REV. LOUIS SAUNDERS, 88, DIES;
BURIED OSWALD
Mr. Saunders, a native of Richlands, N.C., whose father and two uncles were ministers of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), graduated from Johnson Bible College in Tennessee, studied theology at Duke and received his divinity degree from Vanderbilt University.
He left an Arkansas church after Pearl Harbor to join the Army, completing chaplain’s school at Harvard, and participated in the Normandy invasion. He ended up in the Philippines after agreeing to swap assignments so a married colleague could remain close to his children.
After the war, Mr. Saunders stayed in the Philippines as a missionary, building the first high school in a remote Luzon Province and impressed a young Presbyterian missionary by taking her six plants of cascading orchids wrapped in banana leaves.
A few years later, while both were studying theology in New York, they were married. After receiving his master’s in a joint Columbia-Union Theological Seminary program, Mr. Saunders served briefly as pastor of a church in Baywater, Tex., before becoming executive director in 1957 of the Fort Worth Council of Churches, an interdenominational group that coordinated social and other programs.
Six years later, when he learned that President John F. Kennedy’s presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been killed by Jack Ruby, was to be buried in Fort Worth, Mr. Saunders knew his duty.
Even as he was leading the arrangements for an interdenominational memorial service for the slain President, Mr. Saunders worked the phones to make sure that a minister would be present when Mr. Oswald was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery on the outskirts of Fort Worth.
Assured that two Lutheran ministers had agreed to conduct the service at the request of Mr. Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, a Lutheran and resident of Fort Worth, Mr. Saunders went to the cemetery as an observer.
It was only after he had made his way through the throngs at the cemetery gates that Mr. Saunders learned that the ministers, objecting to an open-air ceremony where they would be exposed to potential snipers, had not appeared.
When Mr. Oswald’s mother asked him to fill in, Mr. Saunders obliged. He had left his Bible in his car, but as the small, forlorn Oswald family looked on from a row of folding chairs, he recited the 23 d Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd . . .”) and a passage from John 14 (“In my father’s house are many mansions . . .”) from memory, and delivered one of the briefest eulogies ever:
“Mrs. Oswald tells me that her son, Lee Harvey, was a good boy and that she loved him. And today, Lord, we commit his spirit to Your divine care.”
Within weeks his gesture had prompted an outpouring of financial support for the impoverished Oswald family.
Mr. Saunders went on to become executive director of the Council of Churches in Dallas, where he created a ministry at the county jail, expanded a ministry at Parkland Memorial Hospital and helped soothe the way for racial desegregation.
After his ostensible retirement in 1976, he served as interim minister at five churches.
In addition to his wife, Jeanne, he is survived by a daughter, Susan, of Carrollton, Tex.; two sons, John, of Coppell, Tex., and James, of Dallas; two brothers, John, of Dinwiddie, Va., and Ken, of Winston-Salem, N.C., and a grandchild.
April 17, 1998