Dealey Plaza draws visitors on Nov. 22

DALLAS, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- The director of a museum near where President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas hopes to renovate the area before the 50th anniversary of the assassination.

Nicola Longford, executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, said about $1 million has been raised so far, almost half the cost of the project, KERA-TV in Dallas reported.

The museum in the former Texas School Book Depository, now the Dallas County Administration Building, is on the spot where Lee Harvey Oswald is believed to have waited on Nov. 22, 1963, armed with a Mauser rifle, for the president's motorcade. Investigators found a rifle in a stairwell along with three bullet casings and chicken bones, suggesting the assassin had brought food with him, Merriman Smith of United Press International wrote in an account of the shooting.

Longford said the museum holds special events on Kennedy's birthday, May 29, and usually does not mark the assassination anniversary. But she said more tourists visit the museum on Nov. 22.

Gene Mudry, a 21-year-old Australian, was drawn Tuesday to the plaza by an assassination that happened long before his birth. He told KERA Kennedy's death will never "lose significance in history."

Smith, who was riding in a car immediately behind Kennedy's in the motorcade, gave a vivid description of the shooting.

"Kennedy, smiling and waving as his bubbletop limousine -- its top down in the bright, mild air -- rolled past a quarter million Texans on the streets," he wrote. "At 12:31 p.m. (CST) it was headed toward an underpass. At that moment, he was shot in the head."