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Posted: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 2:14 pm
By GARY EDWARDS The Monitor Staff | 1 comment
There was a time in the newspaper business that being a journalist and having a college degree weren’t necessarily seen as being compatible. In fact, for most in the business, the school of “hard knocks” was valued well beyond a degree from Yale, Harvard or any other school.
It didn’t seem to matter what department one worked in. Journalism was a disease to be coveted by writers, photographers and advertising sales people. Simply being able to say one “worked for the paper,” was enough.
It gave one access to events that others only dream of hearing about.
None of that was lost on a young Jerry Coley.
By 1963 Coley had spent a two-year stint in the Army and had worked at the the Dallas Morning News for several years
He’d figured out that mail room pay wasn’t as good as the $40 a week the advertising folks were making and he sought improvement in his life style.
Along the way to “financial gain” he’d meet a large number of interesting people, perhaps none more so than a self-described former Chicago mafia enforcer by the name of Jack Ruby.
It was Thursday in Dallas, Nov. 21, 1963 and Coley said the staff at the Morning News was excited about the coming visit by President John F. Kennedy.
For the ownership and some of the management of the newspaper it was a huge occasion, for they were Catholic and Kennedy was the first Catholic president.
Coley remembers the political temperature of the city as conservative, with some tension related to the conservative views of retired two-star Army General Edwin Walker, but there was nothing that would prepare anyone for what happened the following day.
Friday morning Coley was at work when Ruby came by on what was more or less a routine trip to the paper to pay his advertising bill for the strip club he operated in Dallas. Ruby, Coley and others had breakfast together that Friday in the newspaper cafeteria and Ruby, who often stayed to make small talk, did so again Coley said. Ruby would brag about his “girls” and fish money rolled up and secured by rubberbands from his pocket.
He talked about his days in Chicago and his connection to the mob and in general, Coley said, Ruby simply hung around the paper.
As Coley recounts how Nov. 22 unfolded, he sits behind a kitchen counter in what has been his Wood County home since he retired in 1996. There are a number of magazine articles spread before him, including diagrams of where the parade route traveled, where Coley was standing and more.
Well before the president would ride through Dallas, Coley had already arranged his sales schedule so he’d be downtown to watch the passage of the caravan and thus he was within yards of Dealey Plaza as the presidential vehicles passed by, turning right and then back to the left.
Coley had noticed that Ruby was still at the paper as noon approached and he would think back later and wonder “if he loved the President so much why couldn’t he walk three blocks to watch him” pass by in the motorcade.
As the group of vehicles turned the School Book Depository, Coley remembers hearing a “noise.”
“People say there were three shots,” he said, “but you couldn’t tell it by me.” All he remembers is the noise and “people running everywhere.”
He rapidly worked his way in the direction of the depository and was stopped by a “county mountie with a shotgun” who told him to “get the hell out of here.”
Which didn’t exactly mean Coley left the area.
He remembers people crying and he remembers something else. Several feet away from the street, above the well-documented grassy knoll, he found a significant amount of blood.
He ran back to the newspaper, finding Ruby still in the office, on a phone and crying.
It was a day or so later when Coley found an advertising photographer, Jim Hood, and ultimately he led Hood back to the scene of the blood, where he said Hood photographed it.
There were personal moments he’ll not likely forget.
They included death threats by telephone calls to his wife saying Coley needed to “shut your mouth” or they were going to kill Coley’s family.
Then there is the matter of the blood that Coley asked Hood to photograph.
Several days had gone by and Coley had returned to work when two men in dark suits appeared at the newspaper. They “flashed green plastic cards” that appeared to Coley as though they were FBI agents.
They were interested to hear about the breakfast with Ruby and then near what appeared to be the end of the interview, Coley said he asked the men if they knew about the blood on the steps.
There was some discussion between the two visitors off to the side and following that, the men confiscated the film and the only print Hood had an opportunity make and then one of the men said to the two newspaper employees, “boys this never happened if you know what I mean.”
The following day, Coley said, he went back to the spot where he’d seen the blood and the area was spotless, as though it had “been chemically cleaned, there was nothing there,” he said.“We didn’t talk about this for 13 years,” Coley said.
For a variety of reasons it took until sometime around 1980 before Coley began to talk about the blood.
By then the others familiar with the situation were no longer in any danger of potential retribution and Coley was beginning to feel comfortable with talking about it.
He was interviewed for a TV program, “Unsolved Mysteries” and while the interviewers were quite interested in talking about the blood, it was not used in the finished product.
To his knowledge there has never been any discussion about that blood by anyone, including those charged with investigating the assassination. He doesn’t know why.
Was Ruby used by someone else to kill Lee Harvey Oswald? Coley doesn’t know the answer but he does have a nagging question to this day.
Why didn’t Ruby walk those few steps to watch the president’s motorcade? If he loved the president as much as he professed, why wouldn’t he want to see him in person?
As for the newspaper family at the Morning News, Coley said, “It took a couple of years before the paper got over the shooting.”
Dallas, he said, was seen as “the city of hate,” which he saw as a “stigma not deserved.”
Today, the 78-year-old Coley lives with his wife Bonnie and son Scott, just East of Mineola, far from the life he knew at the newspaper.
He’s comfortable speaking about the unspeakable and from time to time he shares his memories with civic clubs and church groups.
But always there will be unanswered questions relating to that November day in 1963.
His photographer friend died in the next year or two after the president’s death in what Coley describes as questionable circumstances in a plane crash.
He has other questions that he knows will never be answered to his satisfaction, or that of others... not in his lifetime at least.
