The Floor-Laying Crew

[Martin Weidmann]

How indeed?  Answer:  Oswald = Guilty.

Did your parents demand your tuition fees back?

[Alan Ford]

'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)

'But,' I hear you cry, 'that guy sounds like great big husky Jack Dougherty!'

Nope, it ain't Mr. Jack Dougherty.

Mr. Norman knew Mr. Dougherty well---------they were both veteran employees of the Depository. The chances of his not being able to put Mr. Dougherty's name to the man he's describing are zilch.

And Mr. Dougherty was not even part of the internal floor-laying crew!

Make no mistake about what we have here:

Mr. Norman clearly remembers that an outside carpentry crew was brought in for the floor-laying project. Of the 5-8 men in this crew, not a single name can he give, because they were not fellow-employees.

Furthermore! He cites this crew's presence on the sixth floor through the lunch break as the reason why he & Messrs. Jarman & Williams chose the fifth floor to watch the P. Parade from; and as the reason why they left it so late (~12:28!) to go up to five.

I believe Mr. Norman has let the all-important secret out------------the secret kept ever afterwards by several very frightened manual workers (Messrs. Arce, Givens, Lovelady, Williams) who knew full well who was responsible for the assassination.

And if Mr. Oswald had been brought to trial, he would surely have told everyone about this external crew, whom he had many times seen working away on five and six during the course of his order-filling duties.

 

[Alan Ford]

Go to 5:28 here, and look how uncomfortable Mr. Roy Edward Lewis is about talking about the refurbishment of the sixth floor:

He just doesn't want to go there. Understandable!

[Alan Ford]

The beauty of the floor-laying crew plan, of course, is that these men could be brought in three weeks before the motorcade and become familiar faces about the place.

Result: Folks working elsewhere in the building would be able honestly to state after the assassination that they 'saw no strangers'/'saw no-one who wasn't supposed to be in the building' on 11/22.

it also---------if Officer Baker's same-day affidavit is to be believed----------meant that Mr. Roy Truly could tell the honest truth when reassuring Officer Baker that the man they had just caught walking away from the rear stairway several floors up 'works here'. For he had been working here since three weeks ago.

 

[Alan Ford]

it also---------if Officer Baker's same-day affidavit is to be believed----------meant that Mr. Roy Truly could tell the honest truth when reassuring Officer Baker that the man they had just caught walking away from the rear stairway several floors up 'works here'. For he had been working here since three weeks ago.

 

However!

If Officer Baker really did (as per his affidavit) catch this man walking away from the rear stairway several floors up, then his quick dash into the building was an unforeseen disaster for the plan. Mr. Truly had some explaining to do------------------without revealing the existence of the external floor-laying crew.

The original plan, one presumes, was to allow the culprits to get out of Dallas, leaving folks to believe that pro-Castro Cubans had been responsible for the assassination. (The 'elderly Negro' in an attention-seekingly bright plaid shirt seen by Mr. Arnold Rowland was surely a key part of this strategy.)

But Mr. Truly now had an obviously fleeing culprit to explain away. And so he set the cops on Mr. Oswald, a man who had documented Leftist credentials. Mr. Oswald had to become the man who 'works here' encountered just after the shooting.

Unfortunately, however, Mr. Oswald had been out front for the P. Parade. Hence the invention of a second-floor lunchroom encounter: consistent (with a bit of fine-tuning) with a descent from the sixth floor, but also consistent with an ascent from the front steps.

And so all efforts went into deleting Mr. Oswald's presence on the front steps, but with an escape clause in case firm proof of his true whereabouts at 12:30 should come to light.

If that were to happen, then Mr. Oswald would be written into History as an accomplice. And the Warren Gullibles would have spent all these years wasting their lives defending a different fairytale as to who had fired the shots.