He befriended Lee Harvey Oswald’s family in Fort Worth in ’62. Later, he felt ashamed.

Gazing down toward the Fort Worth Rose Gardens, author Paul R. Gregory, 82, recalled the evening in August 1962 when he drove to the panoramic overlook at the Botanic Garden with the family of Lee Harvey Oswald — the enigmatic assassin who 15 months later fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy.

That balmy evening, Oswald, with his wife Marina and their infant daughter in his arms, had wandered down a curved staircase, walked along the garden paths, then through a shaded arcade and back up the steps. Lee carried the baby, shifting her from hip to hip. On his salary as a welder, earning $1.25 an hour, he could not afford a stroller, much less a crib.

“The Rose Garden was the prettiest place in Fort Worth, and they enjoyed it,” Gregory recalled as he wandered down memory lane, retracing his steps during a two-day visit to Fort Worth this month. “It was the only time I saw them happy.” Ordinarily, Lee, 22, was sullen, suspicious, taciturn, arrogant, jealous, and even abusive toward his pretty Russian wife.

That idyllic summer, no one would have predicted that Lee Harvey Oswald would aim a rifle at JFK, that the FBI and the Warren Commission would interrogate Paul Gregory, or that 60 years later Gregory would publish his recollections in “The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee” (Diversion Books, 2022). A longtime Russian economics researcher at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, Gregory returned to the Metroplex this month to promote his book and speak at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas.

In the summer of 1962, Gregory was 21, a sophomore with a tennis scholarship at the University of Oklahoma. His Russian professor had assigned him to analyze a Soviet play, “The Man with the Rifle,” a 1937 historical drama by Nikolai Pogodin. He needed help understanding the dialogue and asked Marina, 21, to tutor him. Marina spoke only Russian because Lee forbade her to study English.

Gregory had met the Oswalds through his father, Pete Gregory, a Siberian-born petroleum engineer who taught free Russian classes at the old Central Library, where Lee Oswald checked out stacks of books.

Tutored by Marina Oswald

Gregory arranged to visit Marina for tutoring two nights a week at her and Lee’s $59-a-month duplex. Located at 2703 Mercedes St. (now the site of the upscale Aviator West 7th apartments), the Oswalds’ duplex was in a transient neighborhood, “among the poorest in the city” with families “just scratching out a living,” Gregory writes.

Inside the Oswalds’ cramped dwelling, Gregory couldn’t help but notice on the coffee table a January 1962 issue of TIME magazine with JFK on the cover. Lee, a Cold War defector, had lived in the Soviet Union for a 32-month period, from October 1959 to June 1962, experiencing life under communism. His brother Robert had sent him American magazines. The TIME issue, which proclaimed JFK as the Man of the Year, had been to Russia and back.

When Gregory asked Marina about the magazine that had a “permanent place in their living room,” she said she “admired” the family in the White House. The “glamorous” Jackie appeared to be a “good mother.” Overhearing their conversation, Lee had “curtly concurred.”

Marina was largely marooned at their Mercedes Street duplex. She and Lee did not have a car or a telephone. Marina’s only daytime diversion that hot summer was to walk, carrying her 6-month-old daughter, to Montgomery Ward on West 7th and gaze at consumer goods she could not afford. (The mammoth building was redeveloped five decades later into Montgomery Plaza, a vibrant retail and residential center.)

Gregory tried to help the Oswalds. He took them on errands for groceries and drove them in his yellow Buick to local sites of note, speaking Russian all the while. One evening, he escorted Marina and Lee to his alma mater, Arlington Heights High. “I wanted to show her where we both had graduated, but it turned out Lee was only there a couple of months (in 1956). He didn’t seem to know anything about Arlington Heights.”

However, Oswald had stayed in high school long enough to be pictured in the 1957 Heights yearbook, laughing in a biology lab. He dropped out in October, when he turned 17 and was old enough to join the Marines. (As a Marine, he was twice court-martialed and disciplined for carelessness with loaded guns.) Had he stayed at Heights, he would have graduated in 1959, the same year as Gregory.

On a tour of the high school during his recent visit to Fort Worth, it was noticed that Oswald was not pictured on a wall featuring famous former students. “Oswald is infamous,” said Sara M. Guerra-Brown, the school’s communications and community outreach specialist, who escorted Gregory around the New Deal building. Guerra-Brown said she wants to add the author’s picture to the alumni wall.

Gregory’s family lived in nearby Monticello, across the street from an oval park with two tennis courts. Among the kids he grew up with were Bronson Stocker and his sister Peggy Stocker Diebel. They remain friends and had arranged the guided tour of Arlington Heights as well as a visit to the two-story house Gregory’s family had owned on Dorothy Lane. With its covered front porch outdoors and its polished hardwood floors indoors, the Dorothy Lane house has scarcely changed — although a swinging door has been removed in the living room and a fireplace added to the dining room.

Dining with the Oswalds

That’s where the Oswalds came for dinner one evening to meet two of the Gregory family’s “closest friends,” Russians who lived in Dallas. The emigres, both successful and comfortable in America, were eager to meet Marina, the Russian beauty who had grown up in the cultured capital of St. Petersburg. They were not so eager to meet Lee, a Marxist and a misfit.

“They came for Marina, who was dolled up, not Lee,” Gregory said. “They didn’t want anything to do with a commie.”

Marina was happy to engage in conversation with George Bouhe. An aristocratic Russian, George had brought maps and picture books of old St. Petersburg and spread them on the floor to share with Marina. Lee, visibly angry at being ignored, retreated to the den.

During a dinner filled with Russian conversation, another guest, Anna Mellor asked Lee, “Why did you desert to Russia? It’s a terrible place. Everybody’s poor.”

Agitated, Lee responded, “In America things are not fair,” to which Anna snapped, “You didn’t appreciate it.” As tension rose, George announced, “It’s time to go back to Dallas.”

The Russians drove the Oswalds home. Within days, George began dropping in on Marina, when Lee was at work, bringing gifts of diapers, baby furniture, and clothing that the Oswalds could not afford.

The last time Gregory saw the couple was on Thanksgiving 1962 at the Fort Worth home of Oswald’s brother. By then, Lee and Marina had moved to Dallas. Gregory’s last memory of the couple was of Marina turning to wave as she boarded a bus to Dallas.

JFK assassination

Exactly one year later, Gregory was glued to the TV at the student union on the Norman campus when an excited reporter at Dallas police headquarters shouted on camera, “They are bringing in a suspect.” Before the man’s name was disclosed, Gregory recognized the roughed up suspect as Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Gregory family was ashamed of its association with Oswald. “Our neighbors would’ve asked, ‘What were the Gregorys doing with a communist deserter, this traitor?’ We wanted to stay below the radar, which we largely did.”

As conspiracy theories arose, Gregory found the rumors not at all credible. “Oswald marched to his own drummer,” Gregory said. He had no friends or associates. He started working at the Texas School Book Depository a month before Kennedy’s Dallas visit was even planned, long before the parade route that passed below the building was mapped out.

Gregory never spoke with Marina Oswald again, although he tried to reach her and sent her page proofs of his book. Marina had a second daughter, born a month before the assassination. She remarried in 1965, gave birth to a son, and resides in the Metroplex. Like Paul Gregory, she is 82. But unlike Gregory, she remains incommunicado, with good reason.

Hollace Ava Weiner, an author and archivist, is director of the Fort Worth Jewish Archives.