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Meredith at that most important position, with coach Tom Landry calling the plays from the sidelines. “MountLandry” was the nickname for Landry, who was famous for always wearing a coat, a tie, a felt hat, and no sign of emotion on the sideline. His National Football League expansion team had won only nine of forty games in its first two years of life, just three of ten played so far this 1963 season.
    The conversation was especially heated because an away game with the Cleveland Browns was coming up in two days, on Sunday, November 24.
    “Dandy’s too funky to call the plays,” said another boy.
    “Eddie’s too short to see the receivers,” somebody yelled back. “He’s a shrimp, a half-pint midget.”
    “Can’t hardly see over the scrimmage line,” another anti-LeBaron Meredith supporter chimed in.
    Marti recounted this with what I thought of as tomboyish pride. She boasted that she was in a league all by her female self at Dealey when it came to football details and the Cowboys. She said the boys let her participate in the obsessive discussions because she knew more about the players and football than anyone else. But she also knew that it helped that her dad was a Secret Service agent, who, unlike everyone else’s father, not only carried a gun but also caught counterfeiters and protected presidents.
    And it was from Martin Van Walters that she’d gained the critical information and the devotion that turned her into a Cowboys fan like her father. On the quarterback argument, for instance, Marti said it was from her dad that she learned enough to remind the anti-LeBaron boys that while LeBaron was only five-seven he had won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star,and a couple of Purple Hearts as a marine infantry platoon leader in Korea. All Dandy Don Meredith had done was strut around as a hillbilly singing football star at Southern Methodist University here in Dallas.
    “Little people do as many big things as big ones,” Van Walters had said to Marti, not having to mention the obvious fact that he was a small man himself—five-eight, 160 pounds.
    The Walters father-daughter pair—Van and Marti being the names they used—were a match. She called them a “proud match.” Their full names were Martin Van Walters and Marti Van Walters. The small Hudson Valley town of Kinderhook, New York, where the Walters family lived, was the hometown of Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States. Marti told me that an Albany newspaper once reported that in the years following the Van Buren presidency, more than seventy-five male babies born in the area had been given Martin Van combo names. There had also been half a dozen or so Marti and Marsha Vans, and though neither she nor her father had ever attended such a thing, there were even occasional gatherings of “any and all varieties of Martin Vans and their descendants” as a way to draw tourist attention to historical commemorations in Kinderhook.
    Beyond their names and small bones, she also shared her bright dark brown eyes and soft brown hair with her dad. His hair was closely cut, almost like a military recruit’s. Hers was short, too—barely halfway to her shoulders.
    Her dad had a stern way of talking sometimes, as if he were everybody’s father. Marti believed part of it came from the factthat he had spent three years as a criminal investigator with the army military police during the Korean War before becoming an agent of the U.S. Secret Service. He had been in the army ROTC at the University of Albany, a State of New York school, which led to a commission as a second lieutenant upon graduation. Van Walters always told Marti that going from the army into the Secret Service had been an easy and natural move.
    As she talked to me of herself, at the time a high school junior, her attention turned to that November 1963 day in the cafeteria. While biting into her tuna salad sandwich on wheat bread, she heard somebody trying to say something over the