The Day Pierce Allman Met Lee Harvey Oswald

The young reporter who may have unwittingly said, “Thank you” to President John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin passed away Friday at the age of 88. Pierce Allman, the father of Dallas real estate and co-founder of Allie Beth Allman & Associates Real Estate, was a newsman for WFAA-Radio that fateful day in Dallas.

Allman’s authoritative words graced the airwaves that Nov. 22nd day in 1963, and later his voice guided Sixth Floor Museum visitors. Pierce served as the audio guide narrator since the opening of The Sixth Floor exhibition in February 1989 and then returned 23 years later to voice all new narration for the enhanced audio guide to the sixth floor that premiered in Fall 2012, museum curator Stephen Faigin said in his curator notes.

Allman was a friend to the Dallas museum that chronicles the life and assassination of President Kennedy, Sixth Floor Museum CEO Nicola Longford told CandysDirt.com.

“As a journalist and eyewitness to the assassination in Dealey Plaza, his distinctive voice served as the compelling narrator of the museum’s audio guide, heard by millions of visitors over the last three decades,” Longford said. “We are all deeply saddened by the loss of one of our core authentic storytellers who was really there.”

CandysDirt.com reported Monday on Allman’s legacy in real estate and a fateful encounter in 1963.

“Allman would often talk about his Dallas experience of encountering Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository on Nov. 22, moments after the shooting,” veteran journalist Candy Evans wrote Monday for CandysDirt.com. “The eager young reporter rushed into the building and actually encountered Oswald standing in a doorway — not knowing he was the president’s assassin — and asked him where a telephone was so he could phone in the story. Ever polite and gracious, Allman actually thanked Oswald and then filed his live report from the scene of the assassination.”

Reporting From the Scene

“This is Pierce Allman from the Texas School Book Depository…” said Allman, the young news director at WFAA-Radio. At 29 years old, the handsome newsman with light eyes and a crewcut was one of the youngest news directors in the country. He and Allie Beth, a recent graduate of TCU, had just been married the month before.

Allman coordinated the radio station’s editorial coverage of the presidential motorcade from Love Field to Downtown Dallas and the Trade Mart. But this trip was more noteworthy by the rare appearance of First Lady Jackie Kennedy, Allman told the Sixth Floor Museum audience for its “Living History” series in 2015. [The “Camelot” couple had lost their two-day-old infant son, Patrick, in August and by accounts of the time, had grown closer after the child’s passing. Mrs. Kennedy decided to make the preliminary re-election campaign trip by her husband’s side.] Allman decided at the last minute to walk from WFAA’s Young St. studios to nearby Dealey Plaza to watch the procession.

Standing near the Texas School Book Depository, Allman was merely 10 feet away from the Presidential Motorcade as it turned from Houston Street onto Elm Street.

“There were three loud reverberating explosions,” Allman reported live from the scene. He was the first eyewitness reporter to dispatch the news that shots rang out in Dealey Plaza in an apparent presidential assassination attempt.

“Nobody moved. Everybody seemed stunned, and a few seemed to look around, wondering ‘Who has the firecrackers?'”

While he didn’t know if the President had been hit, where he was taken to, or what his condition was, Allman quickly realized he was part of an active crime scene when Secret Service officers yelled for spectators to get down. He needed a phone to call the station and report what he’d witnessed.

“I went up the stairs of the depository building and there was a guy in the doorway,” Allman said. “I ran up to him and asked him where a phone was. He motioned, ‘In there.'”

He didn’t know he had likely encountered Oswald until Secret Service agents visited him later to corraborate Oswald’s testimony of leaving the School Book Depository.

In this clip, you can hear Allman’s 1963 live report from the scene of the shooting and his 2015 reflection on those events.