MY NEW ORLEANS STORY - Part 2

Before reading Part 2, please read Part 1.  This may be incomprehensible without information from Part 1.------------------------------Hugh Murray

             Before I get lost in the story of Oliver St. Pe, and David Ferrie, I should get back to November 1963.  On Friday the 22^nd President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.  On the Sunday the 24^th, Oswald was shot and killed in the basement while being transferred by Texas authorities.  On Tuesday 26^th, I was interviewed by the FBI (after Harold Alderman had been interviewed.  A summary report of Alderman’s comments are included in v. 26 of the Warren Commission material).  That week, David Ferrie was interviewed by District Attorney Jim Garrison’s men in regard to possible connection to the assassination.  He was handed over to the FBI and then released.  I sent Oliver the news item from the newspaper about Ferrie’s arrest.

            All that and more occurred at the end of November.  On December, all the teachers and staff were paid by the school where I worked, the Junior University of New Orleans, but most checks bounced.  Many of the teachers met and decided to inquire about suing the school.  I was among those not paid, so I had a new worry.  Around the middle of the month, a group of us sued the school.  When the news of the suit was published in the newspapers, parents began to worry about the economic stability of the new school.  At a meeting in the school, the administration informed the staff that only those of us who withdrew from the suit would be paid.  I was among those who walked out of that meeting.  Many were not paid, and the suit continued.  Some teachers sought to form a new private school, and I was invited to join the group.  When they discovered my integrationist background, I was uninvited.

            Meanwhile, JUNO limped along.  But it was losing teachers, student body, and tuition.  To protect the school from Communist agitators and union thugs, the school hired a private detective, Guy Banister.  Those of you who have read about the Kennedy assassination already know the name.  Banister had been an FBI agent in various northern cities, came to New Orleans in the early 1950s and was for a time the Acting Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Dept.  He was active in his church (I think it was Presbyterian) and a strong anti-Communist.

            His daughter, Mary Jane, attended Warren Easton High School, and was in the same grade as I.  Not only did we know each other, I occasionally bowled with her boy friend, “Tex” Don  Sanders.  In high school I was moving toward the Left politically and openly espousing integration.  Mary Jane feared that I was becoming a Communist.  (Example, when almost the whole student body left the school and marched to keep segregation on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Black Monday decision – the one that declared segregation un-Constitutional, I was one of the few students who remained in the school and did not join the march.)  Mary Jane urged me to speak with her father, who might save me from such maddening Left-wing views.  I was reluctant to do so, but Mary Jane was a nice girl (in those days one would not refer to a high school female as a woman).  To please her, I went to her home and was introduced to her dad.  He seemed as reluctant to meet me as I to meet him.  We said a few words, but he showed no interest in a debate or even a discussion, sorting his mail while we spoke.  Our conversation lasted only a few minutes, yet both of us had formally acceded to Mary Jane’s request.  Of course, neither of us had changed our political views.

            Apparently Oswald may have attended Easton for a short time.  Previously, he and I both attended P. T. G. Beauregard Junior High during the same year, but he was in 7^th and I was in 9^th grade, and there were some 1,000 kids.  (Beauregard was the officer who gave the order for the Confederates to fire upon the Federals at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, thus beginning the American Civil War.)  Even if I had stood beside Oswald in a lunch line, I did not know him.

            One reads today that Banister had sent young people to spy on the Left in New Orleans.  I cannot attest to this personally.  However, while at Tulane University, Clark Rowley from Connecticut became a friend.  I often spoke politics to him, and in time he became the editor of the Tulane University student newspaper, The Hullabaloo.  In the fall of 1964 I was teaching at Dillard University and took one of my Dillard students over to Tulane for a lecture before the Young Liberals Club.  By this time, Tulane had integrated, and the speaker may have been Birmingham’s civil rights activist Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who was then head of the Southern Conference Education Fund.  After the talk, several of the Tulane students and me, with my Black student, went to a nearby pizza place.  There were about eight of us at the table.  The owner came to tell us they would not serve us, and threatened us with arrest if we did not leave.  This surprise incident led to large-scale picketing of the Maple Street campus eateries.  Clark, editor of the Hullabaloo, ran some sympathetic stories.  He was getting information from various sources, including mutual friends in the Liberals Club.  One day Clark also told me then when we first met and began to discuss things, he had been paid to spy on the Left by Kent Courtney, a leading conservative in New Orleans.  This was a shock, but as I said nothing criminal, I was less concerned.  He told me he quit the job with Courtney.  Moreover, Clark did a good, and fair job as editor, and became a friend.

            In January 1964 I was no longer teaching at JUNO, nor at the newer, rival private school.  No one picketed JUNO, and it was cold and the weathermen had forecast snow flurries.  Because it almost never snowed in NO, I hoped to see some, but nothing stuck to the ground that month.  Another Tulane friend who was a teacher at JUNO suffered the financial pinch too.  He had withdrawn from the law suit, continued to teach there, but received only the December check.  The school closed down in early 1964, so he too had to search for other work.  But while teaching at JUNO in early 1964, he would see Banister walking around the school with his pistol hanging from his belt.  In those days, it was rare to have weapons in a school.

            A little later that year Banister was arrested after he stopped a bus when someone had yelled a remark about a female passenger in his car.  I think he stopped the bus, left his vehicle, and boarded the bus waving his gun.  In June 1964 Banister died.  In late 1963 and 1964 Guy Banister seemed to have no connection at all to the Kennedy assassination or Oswald or Dallas.  Even though some of the “Hands Off Cuba” flyers that Oswald had distributed had an address that was for the same building where Banister had his office, in 1963-64 almost no one would have connected Oswald to Banister.  Nevertheless, if anyone had picked up one of Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba flyers that contained the street address, and had they sent a letter to that address for a Fair Play Cuban Committee, the probably would have been delivered instead to the anti-Castro organization housed in Banister’s office.  (Banister’s office at some point housed weapons to be used in an invasion of Castro’s Cuba.  Banister felt strongly about the issue.)