On November 23, 1963, as the clock neared midnight in Raleigh, an attempt was allegedly made at the Dallas police department on behalf of Lee Harvey Oswald to contact one or two phone numbers in the 919 area code. It was the day after Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
What has come to be dubbed the “Raleigh Call” went unrecorded in the Warren Commission investigation. Later in the 1960s, one of the Dallas County switchboard operators on duty that night shared a story about the call with authorities.
The story goes that the operator reported that she had been asked to call two numbers in Raleigh, although without success, and then threw away the memo slip from the fruitless calls. Apparently she later recreated a slip, as a souvenir, that included two phone numbers along with the name “John Hurt.”
Little has come of the story, and mysteries surrounding the call have contributed to assassination conspiracy theories. In July 1980, both the Raleigh Spectator and the News and Observer printed articles attempting to expose details about the call, its related personalities and chain of events. And still the “Raleigh Call” and an Oswald connection to Raleigh remain an unsolved mystery.
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