Why did Oswald go to the movies?

[John Iacoletti]

He wanted money.

?Mr. BALL. And after you saw the police car go west with its siren on, why at the time the police car went west with its siren on, did you see the man that ducked? This man that you were----
Mrs. POSTAL. This man, yes; he ducked into the box office...?

That's a good trick, considering the ticket booth was sealed from the front.

[Walt Cakebread]

The best line in the thread so far:
Unlike you suckers we don't need a playbook.

 
Playbook? Ha ha ha, you would have needed a full Spring Training to pull off the crap that some of you crackbags have come up with in order for this Grand Conspiracy to have been executed. Playbook  . Thanks for the laugh. (LOL)

I didn't know that any of you patients needed anything to stimulate your laughter there at the Laughing Academy.....

[Mitch Todd]

I suppose it's less dorky to just assume stuff that you have no evidence for.  The WC was just being UN-dorkotronic.  Yeah, that's the ticket (pun intended).

As a variation on what I 'd said before (that you deleted for some mysterious reason), I have no evidence that tens of thousands of people got up this morning and commuted to work in their automobiles. Did it happen? Of course it did! It happens almost every weekday. It's such a common, regular occurrence that it can simply be assumed to occur daily outside of weekends, holidays, and some tiny population of truly extraordinary events. As such, it can safely assumed. The same goes for someone taking a theater ticket, tearing it in half, and handing the poor sucker a stub as proof of purchase. It's so common that if you want to argue that it didn't happen, you need to come up with some good reason to not expect it to have occurred.

It seems to me that a person claiming that "Oswald didn't buy a ticket", would actually have a basis for that claim, rather than making a speculative argument from "ubiquity".  It would have been easy enough to ask Burroughs when they had him.

You're kidding, right? The person who claimed that Oswald didn't buy a ticket was Julia Postal. She's the girl in the ticket booth selling tickets, so I figure that she'd  know firsthand whether she sold some guy a ticket better than an internet troll would 55 years later.

Evidence that Oswald didn't buy a ticket:
1. Julia Postal said he didn't
2. JC Brewer said he asked Postal, and her response was negative
3. No ticket was found on Oswald's person or belongings at or after he was arrested.

Evidence that Oswald bought a ticket:
none

Now, you tell me what happened, kiddo.

[Mitch Todd]

He was 20 when he started work for Hardy's in 1961. This does not preclude a two-year hitch before this. He claimed to go to school, but can you support this claim with evidence?

Look at the testimony excerpt again. He graduated high school, spent a year at TSTC and another attending a different college before getting on at Hardy's. Unless he graduated high school a couple of years early, then there's no time for a two year enlistment. Then again, people who graduate early tend not to wind up selling shoes.

[Mitch Todd]

Actually, it's the "Oswald-Did-It"-ites who are like the Creationists.  They believe it because their book says so, and because an authority figure said so.

The WC report is based on hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews with eyewitnesses and experts. Pages and pages and pages of reports, photographs, schematics, and graphs, all of which were published alongside the report. Even if you disagree with it's conclusions, implying that the report is some work of faith completely misses reality.

And, by the way, you really stooped to the old "I know you are, but what am I?" Really? Sir, I'll have you know that I am of the finest quality Brazilian rubber while you are composed of cheap, gluten-based sticky-products. Your crap ricochets from me and adheres to your person.

So there. :-P

[Walt Cakebread]

Finally, you're asking a question and a good one at that. I've always wondered about that. It's a conundrum for sure, but then so is him going to a middle of nowhere place like 10th street. What in the world was he doing there, walking along with no obvious place to go, when he could have been on a bus out of town?

I was tempted to answer the question of Why did Oswald go to the movies? [/color with a flippant answer the first time I saw the post....Because only ONE person could answer that question...Lee Oswald.   

I was tempted to answer that he was looking for a cool  dark place to relax and rest when he decided to go to the theater.

And that answer could be as good as any....But I suspect there was a definite reason for Lee going immediately to the theater after leaving his room.   Based on the fact that there were three of Hoover's Extra Special, Special Agents  in that theater, I strongly suspect that Lee was told to go to the Texas Theater and await his contact.     

[John Iacoletti]

The same goes for someone taking a theater ticket, tearing it in half, and handing the poor sucker a stub as proof of purchase. It's so common that if you want to argue that it didn't happen, you need to come up with some good reason to not expect it to have occurred.

I don't believe you've actually demonstrated that it's such a common occurrence -- especially in 1963 in Dallas.  Why make any assumptions one way or the other?

You're kidding, right? The person who claimed that Oswald didn't buy a ticket was Julia Postal. She's the girl in the ticket booth selling tickets, so I figure that she'd  know firsthand whether she sold some guy a ticket better than an internet troll would 55 years later.

No, I'm not kidding.  She told both Brewer and the FBI that she wasn't sure if she did or not.

And if you can't actually demonstrate that any patron got a ticket stub, then your observation that no ticket was found is not dispositive.  Nor can you rule out the possibility of a ticket being thrown on the floor or in the trash.  At best you can say that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that Oswald did or did not buy a ticket.

Did the guy who bought popcorn from Burroughs at 1:07 also sneak in without buying a ticket?

[John Iacoletti]

The WC report is based on hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews with eyewitnesses and experts. Pages and pages and pages of reports, photographs, schematics, and graphs, all of which were published alongside the report.

Yes, hundreds, if not thousands of exhibits and testimony that don't support the conclusions that were made.

Therein lies the faith.

And, by the way, you really stooped to the old "I know you are, but what am I?" Really? Sir, I'll have you know that I am of the finest quality Brazilian rubber while you are composed of cheap, gluten-based sticky-products. Your crap ricochets from me and adheres to your person.