JFK, Thanksgiving, and my Brother's Downfall

How misfortune created a rebel

This time of year has always been poignant for me. As I’ve noted, my memories generally date from 1963. More specifically, November 22, 1963. I was born in 1956, but what I recall from before the JFK assassination are only vague images, that are unconnected and of unknown significance.

From the bus driver telling us the president had been shot, to hearing Oswald being shot by Ruby as we were driving home from mass two days later, that entire dark weekend is etched into my mind. Especially after Oswald died, I absorbed all the conspiratorial chatter coming from my father and other relatives. I was obviously born to doubt all official stories, but particularly this official story. The world seemed forever different to me from that day forward. I think the country as a whole did lose its innocence. I know I lost mine, at the tender age of seven.

I have written about it before, but something else happened on the day of the assassination, which impacted me on a far more personal level. My brother made the mistake of “goosing” a senior girl in high school, having been egged on by some older kids. Apparently, pinching asses was a popular craze at that time. Remember, this was America 1.0. As a nerdy freshman, my brother would have been anxious to seem “cool” with the popular boys who felt comfortable in touching the asses of the popular girls. But alas, that was not something someone like him could get away with.

The world came crashing down on my brother after this. To say the school made a mountain out of a mole hill is to understate things dramatically. He had to have a police escort out of the school. Students- presumably the same popular ones who urged him to do it in the first place- were threatening to lynch him. The assistant principal screamed at him, and would eventually follow him to the new high school he was forced to attend. Yes, he was expelled for something that should have perhaps garnered him detention.

But he wasn’t just expelled from school. He was prosecuted. Apparently, the ass he “goosed” belonged not only to a popular cheerleader, but the daughter of a powerful military general. I can’t imagine what the charges were; nowadays, perhaps they would charge him with “sexual assault,” but in 1963, boys of all ages gave girls of all ages “titty twisters” and the like. Regardless, my father complained bitterly about having to fight this powerful man in court. There is no question that my perspective on the law, on the wealthy, and the unfair system, were born out of this experience.

Actually, I didn’t learn that this incident took place on November 22, 1963, until years later, while attempting to obtain the records from juvenile court. I wanted to see if perhaps my brother hadn’t told the entire truth about what happened. I was unable to find out anything, even though a few kind people were intrigued and wanted to help. They don’t keep records that long for juveniles, I learned. And my brother couldn’t shed much light on it. He had clearly suppressed things, even to the point of not remembering the name of the girl. This despite him still recalling the names of all his kindergarten classmates, with kind of a “Rain Man” ability.

I wish I’d realized the importance of this incident before my mother died, in 1987. Both my parents reacted in curious ways to what should have been, again, something that resulted in detention for my brother. My father raged at the corrupt system, as I lapped all that up like a fledgling drug addict. My mother, on the other hand, was so embarrassed by it that she threw down a curtain of secrecy, which I was terrified to breach. Ricky was forced to move in with my sister, as she lived closer to his new school. All the kids asked me why he wasn’t living with us any more. I had no answer for them, and was terrified that they might “know” the truth. Whatever it was.

Before this all happened, I never thought there was anything “wrong” with my brother. However, after he moved in with my sister, when Ricky came home on the weekends, he scared me a lot more than my father’s drinking did. He would come up to me and act like he was going to strangle me. He’d bang his head against the wall, and start crying. He began acting like he was “crazy,” and the mandatory therapy sessions, with teenagers who had severe mental issues, surely contributed to that. I guess he looked at them, and began believing he must be in the same category.

I don’t know how my parents juggled their sorrow over the first Catholic president being assassinated, with this unraveling tragedy involving my brother. I recall all the assassination images from that weekend, but there is nothing about my brother’s situation mixed in with them. Maybe I’ve blocked some things out myself. I do know that neither my brother nor my father was ever the same again. My father’s alcoholism became far more pronounced, and he retired on disability four years later, at only fifty six years of age, because of the terrible toll it took on his health.

As for my brother, he would be looked at, from that day forward, as someone who had something “wrong” with him. By my entire family, including me. He couldn’t hold a job, or keep a girlfriend. And it all was apparently triggered by a pretty innocuous act. I know that he didn’t do anything worse than “goose” that girl, because my father was unfailingly blunt. He never held back in deference to my tender years. If he had actually attempted rape or something, my father would have been bitterly railing in excruciating detail at him over that. But he simply blasted him for “goosing” her.

I would love to ask my parents why they reacted the way they did. Why didn’t they defend him? Why didn’t they object to the brutal way their son was treated? I have to live with these questions, which will remain forever unanswered. I never knew the extent of what Ricky went through when my parents were alive, and it’s too late to talk to them about it now. I know that I would have been irate at that vice principal, and the school administration in general. Ricky was abused by an uncaring system.

I couldn’t have expected anything much different from my father. He was incredibly bitter, saddled with an endless array of physical maladies, and obviously very depressed. But my mother was normally Ricky’s chief defender. Except for this, when he needed her most. I treasured my mother- she alone made my childhood joyful- and I revere her memory. Her response to a petty offense still astounds me. It was totally uncharacteristic. I can’t even begin to understand it. She frequently told me to “always look out for your brother.” That was a real burden to place on a kid who was eight years younger, but I knew he had no one else.

My mother’s words rang in my ears for all those decades, when I became my brother’s unofficial keeper. He lived by himself, but he constantly needed me. Ricky had trouble navigating through social situations, workplace drama, and eventually the purposefully confusing and complex government entitlement business. He was my Best Man at my wedding, and despite my fears he gave a pretty good toast. I’ve written and talked at length about his death. And buried amid all the sorrow and anger I feel about that, is the fact that now I’ll never get the answers I seek about the November 22, 1963 incident. The one that didn’t take place in Dallas.

I am haunted by people who had bad things happen to them, merely because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Think of Kevin Ives and Don Henry, the teenage “boys on the track,” perhaps the most well-known victims of the Clinton Body Count. My brother Ricky was in the wrong place at the wrong time, too. Egged on by the wrong kids, who were probably bullies. And definitely touching the wrong ass. Punished cruelly and unusually by the wrong father, and the wrong school officials. One brief act, and an entire life was negatively impacted. Forever.

I love Thanksgiving. The turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberries, etc. It’s my favorite meal. Should they ever decide to frame me for a crime I didn’t commit, and I wind up on death row, the traditional Thanksgiving spread would be my last meal request. But it’s mixed in with the disruption caused by my brother’s misfortune. In a way, Ricky was kind of a patsy, like Oswald. He wasn’t exactly framed, but he was definitely wildly over-punished for something that really wasn’t a “crime.” It ruined his life, and I now see how much it influenced mine.

Without that “goose,” I wouldn’t have been forced into the older brother role, despite being eight years younger. Maybe Ricky would have married, and had children. Been able to keep a job. Perhaps the odious mental health system would have remained a stranger to me. No psychiatrists, filling out yearly Representative Payee reports, monitoring his money, intervening for him with employers and landlords. And if it hadn’t happened, would I feel the same way about the rigged court system, and have the same antipathy towards the rich and powerful?

So perhaps I can credit my brother’s tragedy for being largely responsible for creating my radical mindset. Without that “goose,” I might never have written the kinds of books I have, or these kinds of posts on Substack. I would not have been so inclined to distrust the system. I would probably have made a lot more money. My life would have been almost as different as his would have been. But it happened. And I saw just how corrupt the system could be, when I had barely a dipped a toe in the shallow end. Although it’s not exactly comparable, it taught me early on to believe in nurture over nature. We are often the victims of unfavorable circumstances, or beneficiaries of favorable circumstances. Sometimes it is the luck of the draw.

I can see that this incident not only helped mold my political philosophy, but also aroused my interest in the subject of bullying. Ricky was bullied at his new high school. Yes, they knocked his lunch tray out of his hands. Tripped him while he was walking through the cafeteria. You’ve all seen the films. And that sadistic vice principal hounded him at the new school, sitting next to him and staring at him in classes, and asking girls he tried to talk to if he was “bothering” them. If he wasn’t a bully, what else would you call him? Certainly not an “educator.” It’s obvious Ricky was the inspiration for Bullyocracy and I dedicated the book to him.

I wanted to write about this in detail. I’m basically an open book, and too old to change. I find it cathartic to do so. Ricky has been gone close to a year now. It was strange not having to pick him up, and take him back home after Thanksgiving. Trying to force him to take some leftovers with him. Christmas will be even harder. His stocking is still there (my wife fills stockings for everyone). We always bought him chocolate covered cherries. I’m not sure he even liked them that much, but my mom started doing that at Christmas when he was young. He had so few interests that it was difficult to get him presents. We mostly always gave him cash, or bought him clothes. Which he would almost always return for some usually unfathomable reason.

It’s been fifty nine years since JFK was assassinated. Fifty nine years of nonstop lies about it. Read my book Hidden History if you want to know my full background in researching the case, as well as all the most obvious evidence of conspiracy. And it’s been just as long, to the day, that my brother Ricky’s life was uprooted, and my personality was largely formed, by an incomprehensible reaction from a popular girl with a rich and powerful father. I wish I knew the full extent of my brother’s story, as much as I wish I could have a video taken from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll, and from inside the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building.

And so these things become jumbled in my mind. Lee Harvey Oswald, ultimate scapegoat for a crime he most definitely didn’t commit. Richard Ellsworth Jeffries, Jr., my older brother who was driven into “weirdness” and denied a normal life, thanks to an injustice that I can’t research like the Kennedy assassination. I am very grateful for my blessings at this time of thanks. But I wish I could change the arc of history, both for the last great American president, and for my luckless brother, who deserved so much better.