Lucas Cabin

[L Verge]

Jim,

The time frame that I was referring to Mr. Hall having tracked down these various sites was back in the 1960s and early-70s. I knew Bert Sheldon, and he and Mr. Hall as well as John C. Brennan and others did the trek in cars for many years before we decided that the Surratt Society could do it for more people on a bus.

I'm sure that Mike will tell you that he met many of us while we were all tagging along with Hall and Co. to a wide variety of places related to the assassination and the escape route. I have often told people on the Booth tours, when Mike was still doing the narration, that he was a skinny teenager when we first met. My first thought was, "What does this young kid know about the assassination?" I was an elderly 30 at the time -- and I quickly learned that Mike knew quite a lot about the assassination! Just as I had, he developed his interest at an early age thanks to a grandparent. I remember us all taking notes when we traveled with Mr. Hall and others.

All you have to do is look at the extensive papers that Mr. Hall donated to Surratt House to learn that he was on top of this subject before most of us were out of diapers. He first developed his interest during WWII when part of his training in military investigations assigned him the Conspiracy Trial. He told me that he realized there were big holes in what he was reading. After the war, he went to work for the Labor Department in Texas investigating claims. That brought him higher positions in the Department here in D.C. and afforded him the wonderful resources of the Archives, Library of Congress, etc. From there, it's history... He left big footprints for us to walk in. His own book never got published, and I think that one of the reasons was that he was so busy helping others with their projects that he never finished his.