What do two people from Oblong, Kennedy and the assassination have in common?

On the face of it, those of us with dull, rectangular imaginations find it hard to conceive of any possible link between a town named, apparently, for the shape of a local meadow and the assassination of John F. Kennedy more than 650 miles away and 50 years ago on Nov. 22, 1963.

But, as it turns out, there is more than just one mystic chord of memory stretching from Dallas, population 1,241,000, and Oblong, population 1,443, give or take. So it’s time to meet oil producer and owner of Larrabee Oil Co. Inc., John Larrabee, who still lives near town, and retired Oblong-born nurse Phyllis Hall, who now lives in Dallas.

We’ll go with the Larrabee link first. His family turns out to have been good friends with one Hy Rubenstein back in the 1950s and ’60s. Rubenstein had a brother named Jack, and he anglicized their last name to Ruby and walked onto the stage of history as the man who stepped into the face of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and returned the compliment by shooting him to death on national television.

When illness claimed Ruby’s life in 1967, Larrabee’s family sent a sympathy card to Hy Rubenstein’s Chicago home and soon received a reply, which John Larrabee has kept all these years:

“The family of Jack Ruby acknowledges with deep appreciation your kind expression of sympathy,” and it’s signed in a flowing script by his surviving brother. “Phyllis only found out I had this recently, and she said you need to have it appraised,” said Larrabee, 74. “I do keep it in a lockbox.”

The two friends had grown up in Oblong and Larrabee was already well aware of Hall’s more than casual brush with the same rich slice of history. It turns out she was one of the nurses on duty at Parkland Memorial Hospital when the president’s body was wheeled through the front doors on that fateful day 50 years ago.

Phyllis was part of the team working on him and trying to save a patient that, after her four years of frontline experience in the emergency room, she already knew belonged to history. “He was gray, he didn’t have a pulse,” recalled Hall, 78. “He just wasn’t there, he was gone.”

But First Lady Jackie Kennedy remained by his side. She had arrived hugging his body on the gurney and stayed there holding his foot while Hall and the doctors worked to produce a miracle that never came. Hall recalls at one stage a nursing supervisor asked the First Lady if she would like a seat outside. “She said ‘I am not leaving him,’” says Hall, who noticed how her pretty pink Chanel suit was all splattered with the president’s blood. And how she kept right on holding that foot.

Hall and Larrabee got together to tell their very different stories in September when she flew back and joined him at a presentation to the Crawford County Historical Society. Larrabee says Hall’s JFK association is local legend and she’s held in a kind of reverence when she returns for her regular visits and for reunions of her Oblong High School class of 1953.

Larrabee’s connection with the Ruby family is less publicized but ran quite deep. The family business when he was a boy was flowers, not oil, and his mom and dad ran an Oblong florist’s shop. Hy Rubenstein was a salesman from Chicago who would make long trips south selling florist supplies and became fast friends with the family and took meals with them.

“Hy was a hard-shell Democrat and dad was also,” says Larrabee. “They just clicked.”

When Larrabee’s father later suffered a stroke in 1959, Rubenstein would come visit him at the Veterans hospital in Danville. “And I was going to visit dad in the hospital when I heard on the news that Oswald had got shot,” Larrabee recalls. “We didn’t know Jack was any relation to Hy until Hy called two weeks later and said it was his brother who had shot Oswald. I was really shocked.”

Four years later, after Ruby died of cancer while awaiting a retrial having been sentenced to death, deciding to send the old family friend a sympathy card on the demise of his sibling just seemed natural. Larrabee says he’s heard all the conspiracy theories that say Ruby was part of some sinister plot to silence Oswald before he could spill the beans on the darker plot to murder the president, but he never dug those stories.

“I was up at the hospital seeing dad about a month later (after Oswald’s death) and Hy walked in and we talked about this idea of conspiracy,” says Larrabee, who would later lose touch with Rubenstein while pursuing his oil industry career. “He said his brother had nothing to do with anything like that. He said Kennedy was Jack Ruby’s idol and Oswald had killed his idol and Jack just wanted to make sure he would not get off or get away with it. Even my dad thought it was a good deal that Oswald got shot.”

Hall never encountered Hy Rubenstein in those Oblong days when she lived just down the road from the Larrabees, but she was destined to enter Ruby’s world both before and after he shot Oswald. The registered nurse, who left Oblong in 1954 and later moved to Dallas with her late husband, David, actually visited a Ruby-owned nightclub in the city. It was long before anyone had ever heard of Oswald and she said her husband talked her into accompanying him to the naughty establishment known for strip tease and pole dancers.

“My husband drug me there and I had to hold him back by the ear when a famous strip-teaser called Candy Barr came out,” says Hall. “She was very beautiful.”

Ruby was also destined to wind up at Hall’s place of work after his sentencing. She said he was brought to Parkland Memorial — where he would eventually die from cancer complications — because he kept injuring himself in prison. Hall said he would whack his head off the walls just to get a ride to hospital so he could escape his cell for a while. “I saw him there just laughing and talking,” recalled Hall, a nurse for 43 years.

Several weeks before the JFK assassination, she had also met Oswald’s Russian wife, Marina, who had came to Parkland seeking care. “She was very, very pregnant and had no prenatal care up to that point,” says Hall. “She was a pharmacist and a very interesting person. And it’s just hearsay, but one of the nurses who was working up on OB (obstetrics) when her baby was born said there were three baby entries that day: Oswald, Kennedy and Johnson were their names.”

In this 50th anniversary year Hall who, like Larrabee, does believe there was more than one shooter in the president’s assassination, has found herself giving more than 40 interviews to newspapers and television stations from all over the world. Some sensationalize what she tells them and she hates that and can’t understand why anyone would embroider the stark truth.

And when you have real stories to tell like stepping away from the dead president to take care of wounded Texas Gov. John Connally as his every tortured breath sent clouds of misty blood spraying out of a hole in his chest from a bullet-punctured lung, the truth is dramatic enough.

“Everybody knows about me in Oblong, everybody,” says Hall. “They say ‘Were you really there? Did you touch the president?’ And I say ‘yes’ and it’s like they’re humbled; it’s very sweet but it makes me feel kind of weird.”

Her old pal Larrabee says the death of the president was a national tragedy that robbed America of a great man, and Hall also appreciates the magnitude of his loss even though her personal politics run in a different direction. When she thinks back on the agony in Dallas, she feels it most as the loss of a mother’s son, a husband and a father whose life was taken by the evil done by others. “Thinking of that is when I get emotional,” she adds.

She’s giving no more newspaper interviews this year but does enjoy telling what she remembers to children, acting as a kind of living history book for them. The trouble with children, however, is they don’t always appreciate the significance of what they are hearing or, in the case of her own daughter, the value of what they’re borrowing.

Hall explains she had kept the nurse uniform she had been wearing that sad and momentous day, still stained a little with the president’s blood, and her daughter had borrowed it once for show and tell back when she was in grade school. “I don’t know if she lost it on the way home from school or what,” says Hall. “But I haven’t seen it since.”

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