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June 12, 2020 - Jim Fetzer
10:16
Judyth Vary Baker and Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans (Part 2 of 6)
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This is Jim Fetzer with James Fetzer News, and it's my pleasure to have as my guest Judith Mary Baker, a woman who knew Lee Oswald in New Orleans.
Judith, tell us a bit about your relationship with Lee.
Well, I'd like to start about just ten years ago when people were telling me, you're a smart lady, and this Lee Oswald was kind of dumb.
Although, how he could be fluent in Russian and be stupid, I don't know.
And certainly then here, I knew what we had read in New Orleans together.
Excuse me, he always said New Orleans, and I said Orleans.
And by the way, you will hear him say New Orleans on the taped interview.
And he did that because of me.
People are saying, I've heard it said that Lee Oswald couldn't have been born in New Orleans because he pronounced it New Orleans on the tape.
This is a nice internal evidence to show that we knew each other because I came in there as a Yankee and I said, I really like New Orleans, Lee.
And he said, it isn't pronounced that way.
It's pronounced New Orleans.
He said, I almost missed his TV program.
He was on television first before he had the radio interviews.
Almost missed it.
Just barely made it.
And he said, I'm going to make sure you, you, that you really hear my, uh, But it turned out to be like a five minute interview, his first radio interview.
And I want to make sure that you really heard it.
He used the word New Orleans about six times in the 30 cents.
He didn't know where it was going to be cut, you know, and sure enough, one of them got through, you know, on the five minutes.
And so here he is saying something like, well, we're, you know, I'm in New Orleans or whatever.
And he did that.
And so when he came to me, he said, well, did you hear it?
I love it.
It's right there on the tape, and people are saying, well, if he was raised in New Orleans, how come he said New Orleans and that's wine?
I love it.
I love it.
A little anecdote.
So, and I have so much, many things like that that I can explain and tell what was going on.
So what I thought I'd do is tell people what kind of books he read, you know.
Well, let me just add a question here, Judith.
My understanding is that you and Lee were hired by the same company on the same day, and that you were released on virtually the same day as well, and that a fellow by the name of John Williams, who's a professor, has done a statistical and that a fellow by the name of John Williams, who's a professor, has done a statistical study about the improbability of the two That's right.
His name is Dr. John Delaney Williams, and he taught statistics.
He's a university professor with a PhD in mathematics and statistics, 43 years of experience, and he concluded after going through tremendous research, including even counting every single ad, one ad in the newspaper and so on, In New Orleans at that time, that we would have responded to, that the chances were only one in a million that it was by accident or coincidence that all these things happened.
And I'd like to read to you the whole list, if you don't mind.
Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
This is what he worked with, and a few more people like it, right?
Number one, we were hired the same day on May 9th, okay?
And we were interviewed, of course, the same day.
What's interesting before that is we moved into our apartments the same week.
I have my rental receipt and he has his, the same week.
We arrived in New Orleans the same week, seven days apart, okay?
We also, by the way, left in the same month, in September, you know, 63.
But what's interesting, we also both ended up at the YMCA to begin with, and I was at the YWCA.
We both came in by bus, and we both left our significant others behind and came alone to New Orleans.
Now those are coincidences, though, that don't mean very much.
The rest do.
But they do mean it when you add all of it together, because I was asked to come to New Orleans at a certain particular time.
Now, so we were hired the same day, interviewed by the same person.
We were hired to Standard Coffee Company.
And Standard Coffee Company at that time was a small company.
It's not anymore.
A small subsidiary of Riley's, which was a much larger coffee company in New Orleans.
They're both on Magazine Street, and one's across the street from the other.
And Lee was hired there, and I was, in this small company that had about 10 employees.
They only had one office and for one day he was a route salesman there and the rest of the time he was a maintenance man for Standard Coffee, they said, for one week.
He was transferred over from Riley, to Riley, from Standard Coffee.
I was too.
We were both transferred the same day.
Now imagine, we have to ride, we live within walking distance of each other, one bus stop apart.
We have to take, we take the same bus into town Every day.
He gets on an upper line.
I get on it either Napoleon or Marengo depending on where the bus, whether it was raining or not.
And in we go and we're going to get off right at 640 Magazine Street together.
And anyone who says that we didn't know each other when we did that for 11 weeks in a row, when I was a young girl and he was a young man and almost everybody else on the bus is like a cleaning lady or Um, a maintenance, I mean, you know, a plumber or something, because those, because, and a lot of black people running the bus, you know?
So, uh, I mean, he get on the bus, and then the bus stop, next time it stops, I get on the bus.
Now, do you think he didn't see me?
Okay, let's, then we get off at the same place.
We do that for 11 weeks, and yet people, some people are saying we never met.
This is absurd.
Now, of course, the argument has also been made that this was a big company, so there'd be no reason.
You know, there could have been thousands of employees.
What reason would there be to suppose you even knew each other?
Okay, first of all, there are only about 45 employees at Ryland, but there are only about 10 over at Standard, and there was only one room, plus the shipping room in the back.
For a whole week we were there working on Lee Oswald's records, the Lauderdale records, and they taught me secretarial services.
I didn't know how to do any.
I couldn't hardly type.
They had to teach me how to handle it because I had to post as the secretary for the vice president of Riley when I never had any experience.
Now why in the world would I come to New Orleans to become a secretary at Riley's when I was doing cancer research?
And we got very well established that I was doing research right up to that time.
And afterwards, After I left New Orleans, I am employed at a high-tech chemical company called Peninsula Chem Research, where they do the most exotic chemical combinations and things, and everybody would try to get in there to get hired there, because it was right at the university.
I get in with no degree in chemistry at all or anything.
And you actually maintained his time cards and records when you were working at Standard?
Well, not there.
Right there we laundered his credit, his background report.
Imagine the retail credit if they had actually written this.
We got the forms, okay?
We got blank forms from them.
And it's in my book how we did that.
The book is Me and Lee.
And then we had a grubby pause on them, you know, we took them and got a typewriter and had the same typeface.
And then I went to work trying, we decided to make them a big fat capitalist pig, see?
He had the equivalent of about $25,000 in savings.
He had like 30, you know, lots of stuff.
Oh, we have so much to say.
Keep going.
I'll go as fast as I can.
All right.
So we were at Standard Coffee Company for a week.
And yes, I am in charge of when Lee is not there.
I have to clock him out.
He clocks in at any old time.
10.15, 9.15, 8.45.
But I'm clocking him out at 5 o'clock, 5 o'clock, 5 o'clock, or 6 o'clock, or 6.30, and so on.
He wants it 7.32 p.m.
So, he wasn't home at 4 o'clock like Marie Oswald said, okay?
He just simply wasn't.
Now, Judith, let me just get this clear.
It looks to me like his job was simply a cover job with Riley Standard, and that he actually had great flexibility.
He was away more than he was there, and you maintained the records that concealed it.
Yeah, well, we had problems sometimes.
Personnel said, wait, we can't find him.
Was he really here?
And I was the one that had to resolve all kinds of problems on timecards.
And so, yeah, my initials on some of his timecards, where the personnel didn't want to accept the fact that they couldn't find him and he was supposed to have worked 40 hours.
Your initials are even on records that were presented to the Warren Commission during its investigation, but your role was never identified.
That's exactly true.
So we're at Riley's and we're there for 11 weeks.
Then the day that Lee Oswald gets fired, which is the 19th of July, they put an ad in the paper to find someone to take my place because they don't need me there anymore.
That ad comes out on the 20th.
On the 9th of August, Lee Oswald gets arrested for handing out brochures.
I had brought some of those brochures and gave them to Dean Andrews, who gave them to Carlos Coroba, who took them to Lee, and those were backups.
I got seen by the very secretary that was supposed to take my place, and she reported it to my boss, Monaghan, former FBI agent.
And John Williams calculated that the improbability of all these things happening by chance was approximately?
One out of a million.
One out of a million.
Judith, you're one out of a million.
I want to thank you for being here with me on James Fetzer News.
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