The people who have contacted the Park Department have been given contradictory information. Some have been told they didn't need a permit to sell magazines or videos on the plaza, only to be ticketed anyway. Some were told they could sell printed materials without a permit, but not videos. Others were informed they couldn't sell anything without a permit, but when they inquired about getting one, they were told there weren't any available or were sent to the Health Department, where they came up empty-handed. The Dallas Observer spent more than a day being transferred from one Park Department staff person to another trying to find someone who was in charge of issuing permits for Dealey Plaza. We finally found the right person -- Ralph Mendez, assistant director for the eastern region of the Park Department, who says that the policy governing Dealey Plaza is still being worked out. According to Mendez, a potential Dealey Plaza vendor or tour guide has to submit to the Park Department a detailed proposal, which has to be approved by the Park Board and the City Council. So far the only people who seem to know about that policy are those who work for the Sixth Floor. Even if the Sixth Floor and the city wanted to see the vendors gone, Jeff West thinks they are probably protected by the constitutional right to free speech. That point has actually crossed the minds of the people who run the Park Department. Not sure whether the city code gives them the right to stop people from selling certain material on the plaza, they recently asked the city attorney's office to research the matter, says Mendez. Nevertheless, the police continue to roust the conspiracy theorists, even while the kinks in the ordinance are being worked out. All of which leads to an interesting bureaucratic and legal Catch-22. The police are ticketing people for selling materials in Dealey Plaza without a permit, but the city is not even sure it has the right to issue such a permit. The saga of the plaza subculture is like everything else associated with the JFK assassination -- neither simple nor sane. And there's a little bit of truth in all of it. "Like the police have nothing better to do but police the plaza," says an indignant Brad Kizzia, a local lawyer with Strasburger & Price and a student of the assassination who has informally counseled some of the vendors who have been ticketed. "It's a misuse of our police and legal resources and an infringement on [the vendors'] constitutional rights. If it weren't so troubling and disturbing, it would be laughable."
Dan Hayden never intended to sell JFK assassination memorabilia for a living, but "it just gets into your blood," he says. "The grassy knoll is the vortex of the world." A compact man of 40, Hayden sports a green "JFK Grassy Knoll Tours" shirt and a deep sunburn, earned from spending long days selling Robert Groden's magazine The Killing of a President and giving guided tours of Dealey Plaza. The magazines cost $5 apiece and his tours, depending on the length, average about $10. He gives free 15-minute talks to groups of schoolchildren. A part-time house painter, Hayden got interested in the assassination in the early 1980s, when he moved here from East Texas. He spent a lot of time browsing the library archives and eventually started selling newspapers on the grassy knoll in 1992, from sunrise to sunset, six or seven days a week. "I don't make a lot of money doing this," says Hayden. "My personal gut feeling is that this is an open forum for opposing viewpoints, which is fundamental to a free society." On weekends, as many as 14 different vendors swarm the plaza and grassy knoll, many of them congregating near the stone pergola on top of the knoll to escape the brutal sun. "Get the real facts about the assassination," they bark, as they brandish assorted shrink-wrapped magazines and newspapers tucked in cloth aprons tied around their waists. Competition is fierce and has led to fistfights in the past. One vendor even used pepper spray on another because he refused to front him newspapers. But Hayden and others say it has been quiet lately, ever since a particularly tough-guy distributor sold his business. The periodicals vary in quality and content. JFK Today is a flimsy newspaper with grainy photos of the motorcade and ensuing pandemonium, as well as photos of noted right-wing fanatics and opponents of integration. The Questionmark Newspaper contains muddy Xeroxed photos of the usual suspects, hand-drawn diagrams of Kennedy's wounds, and assorted documents, such as a transcript of Dallas police initially dispatching officers to the grassy knoll. The slick magazine The Killing of a President has a detailed analysis of Kennedy's wounds, a lurid shot of Kennedy's bullet-pierced neck, plus a discussion of acoustical evidence of gunshots and medical testimony that Kennedy was shot from the front. Perched most days at the corner of Elm Street and Houston, across from the Texas School Book Depository, Hayden attracts many of the tourists who have just finished touring the Sixth Floor Museum. The majority of them, he says, believe that Oswald did not act alone.
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Photo by Mark Graham
Slick hardback books and more lurid publications are hawked daily on Dealey Plaza.
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