Bud Kennedy
Fri, November 19, 2021, 4:44 PM·4 min read
Decades after her death, one of the most tragic mothers in Texas history lies forgotten in Fort Worth.
No headstone marks the grave of Marguerite Oswald, born 1907, died 1981. She rests forever on a Handley hillside, beside a tomb marked with only a last name.
The pink granite stone reads simply OSWALD.
Her slain son, Lee Harvey Oswald, was buried on this hillside Nov. 25, 1963, a day after he was killed in Dallas. He will eternally remain the No. 1 suspect in the Nov. 22 assassination of President Kennedy on Dallas’ Elm Street.
Within two hours of the assassination, she predicted to two Star-Telegram reporters: “They all turned their backs on me before, and they will turn their backs on me again.”
The world has turned its back forever on Marguerite Oswald, but not on her conspiracy theories.
Before Dallas had a Conspiracy Museum, before distrust and cynicism became fodder for daily headlines, “Miz Oswald” said her son was the victim in a plot by “high officials.”
First, she said he never shot anybody but fled because “he knew he would be blamed.”
Later, she said he was duped into the shooting.
For the next 17 years from the assassination until her death on Jan. 17, 1981, her neighbors would see carloads of investigators, reporters and assassination buffs come and go from her west side home, first from her duplex on Thomas Place and later from her home on Byers Avenue.
“I am a mother in history,” she told magazine writer Jean Stafford, saying the words that would become the title of a short 1966 biography. “I must defend myself and defend my son Lee.”
Stafford quoted her rambling soliloquies: “Now, maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. But does that make him a louse? ... As we all know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So, it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do, and my son is a hero.”
That’s basically what Marguerite Oswald said for years, both on the streets of Fort Worth and to reporters.
She had worked as a caregiver for a Star-Telegram executive years before the assassination. When her son was arrested 90 minutes after Kennedy was shot, she heard his name on WFAA/Channel 8 and phoned our newsroom asking for a ride to Dallas.
Reporters Bob Schieffer — later of CBS News — and Bill Foster gave her the ride.
Their report describes a sobbing woman in a nurse’s uniform asking only, “Do they think he did it?”
After that, she became a regular caller to reporters Jerry Flemmons and Jon McConal, and even struck up an acquaintance with the late C.A. Monismith.
I hadn’t come back to Fort Worth then. When she died, I was still a sportswriter at the Dallas Morning News.
But I also once had a call from Marguerite Oswald.
I grew up about a mile from her home in Arlington Heights. In spring 1967, I was 11 years old and in seventh grade at what is now Stripling Middle School in the same neighborhood.
My wallet was stolen one day during gym class. A few days later, a woman called one day after school and said she had found the discarded wallet in her yard. Back then, the phone number was on my city library card.
She told me her Byers Avenue address, and I pedaled my Wards bicycle down Alamo Avenue and up the Clover Lane hill under the freeway.
When I knocked, she cracked the door about 6 inches and slipped the wallet out.
She asked, “You’re Buddy Kennedy?”
I said yes, and reached to shake her hand and thank her.
She pulled away and said in a low voice, “I’m Mrs. Oswald.”
I ran to my bike and pedaled downhill and back home.
One Mother’s Day, I drove to the cemetery to visit her. At the front gate, cemetery workers gave out free carnations.
All around, the burial plots were covered with bright bouquets of pink and yellow blossoms.
There were no flowers on her grave.
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