Beyond the Classroom

DR. MICHAEL MARCADES is the son of Rose Cherami, aka Melba Christine Youngblood Marcades. You have seen an incident in the early stages of Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, with a delirious woman in a hospital bed sharing information about the impending assassination attempt on President Kennedy, BEFORE it happened.Dr. Michael Marcades heard of the JFK assassination at school and all students were sent home. For as long as Michael could remember, his mother, often referred to as Crit by family members, was a mysterious, purportedly troubled person, incapable of raising him full-time.  A few years before her young son entered first grade, Crit asked that her mama and papa rescue Michael from her dangerous lifestyle.  Tom and Minnie Youngblood became Michael's legal guardians.  After that, Michael seldom saw his mother.  On September 4, 1965 -- Michael's mother was murdered under cover of darkness.  She breathed her last in a tiny, mob-affiliated East Texas hospital. Hardly anyone noticed. Leading up to her funeral at a secluded cemetery outside Duncanville, adults whispered words of confusion and grief.  Michael was lost in conflicting, blurry thoughts.  Decades would pass before Michael unearthed truths regarding his mother's life and covered-up, murderous death, and her bizarre interconnectedness with the death of President John F. Kennedy.This podcast details the experiences of  Dr. Marcades, former college professor/music educator, ordained minister, who has discovered dozens of documents, many of which have rewritten salient "facts" about Rose Cherami and her undeniable connection to assassins, the drug world, nationwide prostitution, corrupt law enforcement individuals, MKUltra, Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald, documented evidence of her foreknowledge of the assassination and her efforts to warn authorities before Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, and her well-disguised murder two years later.

The Green Mountain Boys band from Putney, Vermont had formed in 1969 and performed in Craftsbury Common, Vermont on March 14, 1970. Banjo player, Bruce Stockwell, 14 years old, won the banjo contest that day.  Within a short time, news spread of the Green Mountain Boys and they caught the attention of Windham College students who were part of an early 1970s college funded Student Activities group. They included David W. Gray. We contacted David W. Gray, part of the group coordinating concerts at the college and in the tri-state area.According to Gray, “At Windham and student activities, we really wanted to do a large-scale Folk Festival, both Bruce (Bramson) and I, and a number of other people had gone to the Toronto Folk Festival. We were just absolutely blown away. It was amazing. It was incredible. We thought, we need to do that in Putney, and so we decided to call that Putney Folk,Putney Folk, the organization, was born. They needed a warm-up band. Enter the Green Mountain Boys.This podcast follows the careers of the Green Mountain Boys, today, The Stockwell Brothers Band, and David W. Gray – In 2015 David W. Gray received an Oscar (Gordon Sawyer Award) for his technological contributions to the motion picture industry. Officially – "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technologicalcontributions have brought credit to the industry." A fabulous career anda long way from Student Activities at Windham College.The podcast puts David W. Gray together with Bruce and Barry Stockwell approximately 50 years after they last saw one another – to reminisce about how it all started and where it is today.The voices in the podcast are David W. Gray, Bruce Stockwell, Barry Stockwell, Bill Holiday, Lyle Holiday and, briefly, podcast producer, Reggie Martell.

Thirteen seconds of gunfire on the campus of Kent State University in northeastern Ohio ended the lives of four young people, and permanently altered the lives of countless others. The victims' families, injured survivors, guardsmen, eyewitnesses, and politicians were immediately and directly affected. Many Americans, shocked by the shooting, began to see domestic turmoil in a different light. American society, deeply divided before the Kent State incident, was in its aftermath completely polarized.

In this inaugural edition of Beyond the Classroom, Bill and G discuss Bill’s book, Beyond the Classroom, and the life-changing opportunities found when learners step outside the confines of their school building and go to where history happens.They also discuss the history of Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” and the challenge of readying students for travel in one of the world’s most politically contentious areas.

J. Gary Shaw and Brian Edwards recently published, Admitted Assassin: Roscoe White and the Murder of President Kennedy.This podcast discusses the results of their research.Brian Edwards has been researching the JFK assassination since 1969 and has interviewed many of the Dealey Plaza eyewitnesses; Dallas police and sheriff’s officers; Parkland doctors and medical personnel who were on duty at Bethesda Medical Center. He has given hundreds of presentations on the assassination and since 2001 was a regular presenter at the JFK Lancer Conference Mr. Edwards has extensive Law Enforcement Experience with the Lawrence Kansas Police Department, as a field training officer, accident investigator, counter-assault team, and instructor in the police academy.Edward’s research has been cited in numerous books, including Assassination Science (1998); Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000); The Zapruder Film (2003) and The Hoax of the Century (2004). He is co-author of Beyond the Fence Line: The Eyewitness Account of Ed Hoffman and the Murder of President John Kennedy. In 2018, Mr. Edwards collaborated with and appeared in Oliver Stone’s 4-hour documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.J. Gary Shaw is a first-generation assassination researcher and one of the leading experts on the case. Shaw began studying the case the day after it happened. In high school, Shaw met Jack Ruby who asked Shaw’s group to join the artist’s guild in Dallas. After Ruby shot Lee Oswald in the basement of police headquarters, Shaw began collecting every newspaper, magazine and book on the case. Shaw met Penn Jones, Jr. After reading Penn’s Forgive My Grief, Shaw bought two complete sets of the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report. Shaw maintained a close relationship with Jones. Shaw began interviewing individuals directly connected to the case; Dallas Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, Richard Carr, Gerry Hemming, Loran Hall and many others. In 1976, Shaw and Larry Ray Harris (1952-1996) published Cover-Up: The Governmental Conspiracy to Conceal the Facts About the Public Execution of John Kennedy. Shaw is a co-founder/director of the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas. Shaw was chair of the ASK Conferences in Dallas and acted as a consultant on Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK. In 1992, Shaw co-wrote JFK: The Conspiracy of Silence with Dr. Charles Crenshaw. It was the number one seller on the New York Times list of paperbacks.

In this edition of Beyond the Classroom we talk about how an announcement from the Junior High middle school intercom and a sans-textbook curriculum led to a lifelong search for truth that spurred Bill to Dallas’ Dealey Plaza by way of the Putney School. Along the way, he spoke with witnesses to a seminal moment in American history and chronicled those stories in a new book: The JFK Assassination: What They Told Me.

How to explain history when the officialdom disavows events and its agents? How do you explain history when history is composed of events that never happened carried out by people who never existed? You talk to their kids.This is the story of Clandestine America, where a German teenager is impregnated by Fidel Castro and subsequently tortured psychologically by the CIA in a successful effort to recruit her as an assassin. Who did they want her to assassinate? The great love of her life, Fidel Castro. It is the story of an assassin’s daughter, the self-appointed guardian of her only parent who likely foiled an attempt on her mother’s life by discharging a pistol on the street in New York City.It is the story of a Connecticut woman whose father left home one day when she was a teenager and was never seen again. He never existed. His job? Doing things that never happened. But students are always more understanding than adults think. Did they know Fidel Castro had just taken power in Cuba? That JFK would soon be elected president? That the civil rights movement was about to change the United States forever? And that newly enlisted Marines would soon be sent to Vietnam?No, but they would soon learn about their country, their parents' seminal roles in its history, and how the US treats the children of people who never existed. In this episode, they attempt to tell their parents’ stories.

On his 18th birthday Robert Groden was playing hooky from high school when a blockbuster news story hit NBC TV News: President John F. Kennedy had been shot from a hill along the parade route during a campaign stop in Dallas, Texas. In this episode of Beyond the Classroom, Robert Groden tells Bill the unlikely story of a New York teenager who, some 12 years after the events of November 22, 1963, revealed the definitive visual account of the assassination of President Kennedy on the Geraldo Rivera show.Robert Groden has been researching the assassination of President John F.Kennedy since 1964 and is considered a leading critic of the Warren Commission. Robert has assembled the largest photographic and film evidence on the case. He has also investigated the medical evidence and personally interviewed most of the medical professionals present that day.In 1975, Robert showed the Zapruder Film live on national television (Good Night America, ABC TV). As a result, he was invited to address the US House of Representatives to present the case for conspiracy via photographic and other evidence. He was then invited to show his evidence to the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington D.C.  Two days later, a resolution to reopen the investigation was introduced by Representative Thomas N. Downing of Virginia. This led to the creation of the House Select Committee to Investigate Assassinations. Robert was the staff photographic consultant for the life of the committee. He authored the dissenting opinion report for the HSCA photographic panel. He has consulted with other investigations since then. Mr. Groden has written 8 books on the assassination. He has consulted on numerous documentaries over the years. He worked with Oliver Stone on his landmark film, JFK. Robert continues to investigate the assassination as he feels that “although it may be too late for justice, it is never too late for the truth.”

Monica Mercedes Pérez Jiménez has a lineage of power. She is the daughter of Marco Jimenez, dictator of Venezuela in the 1950s, and Marita Lorentz, one-time girlfriend of Fidel Castro who later became a CIA spy.This recording is a conversation between Bill Holiday and Monica at the JFK Lancer Convention in Dallas, Texas in November of 2023.Monica tells the story of growing up the daughter of a CIA assassin and South American dictator. 

An outtake from our Kent State episode: Bill Holiday gives prospective Kent State students an unscheduled tour addendum.

An outtake from our podcast about the killing of 4 students at Kent State University in 1970.G relates an anecdote from Robert Giles book When Truth Mattered, when a careless photo editor cost his newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.