Friends, consider two facts:
1. The floor from which shots were fired just happened to be the one floor where renovation work was being done.
2. The floor from which shots were fired just happened to be the one in-use floor from which not a single member of the Depository building workforce chose to watch the P. Parade from.
Probative of anything in particular? Hardly! But interesting? Yes!
Well!
What if the above facts are in fact intimately related? What if these three circumstances are
functionally intertwined?
----------------Renovation work on 6
----------------No spectators on 6
----------------Shots fired from 6**
Now!
On 5 December 1963, Mrs. Toney (Ruby) Henderson told FBI that, at some point between the departure of the ambulance (carrying the epileptic man) and the arrival of the motorcade, she noticed two men on an upper floor of the Depository----------and could not recall seeing "anyone on a floor higher up than the one they were on".
One of these men (in a white shirt) appeared dark-complected; the other (in a dark shirt) was taller than him, but she not could speak to this man's ethnicity.
Here was the distinct impression
as to activity which Mrs. Henderson got from these two men:
"She said these men were standing back from the window and
she got the impression they were working and yet looking out the window in anticipation of the motorcade passing that building."
**
But! How could there have been any men working on an upper floor just a few minutes before the motorcade? Had not everyone broken for lunch?
Indeed so! But that would hold only for all those manual workers in the building who were actually employees
of the building.
'Leaving whom, exactly?' I hear you ask................
Well, what if there was a carpentry team--------
outside contractor---------in charge of the laying of plywood on the sixth floor? And what if they did NOT take a lunch break at the normal time? What if they kept working through even after all the internal manual workers went downstairs for their break? Why? In order to disincentivize any of the internal crew from choosing the sixth floor as the place to come back to once they'd got their lunch. It would be a noisy place, not conducive to a relaxed lunch break.
**
'But,' I hear you cry, 'there is no evidence of any such outside team having been brought in for the plywood-laying project!'
Wrong.Mr. Harold Norman* was NOT (like Messrs. Arce, Williams, Lovelady et al) a member of the floor-laying crew, so he may not have been told to shut up forever about the true number and mix of people who had been putting that new floor down.
(*Credit to Mr. G. Parker for coming upon the below information..............)
In 1991, he told the Sixth Floor Museum this:
------------"we [= Messrs. Norman, Williams & Jarman] had plans of waiting until the mororcade arrived and then going up to the 5th floor to watch"
------------An outside carpentry team had been brought in for the floor-laying project (he even remembered one of its men, a "kind of a rugged-looking guy", white, about 6'2"-6'3"/210-20 pounds, and chatty about boxing)
In 1993, Mr. Norman fleshed out his recollections on this to Mr. Glen Sample. What he has to say is truly startling. Read and you will hear the sound of a very big penny dropping.............................
“Now, you ate your lunch on the fifth floor, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, we got up there a little before twelve.”
“Why the fifth floor? Why not the sixth floor, or the seventh floor?”
“Well, at first, we were going to do it on the sixth floor, but they were working, they were putting down some flooring, some 3/8” plywood, so there was quite a bit of noise, and they were painting up there too."
[...]
“Now you were telling about the construction that was going on up on the sixth floor. Why were they laying down plywood?”
“They were putting it over the hardwood flooring. You see, some of the hardwood was rotting in places; it was in really bad shape.”
“I see. So it was noisy up there you said. What was it that was so noisy? Were there any kind of saws, or machinery, or anything like that?”
“Yeah, they had one of those saws, you know, one of those table saws, but there wasn’t any noise going on during the motorcade, everything was quiet.”
[...]
“Did you help lay down the new flooring?”
“No, we went up there sometimes to move stuff around for the floor construction guys. They didn’t work for the Book Depository, but if our work got slow, we would give them a hand.”
“So there was an outside contractor doing the work on the floors, right?”
“Right. There was a crew of about five or six, maybe up to eight men.”
“Were they only doing work on the sixth floor?”
“At that particular time, I think they were. They were planning on doing something up on the seventh floor after they were finished with the sixth floor.”**
Is the floor-laying crew the great secret of how the sixth floor was requisitioned for the assassination?
If so, then we can confidently identify not just the men seen by Mrs. Henderson, but also those seen by Mr. Arnold Rowland, and those seen by Mrs. Carolyn Walthers, as members of that floor-laying (and, of course, altogether more nefariously-minded) crew that had been brought in from outside. They were not 'strangers' in the building, and so their presence would have raised no eyebrows amongst regular employees. But any of the Depository manual workers who had unsuspectingly helped them lay the floor that day will have been told afterwards to erase their presence from the collective memory of who had been up on that sixth floor that day.
