"The Truth Comes Out" by Joel R. Stegall

 — I respected the officer and assumed he would also respect me.

This was not just the assassination of the President; it was the death of hopes and dreams.

Since retiring to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Joel Stegall has completed a family history dating from the early Colonial Era. Longer (and more interesting) than any scholarly work he ever wrote, he was pleased to find in his bloodline literary ability, ingenuity, inventiveness, devotion to duty, self-sacrifice and uncommon love. At the same time, he was taken aback to discover insanity, murder, suicide and cattle rustling. 

Author’s Talk

Joel R. Stegall

After completing the US Army Reserve Officer’s Training Corps program at Wake Forest University, I graduated in 1961 with a BA degree and a commission as a second lieutenant. I got a deferment of active duty and enrolled in graduate school, where my wife and I became parents. Called to active duty early in 1963, I was assigned to a post in New Orleans. Life in the Big Easy was not bad. My military assignment was pretty much like any other junior management job: I showed up at an office five days a week and was home at night and on weekends to be a husband and father to our little boy. 

In late summer 1963, the doctor said we could expect an addition to the family near the end of December. The baby, to be delivered in a military hospital, would cost us a total of $7.50 out of pocket: $2.50 a day for meals for the three days the mother would be in the hospital. 

Around the same time, I happened to get an unusually interesting Army assignment helping plan an event for Vice-President Lyndon Johnson’s visit to New Orleans.  

Life was good. I enjoyed what I was doing, and a new baby was on the way. Then, less than a week before Thanksgiving, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That tragedy would never be made right. But joy returned to my personal life when, four weeks later, a beautiful baby daughter was born. - Joel R. Stegall