Peel’s father had business contacts in Texas, and offered to send Peel there in 1960, where the contacts treated him as cheap labor. He then took a brief stint selling door-to-door insurance, and around this time, incredibly, he was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Out of curiosity, he went to the Dallas police station and bluffed his way into Lee Harvey Oswald’s arraignment hearing, claiming in a heavy accent that he was a reporter for The Liverpool Echo. “I then went and made what I’d said retrospectively true and phoned The Liverpool Echo to give them the story. But they didn’t care. I was a bit wounded by that.”

Old newsreel film of the event shows Jack Ruby to have been in the room also, and Peel standing off in a corner. Peel remembers, “In a documentary they showed on British television, the camera pans across the room to show Ruby, and, in the last few frames, me and my friend Bob are standing there looking like tourists.”

- posted by Don Porges @ 3/14/2005 05:50:00 PM |