Another Civil Air Patrol (CAP) link has emerged regarding the catastrophe in Dallas on November 22, 1963. O.B. Graham, the pastor who ran and managed the Abundant Life Temple, the Oak Cliff church where a witness said the alleged killer of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit sought refuge about 45 minutes after the shooting of JFK, was a one time chaplain for the South Carolina Wing of the CAP, according to his 1974 obituary in the Dallas Morning News.
Lee Oswald, a former CAP cadet from Louisiana, was charged with both the murder of Officer Tippit and President Kennedy. He denied both charges.
This marks a second building of significance regarding the assassinations with ties to CAP. The Texas School Book Depository building, where the official account states Oswald fatally shot JFK and wounded Governor Connally, was owned by Col. D.H. Byrd. Byrd was the CAP wing commander for the state of Texas in 1946; he later served as CAP National Executive Board Chairman from 1959–1960.
Last month, I reported another CAP high commander, Gordon A. DaCosta of Illinois, was affiliated with Old Catholic “wandering bishops,” the same milieu that attracted Oswald’s CAP leader, Capt. David Ferrie.
It is not exactly clear at the moment when Graham was the South Carolina CAP chaplain. But the CAP chaplaincy program was only formalized in January 1950. Prior to this, Air Force chaplains ministered to CAP units. In 1949, Col. Byrd was instrumental in helping persuade Maj. Gen. Charles Carpenter to approve the chaplaincy program.
Graham had deep ties to South Carolina. He was born in 1921 in Conway, near Myrtle Beach, and attended Holmes Theological Seminary in Greenville. He was a full time pastor as early as age 21. Graham spent formative years as a reverend in Greenville, leading healing revivals in the Full Gospel (Pentecostal) tradition. It was here where he founded United Missions of America, the entity that would incorporate the Abundant Life Temple in 1962.
Amazingly, one of the Dealey Plaza shooters as reported by FBI informant Willie Somersett was a resident of Greenville and another reverend, Theodore Jackman.
After a stint in Port Huron, Michigan, Graham arrived in Dallas in 1958. It was not until April 1962 when Graham purchased the church property, formerly Oak Christian Church, at Tenth and Crawford — the purported safe house location for Officer Tippit’s killer 19 months later.
Graham’s original church, the Abundant Life Center at 1730 S. Ewing, was destroyed in a “spectacular 3-alarm fire” on Saturday, February 10, 1962, according to the Dallas Morning News. Loss was estimated at $20,000 according to the report. The building was vacant at the time. Graham told firefighters he locked up at 8pm that night, two hours before the fire “apparently started in an attic near a central heating unit.” Busy with nightly healing revivals, Graham said he made Saturday a “night of rest.”
Also in February 1962, Graham began hosting a local television program on KTVT, Abundant Life Ministry of O.B. Graham. Within a year of the killings of the president and Officer Tippit, Graham sold the Abundant Life Temple. He died in Shreveport, LA at age 53 in March 1974.
Graham was frequently referred to as “Doctor” in advertisements for church services and in newspaper articles. According to the Dallas Morning News obit, Graham earned his doctorate of divinity from Lighthouse Bible College in Rockford, Illinois. However, in 1949 Lighthouse was ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to cease and desist representing itself as a “college.” In essence, it was a correspondence school that offered theology degrees for a price.
As I discussed in my book The Mad Bishops, phony schools and diploma mills abound in this world. David Ferrie, for instance, considered his own fraudulent PhD to be his most prized possession. Gordon A. DaCosta ran his own diploma mill, Indiana Northern University. Oswald himself applied to the spurious Albert Schweitzer College before his defection to the USSR.
Finally, there is one other potential CAP link that has been posited by some theorists. After Oswald supposedly murdered Tippit, he fled to the Texas Theater. Johnny Calvin Brewer of Hardy’s Shoe Store claimed Oswald ducked into the store as sirens wailed down the street — the response to an officer down: J.D. Tippit. When the sirens subsided, Oswald proceeded towards the Texas Theater. Suspicious, the astute and intrepid Brewer followed Oswald to the movie house — and even went inside. “There’s something funny [about him],” Brewer told the ticket taker, Julia Postal. Dallas PD was subsequently called to the scene, arresting Oswald on site.
At his Warren Commission testimony, Brewer was asked how he heard about the shooting of JFK:
“We were listening to a transistor radio there in the store, just listening to a regular radio program, and they broke in with the bulletin that the President had been shot. And from then, that is all there was. We listened to all of the events.”
But who was we? Ian Griggs for Dealey Plaza Echo asked Brewer that in 1996:
GRIGGS: When this happened, John, were you in the shop by yourself?
BREWER: There were two other men in there. They were from IBM — they were in the neighborhood. I had known them since I came there.
GRIGGS: Customers?
BREWER: No, they weren’t customers. They’d just come in and kill time and lounge around.
While there is nothing seemingly out of the ordinary with Brewer’s story, a shoe store is an odd place for computer professionals to kill time. Who were these IBM men? Per New Orleans police detective Frederick O’Sullivan, a former CAP cadet with Oswald, David Ferrie once performed a hypnosis demonstration at a CAP meeting on one Robert Radelet (phonetic spelling of last name), a CAP cadet executive officer, according to Ferrie’s FBI interview. This was about 1955. In November of 1963, Radelet was now employed by IBM. However, the identity of the IBM men remain inconclusive, like so many characters on November 22, 1963.
Still, a Civil Air Patrol thread continues to emerge: from Lee Oswald as a CAP cadet under Capt. Ferrie to Oswald employed in a building owned by major CAP figure Col. Byrd to the Abundant Life Temple, that we now know was owned by former CAP chaplain O.B. Graham.
The identity of the person who fled inside the imposing structure moments after Officer Tippit was shot remains unknown. And whether the church was unlocked or he was let in by someone from the inside may never be known.