and seventy pages this book covers Bart's ten year investigation of the blurry figure in the TSBD front steps at the time of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, found in the films of Dave Weigman and James Darnell. Perhaps only until researchers are able to obtain access to the original film, now locked away in a safe at NBC's offices in New York will this matter ever be resolved. However, Bart's work is covering much more than 'a fuzzy picture'. It also challenges the famous 2nd floor lunchroom encounter between Oswald, Truly and DPD Officer Baker as well as casting doubts on the many aspects of 'so called evidence' presented by the Dallas Police over that assassination weekend, accompanied with a chronological order of events over the three days inside City Hall. As Malcolm Blunt writes in his Foreword, "the reader may discover, at last, a true representation of Lee Harvey Oswald's final hours."
Also, these intriguing pages include a comprehensive floor by floor study of the TSBD building and the persons employed therein, as well as their whereabouts, before, during and immediately after the killing of Kennedy. To quote Blunt's Foreword once again, "Bart's huge effort has produced the ultimate reference point for future authors and researchers working on this aspect of the Kennedy assassination."
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Error with post, full review below.
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2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:
I am looking forward to this book when it comes out in paper.
Bart says at the end of this week.
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9 hours ago, Pat Speer said:
FWIW, from studying the films, witness statements and testimony, it's clear to me that Lovelady and Shelley made a brisk walk around the outside of the building and entered through the west roll-up door while en route to a phone. They were then spotted by Adams, who quickly ran outside. They were then approached by Baker and Truly, who asked Shelley to guard the front elevator and stairs. This lasted but a minute or two. When Sawyer came in, Shelley took him up to the fourth floor. In any event, this puts Shelley at the bottom of the front stairs when Oswald is purported to have come down those stairs and exited the building.
As a result, I suspect Oswald was telling the truth when he said he went outside with Shelley. I mean, they could have been chatting as they walked for a sec. So...did Shelley lie about this? I suspect so. Oswald was dead. The authorities said he was guilty. If Shelley were to have admitted he'd let Oswald pass or even said he could go home his life would have been severely disrupted, perhaps even ruined.
I'm with you on this Pat.
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On 8/7/2023 at 6:17 PM, Gerry Down said:
The book sounds like it would be worth a go, though I'd have to skip through the prayerman stuff.
Does anyone know if Cadigan or the Recordak camera issue is in the book? Should be easy to locate it in the Kindle version.
Cough the money Gerry. Even the PM pages are very interesting, as Bart documents the long history of researchers who have examined the Weigman, Darnell & Couch stills. I never knew it began in the late 60's! Still not through the book but I reckon it's well worth the money.
I've searched Cadigan & Recordak with no items found.
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3 hours ago, Mart Hall said:
the book is as cheap as chips and should have benefitted from a professional review/edit before it was published.
Mart, I'm busy with a number of interests and commitments, so I'm not quite half way through the book, one of four that I have on the go too. As far as the text is concerned, and Bart is Dutch, and as he states English is his second language, I have so far only come across a couple of words to edit.
I am a fellow member of Dealey Plaza U.K., but I have no knowledge of any review/edit to his work prior to publication. & as stated I'm under half way through, so too early to comment. I assume Malcolm Blunt gave it the green light as he wrote a Foreword, apart from advice from a few sources it's all down to Bart.
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8 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:
Does Bart reproduce Hosty's note? When was Hosty's note written? When was it made public? I need to catch up here.
I'm trying to recall: I think the debate was related to architectural terms.
Have you posted the most current iteration of an image(s) of Prayer Man on EF recently? If so, can you point me to the thread? Ralph Cinque has posted photos on Facebook in the past few days.Yes, Bart has a link to Hosty's notes. Written during the interrogation (one) & directly after (two). Hosty passed his notes to the ARRB in '97. The book also links to the Fritz notes that were also donated to the ARRB in '97.
Negative. I'm not one to post photographic images on E.F. or anywhere. I'm just a book reader Leslie. 📚
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12 hours ago, Gerry Down said:
In his podcast appearances, Bart has made reference to essays he has written. For example, if I interpreted it correctly, he talks about one essay being 400 pages long that deals with the 48 hours immediately after the JFK assassination and goes into detail of Oswalds interviews while in DPD custody. I can't find a link to this book-length essay or to any of his other book-length essays on his prayer-man.com website. I only see regular post-length essays on his website.
Can you provide a link to his book-length essays?
Gerry, Bart's publication is more than a fuzzy picture, to quote the title. Suggest you buy the book as the papers are transformed into the book, as his essays are not available any more on the website. Under £8, cheap at half the price!
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14 hours ago, Bill Brown said:
If Oswald was not out on the front steps or the landing, then he is not Prayer Man/Prayer Woman.
However, there are also the notes from the Oswald interviews i.e. 'Out with Bill Shelley in front' & 'then he went outside to watch P parade'.
Interested to know if you have, or will obtain Bart's book & then post your opinion?
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12 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:
Pete, can you say whether Bart Kamp delves into the tenants of the depository building?
Leslie, the early pages provide a brief history of the depository building's ownerships. Having just downloaded the book I've only just covered the first hundred pages.
Slow going as there are so many interesting photographic and textual links embedded into the pages.
So far the text has documented statements given by TSBD employees along with the other occupants of the building, Scott Foresman & S.W. Publishing Co., etc., establishing their whereabouts and actions before, during & after the assassination.
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7 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:
Tell Bart Thank You.
Ron, Although Bart doesn't post here anymore, he e-mailed me after I opened this thread, so he is well aware of Forum activity.
I would suspect he is aware of your post too. Anyway I'll pass on your thanks, as well as that 'howdy' to Mr. Blunt.
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1 hour ago, Gerry Down said:
Reading age 14-18 years?
Too bad I'm over 18 😥
Gerry, maybe that recommendation came from Langley.
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8 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:
Under him the CIA became a Monster as well, Iran, Guatemala, Lumumba and more.
Sure! & as Poulgrain's books on Indonesia documented, with JFK's supporting stance for Sukarno, would Allen Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to ensure the achievement of his ‘Indonesian strategy’? This is the central question addressed by Greg Poulgrain.
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Cheers George. The link to Amazon is below.
Bart informs me that the hardback book will be available in 7-14 days.
However, as pointed out, the Kindle book does contain multiple links for reference to further information.
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Bart Kamp's book 'Prayer Man More Than A Fuzzy Picture' is now available on Kindle for just short of eight squid on Amazon U.K.
Amazon's review:-
The publication of Prayer Man: More Than a Fuzzy Picture represents an unprecedented decade-long investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald’s last 48 hours.
Bart Kamp has produced a comprehensive work which delves into Lee Harvey Oswald and the other Texas School Book Depository employees inside the building during and shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd 1963.
Kamp’s detailed research also examines the period of Oswald’s incarceration and interrogations. It presents an entirely new and deep perspective of how the law enforcement agencies gathered their evidence that weekend. It reveals a dramatic new context in relation to understanding Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence.
Within these pages are many new and never before published revelations that contrast the altered accounts that were represented before the Warren Commission and challenges many commonly accepted assumptions and interpretations.
Prayer Man: More Than a Fuzzy Picture is Kamp’s debut on the JFK Assassination.
Book Review: JFK Assassination by Anthony Rante - published: 2022
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
In just over ninety pages + large font text, this 'booklet' is done in just a couple of hours. 'The JFK Assassination-A Technical Review of the Evidence' by Anthony Rante is not worth the money or the reading time. Perhaps this is aimed at first time readers of the case, but anyone with even basic knowledge of facts will encounter glaring errors. Rante states "While in Mexico City, [Oswald] he allegedly entered the US embassy." "The president was riding in an open limousine on his way from a main airport (Loves Field)." When describing the Grassy Knoll & police officer Joe M. Smith he writes, "He was likely the first person to arrive. The officer dropped his motorcycle near the curb and ran up the hill seconds after the assassination took place." All these errors in the first chapter and there are many more littering these pages. I'll be generous, and rate it with one star.