One of the stranger photos to surface over the years…
In the front, holding the plate of food: John Wayne. Standing in the back: Lee Harvey Oswald
I don’t quite want to be the person to write Weird Orange County, but there’s enough old-growth conspiracy in O.C. to fuel at least a couple of chapters. A photograph of OC’s Most Famous Resident and an assassination enigma is just the starting point… Oswald first reported for Marine Corps duty at El Toro where he became friends with Kerry Thornley. Thornley would go on to write a book about Oswald called The Idle Warriors – the only book written about Oswald before the JFK assassination. Thornley was also the main guy behind the Principia Discordia and the Discordian Society, later fanning the flames of paranoids worldwide who took a joke concocted in a Whitter bowling alley to inevitable and extreme conclusions.
The Prankster And The Conspiracy gets into the details. Thornley later found himself on the wrong end of Jim Garrison’s investigation with an indirect connection to O.C.’s Most Infamous Resident who just happened to be in Dallas that day.
The only thing missing from a county of flying saucers, assassination connections, corrupt sheriffs, and banking scandals is a crypto-monster, but perhaps O.C. could adopt Elsie the Lake Elsinore Sea Serpent from next door Riverside.
