Their son, John Edward Pic, was born on January 17, 1932. The father went on sending Marguerite forty dollars a month and claiming their son as a dependent until 1950, when the boy was eighteen and started filing an income tax return on his own behalf, claiming Marguerite as a dependent. Otherwise, the separation was nearly total—Pic never saw his son after the boy was a year old, or even a photo of him, until Marguerite sent him one of eighteen-year-old John Edward Pic in his Coast Guard uniform.15
Marguerite met Robert Edward Lee Oswald shortly after her separation from Pic. A friend of Lillian’s, Robert saw Marguerite and her baby coming home from a park, picked them up in his car, and started dating her.16 Robert Oswald collected insurance premiums door-to-door for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Lillian was already married to Charles “Dutz” Murret when the energetic and affable Robert began to collect the Murrets’ premiums. He too was separated from an earlier marriage, and eventually both he and Marguerite arranged divorces in order to marry on July 20, 1933. Oswald, a divorced Catholic, could not remarry in the church, so he had to marry Marguerite in her Lutheran church on Canal Street. He wanted to adopt young John Edward Pic, but Marguerite, aware that the boy’s support payments from his father would cease, was against it.17
A son was born on April 7, 1934, nine months after the marriage, and named after his father, Robert E. Lee Oswald. The couple settled down to what Lillian perceived as a happy marriage, a family that flourished as the Depression raged, eventually buying a house on Alvar Street. The Oswalds even had a car.18 That period with her husband, their son, and her son by her previous marriage, Marguerite would recall later, “was the only happy part of my life.”19
Two months after her husband died on August 19, 1939, Marguerite gave birth to their second son, Lee Harvey Oswald. (Harvey was Oswald’s paternal grandmother’s family name.) Although the young couple had been hoping for a girl, the baby’s two older brothers, then five and seven, were not. “If it’s a girl,” John told Robert, “we’ll throw it out the hospital window.”20
At times the boy would pretend that the death of his father before he was born was of no consequence, as a psychiatric social worker who examined him at the age of thirteen noted. “He has no curiosity about his father,” Evelyn Strickland wrote, telling Strickland he never missed having one and never thought to ask about him.21 Nevertheless, one chilling phrase from a draft of a book he was writing about his experiences in Russia has lodged itself in the consciousness of many: “Lee Harvey Oswald was born in Oct 1939 in New Orleans, La.” he wrote, “the son of a Insuraen Salesmen whose early death left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck.”22*
The early death of Oswald’s father plunged the family into economic difficulties. The Depression was all but over by October 1939 as the country geared up for the Second World War, which had just started in Europe, but for Marguerite and her boys, life would soon become harsh. For over a year after her husband died on August 19, 1939, Marguerite remained at the Alvar Street home with her three children without working, probably living on the life insurance proceeds from her husband’s death.23 Her oldest two children went to the William Frantz Elementary School, which was across the street from the Alvar Street home. In January of 1940, Marguerite removed her two sons from the Frantz school and placed the boys in the Infant Jesus College, a Catholic boarding school in Algiers, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans proper.24 John Pic believed Marguerite had done this to save money,25 though it is not known how much it cost to board the two boys, and why that would have been cheaper than to keep them at home. Evidence that Marguerite was feeling a financial pinch is that at some time in late September of 1940, she applied for Aid to Dependent Children assistance.26
The boys did not like it at the Catholic school. “The nuns were terribly strict,” Robert would recall, “and we were afraid of them. We saw boys who broke the rules beaten with a broomstick. The whole place was gloomy and cold and we felt like outsiders because we were Lutheran.”27 With the advent of the new school year in September of 1940, Marguerite reenrolled her two sons at the Frantz school.28 Also, sometime in late September of 1940, Marguerite rented the house on Alvar Street to Dr. Bruno F. Mancuso, the doctor who had delivered Lee,* and at the end of September moved to a smaller home at 1242 Congress Street.29 She soon transferred her two sons to the nearby George Washington School.30
In early March of 1941, Marguerite purchased and moved into a small-frame house on Bartholomew Street for $1,300.31 Her nine-year-old, John, recognized the move as a step down in life but recalled the house as pleasant enough. It was in an older, “upper-lower-class” neighborhood, but it had two bedrooms and a large backyard, and they had a dog called “Sunshine.”32
Marguerite opened a shop in the front room, “Oswald’s Notion Shop,” where she sold needles, thread, ribbon, and other sewing materials, as well as candy—which the boys occasionally swiped. She hoped to be able to make enough money to stay at home and keep her children with her, but she couldn’t.33 In December 1941, as war broke out, Marguerite turned to the Lutheran church, which ran the Bethlehem Children’s Home (Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Orphan Asylum), a place that took in orphans or children with just one parent for a fee tailored to the circumstances. Marguerite paid ten dollars a month for each of her sons, John and Robert, plus provided shoes and clothing, and hoped to place Lee there too, but the home did not take children under the age of three.34
Robert thought Lee must have already begun to realize that Marguerite considered all of her boys a tribulation to her. “I don’t know at what age mother verbalized to Lee to the effect that she felt he was a burden to her. Certainly by age three he had the sense that, you know, we were a burden.”35
The older boys got on well at Bethlehem. Robert remembered it as a cheerful place, far less rigid than the Catholic boarding school at Algiers. Marguerite, flitting like a butterfly from job to job, would fetch John and Robert on weekends and return them on Sunday morning so they could go to church with the other children.36†John recalled pleasant interludes at Aunt Lillian’s too—“Whenever we had a chance we were more than glad to go there.”37
In January of 1942, Marguerite sold the Bartholomew Street house back to the seller from whom she had purchased it for a profit of $800,38 and moved again, to an apartment on Pauline Street. She tried as best she could to look after Lee, with the help of babysitters,39 while she worked as a switchboard operator.40 But it wasn’t working and her sister Lillian, already with five children of her own, the youngest about the age of Robert, volunteered to take Lee in as well. He was “a very beautiful child,” she said. She took him to town in his sailor suit, where the friendly tyke would call out “hi” to everybody and people would say, “What an adorable child he is.” He got along well with Lillian’s children too, but he could be troublesome, particularly in the morning when Lillian had her hands full getting all five of her own kids off to grammar school. Lee, still in his nightclothes, would slip out of the house, go down the street, and sit down in someone’s kitchen. “You could have everything locked in the house,” Lillian said, “but Lee would still get out.”41
Although Lee’s Aunt Lillian got on well enough with Lee, her relations with her quick-tempered sister Marguerite were often prickly. The women usually settled their differences, as they had ever since they were children—“Marguerite was easy enough to get along with,” Lillian would say, “as long as she gets her own way,” adding, “You see, she was always right.” Also, “She would fly off too quick,” and no matter how much anyone did for her, such as Lillian taking in Lee, “she never thought that anyone was actually helping her.”42
Lillian is unsure of the length of time she kept Lee, though she believes it was two years. Robert recalls a much shorter time and says that Marguerite, evidently feeling Lee would be better off in his own home, took him back from Lillian. Marguerite advertised in the newspaper and found a couple willing to accept free room and board an
d fifteen dollars a month in return for caring for Lee while she was at work. The arrangement lasted only two months. Marguerite came home one day to find the child crying, red welts on his legs. She fired the couple, who claimed that Lee was “a bad, unmanageable child,” on the spot. Marguerite did not believe that a child that young could be that bad. She moved back nearer to her sister, to a house on Sherwood Forest Drive, and made a new arrangement: Lillian would look after Lee during the day while Marguerite went out to work.43
As Lee’s third birthday approached in October of 1942, Marguerite again inquired about his admission into the Bethlehem Children’s Home, offering to contribute ten dollars a month toward his upkeep as well as provide his shoes and clothing, and he was accepted. When John and Robert went back to the children’s home after the Christmas holidays in December of 1942, three-year-old Lee went with them.44 Marguerite took a job as a telephone operator for, it is believed, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.45
Eight-year-old Robert in particular enjoyed having Lee with them at what they called the orphanage. Used to the protection of his older brother, John, Robert now became the protector of Lee, and the two of them began to feel a brotherly closeness for the first time, a feeling that persisted throughout their lives. Robert thought he and Lee were always closer than Lee and John, or, for that matter, Lee and their mother. It was to Robert that Lee turned when he had something important to discuss.46
Robert remembers Lee “as a happy baby and a happy little boy” at that time, “not too quiet nor too rambunctious,” and filled with curiosity about how things worked. He didn’t seem to miss his mama all that much, but Robert didn’t find that surprising—he had spent more time with babysitters, housekeepers, and aunts than with his mother anyway, and it wasn’t as if the boys didn’t get to see Marguerite. Once a week they would take a streetcar over to Canal Street to visit their mother at her latest job as manager of the newly opened Princess Hosiery Shop. They would have lunch there and then go to a movie. And on weekends she would go to the Children’s Home to visit them.47
Lee remained in the Bethlehem Home until late January of 1944, about thirteen months, but according to John, he left on several occasions to spend short periods of time with his mother or the Murrets.48 Marguerite also seemed to like her new job; she was given a free hand and was able to hire four girls in six days to help her.49 Her employer, Edward Aizer, remembered her as a neat, attractive, and hardworking woman, a “very aggressive individual” who would make a good manager, but she was not good with figures—she apparently could not even add or subtract—and after a few months he had to discharge her.50
By this time, however, Marguerite—looking much younger than her thirty-seven years and a “remarkably pretty and vivacious woman,” according to her son Robert, with dark hair worn long and vivid blue eyes—had begun dating Edwin Ekdahl, an electrical engineer from Boston who was then working for the Texas Electrical Service in New Orleans. Ekdahl, a tall, white-haired, well-educated man with a Yankee accent, was much older than Marguerite. The boys liked him because he seemed to like them. He was good-natured and friendly, and he seemed to know how to talk with them. He also had a car, a 1938 Buick, which was important.51 By the time Marguerite brought Ekdahl out to the orphanage to meet her three children, she had already been seeing him for several months and he had asked her to marry him.52 He had one powerful advantage in the eyes of the hard-strapped widow. He was a “ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account,”53 excellent remuneration in those war years, when a worker might be glad to pull down forty or fifty dollars a week. However, Ekdahl was not only a good bit older, he had been married to a woman to whom he was only separated, his job required him to travel a lot, he had a bad heart, and Marguerite was not overly eager to marry him. She took her time to decide, even after Ekdahl’s sister came to New Orleans to urge his suit, telling Marguerite he was lonely.54
Marguerite dithered, the affair continued, and finally, in January of 1944, she decided to marry Ekdahl. She made an arrangement with Bethlehem to leave the two older boys there until they completed the school year, and took Lee with her to Dallas, where Ekdahl had been transferred. There, however, she changed her mind about marriage, and using money from the sale of her Alvar Street property in New Orleans,55 and possibly help from Ekdahl, for a very small downpayment she bought her own place, a white, two-story duplex on Victor Street in Dallas with rooms lined up like railroad cars—living room, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen. She settled down in one of the apartments, while renting the other.56 When the two older boys finished the school year at Bethlehem in June of 1944, they moved to Dallas to reunite with Lee and their mother. They were enrolled in a summer school and then, in the fall, in a public school three blocks away, Davy Crockett Elementary. Marguerite dropped Lee off at a nursery school on her way to work in the morning and picked him up when she came home in the evening. Robert was now ten, John twelve, and Lee not quite five.57
Ekdahl visited Marguerite on weekends and stayed at Victor Street with her and the boys.58 Early in the following year, 1945, Marguerite decided she would marry Ekdahl after all, and she tried, in February, to return the older boys to the Bethlehem Children’s Home. Although she knew the home did not accept children with two parents, Marguerite explained that her prospective husband’s work would require her to travel a great deal.59 When the home refused them, she made other plans, enrolling both of them, for the fall semester of 1945, in Chamberlain-Hunt Academy, a military school in Port Gibson, Mississippi. She paid the tuition herself from what remained of the proceeds from the sale of the Alvar Street house in New Orleans the previous year.60 With that taken care of, she and Ekdahl married on May 7, 1945.61 After a honeymoon that may have lasted only a day or two, Ekdahl moved into the Victor Street house.62
Ekdahl got along well with the boys, and they thought it a treat to have a stepfather who had a genuine interest in them, talked to them, took them out for ice cream, and made every little excursion a special event. He asked them to call him Ed, and it made them feel very grown-up to do so. Robert would later say that both he and John could remember having “a father to play with us when we were little and picking us up when we fell, but Lee had never known a normal family life” and he was thrilled to have a father at last. Robert also thought that their mother was easier to please when Ekdahl was around.63
In early September 1945, Ekdahl, with Marguerite and Lee, drove Robert and John to Port Gibson, Mississippi, dropping them off for their first year at Chamberlain-Hunt on their way to visit Ekdahl’s son by a previous marriage, who lived in Boston.64 Chamberlain-Hunt would be John and Robert’s home over the next three years. It was a small school, with about 110 boys, each of whom got a good deal of individual attention. The commandant, former Marine captain Herbert D. Farrell, taught them math as well as military science and became something of a substitute father and role model. Listening to his stories of life in the corps, the boys formed an early predilection for military life that would resonate with Lee in later years.65
In the meantime, Lee traveled the country with his mother and new stepfather on his stepfather’s business trips. The boys at school got letters from Boston and snapshots from Arizona.66 Traveling with a small child did put something of a strain on the marriage, though. Marguerite’s friend from New Orleans, Myrtle Evans, who visited the Ekdahls in Dallas around this time, thought that Marguerite would have had a better life if she could have put Lee into a boarding school with the other two boys. As opposed to Lee’s brother Robert, who always said that Marguerite acted as if all three children were a burden to her, Evans felt that Marguerite “loved [Lee] to death and spoiled him to death…She was too close to Lee all the time and I don’t think Ekdahl liked that too much” and she feels it “contributed” to their eventual divorce.67
Sometime that fall of 1945, the Ekdahls moved to Benbrook, a suburb just northwest of Fort Worth that at the time was not much more than a “wide spot in the road,” according
to Robert. They leased a comfortable stone house on a rural mail route. It was on a large plot of land and there was a creek four or five hundred yards from the house. Lee entered first grade at the Benbrook Common School on October 31, 1945, a few days after his sixth birthday—although his application gives July 9, 1939, as his birth date instead of October 18, presumably to satisfy the age requirement that he be six by September 1. He did well there—all As and Bs, including an A in citizenship.68
It was not until Christmas of 1945 that John and Robert, on vacation from military school, saw their new home. They were impressed. John recalled that one of President Roosevelt’s sons was supposed to have a house nearby.69* Over the holidays, Lee’s cadet brothers taught him close order drill with wooden practice rifles and marched him around, and he tagged along with them whenever they would let him. He also liked to play cowboys and Indians, and his brothers obliged him, even though they felt too old for such games. Lee’s older brothers were almost unaware of the rapid erosion of their mother’s marriage, the arguments, disagreements, and separations. Ekdahl began to spend more and more time away from home. Lee, who was around the house far more than his brothers, was more upset by these conflicts. Robert thinks he was more sensitive than they realized at the time, being worried over “the danger of losing the only father he had ever known,” but the six-year-old was already learning to keep his feelings to himself.70
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