It’s a good bet that none of you have ever heard of William F. Marina. In 1963, he was a history professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He took a group of students to Dallas to see President Kennedy, and may have been the only historian in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.
Over the years, he taught many college courses on the Kennedy assassination, and collected voluminous notes. Invariably, he would learn something new from his students each semester. For example, a nurse taking his course told him that a drug that Jack Ruby was taking creates violent responses in a significant number of people who take the drug.
It was his intention to turn his notes into a book, but he never got around to it and died of a heart attack in 2009. I didn’t personally know the man, so I can’t say if he procrastinated or if he just gave priority to other projects he was working on. I do know that he was a respected historian, and thus we would have likely benefitted from his research and insight into the matter.
As an aside, he thought Oswald acted alone. I find it interesting that many of the people who did extensive research on the topic came to the same conclusion. Norman Mailer, who started writing Oswald’s Tale thinking that LHO had been railroaded, said, upon completion of the book, that he was 95% sure that Oswald acted alone. Stephen King said that after researching 11/22/63, he was 98% sure. And Vincent Bugliosi, author of the 1,600+ page tome Reclaiming History, is certain that Oswald acted alone, although in the interest of full disclosure, he thought that before he wrote the book.
But back to the theme of this essay, procrastination. We all have within us that book, that song, that poem, that idea, that business, that requires some nurturing, some “fleshing out”, so to speak, to bring it to fruition. It can seem intimidating when we envision all the work necessary to get to the end result. But as the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It doesn’t have to, indeed it can’t, be completed in a single step. Take it slow, but make steady progress. Map it out and do a little each day.
Unfortunately, we don’t know how much time we have to accomplish the task (or to get our affairs in order). The clock is ticking, but we don’t know the time the alarm is set to go off, which is all the more reason to start now.
Happy Thanksgiving to all, and thanks for reading.