Account of a young Lee Harvey Oswald with BB gun in New York surfaces Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of assassinating former US President John F. Kennedy, is pictured in this handout image taken on November 22, 1963. New York: Nearly 30 years ago, a seventh-grader at the East Midwood Hebrew Day School in Brooklyn needed to complete a social studies assignment, something along the lines of what was it like in the olden days. She set down a cassette tape recorder in front of her saba, her grandfather, and pressed a button. The grandfather, Philip Jacobs, who was 73, summoned stories from bygone New York, of Lower East Side toil, business success and the Orthodox Jewish customs of his youth. His days as a landlord prompted one memory in particular. It seemed that someone with a BB gun had been shooting at an apartment building he owned in the Bronx, pinging the dark brick, piercing the windows, even targeting the elderly women who sat and gossiped in front of the building, on the sunny side. A minor nuisance in the overall context of early 1950s New York, but it had to be dealt with. He questioned tenants in the building across the street, figuring that the shots were coming from that direction. A boy piped up to say that the shooter was one of Jacobs' own tenants: a young teenager who had just received a BB gun as a present. Lee, the boy said. Lee Oswald. "So he got his experience in my building how to use a BB gun," Jacobs said for posterity, adding that this former tenant "eventually killed President John Kennedy." "He killed him?" asked the 11-year-old girl, Alysha Jacobs, in the disbelief of innocence. Until now, the story that the grandfather shared nearly three decades ago has been a private curio in the stocked cabinet of Jacobs family lore. If true, and the Jacobs family says it is, the tale would add one more detail to tantalise those still scouring the brief, troubled life of Lee Harvey Oswald for answers to the how and why of a presidential assassination, 50 years ago this Friday. And one more flash of foreboding. Among the many pit stops in Oswald's unhappy childhood was a 17-month stay in New York City, a disconcerting place for a withdrawn, ornery teenager whose Southern accent announced a young life spent in Louisiana and Texas. The report by the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, also known as the Warren Commission, traced his New York steps. In August 1952, young Lee and his mother, Marguerite Oswald, moved into an apartment on East 92nd Street in Manhattan, joining another of her sons, John Pic, and his wife and young child. The visit began well enough, with John taking Lee on day trips to the Museum of Natural History and the Staten Island ferry. But the mother and daughter-in-law clashed, and the guests left after a particularly nasty quarrel. The Oswalds moved to the Bronx, first to a basement apartment on Sheridan Avenue, and then to a five-story apartment building at 825 E. 179th St., just south of the Bronx Zoo. The landlord was Philip Jacobs, who often brought his work home to Brooklyn, according to one of his sons, Dr Martin Jacobs, a psychologist in Woodmere, NY, and the father of Alysha. "I used to count the dimes that my father brought home from the washers and dryers that the tenants used in the building," Martin Jacobs says. Marguerite Oswald worked long days at a Brooklyn department store and, later, for a hosiery company. Her son, now 13, was a latchkey kid and a chronic truant, more likely to be at the zoo than in a seventh-grade classroom. Finally, in April 1953, Lee Oswald was remanded to a home for juvenile delinquents. A social worker there described him as a "seriously withdrawn, detached and emotionally isolated" son of a cold, self-involved mother. Marguerite Oswald was "very tight-lipped," Philip Jacobs later told his granddaughter Alysha. She was sort of anti-Semitic in her approach every time I spoke to her. As for the son, he recalled, he was like any other teenage boy, "snappy in their answers." But he added that no good would come from an absentee landlord getting involved. "It was better to talk nicely to them than to be angry with them," he said. The young Oswald returned to school, but he did little more than sail paper airplanes and refuse to salute the American flag. And, at some point, he apparently received a BB gun. "So he went with his friend who lived across the street and shot at the tenants who were sitting in front of the building and at our windows," Jacobs told his granddaughter, his voice gravelly, matter-of-fact. Which left holes in the windows. From that point on, of course, having found out who did the shooting, we sort of took the situation in hand and it stopped. Jacobs did not elaborate, but his son Martin recalls that his father claimed to have confronted the Oswalds. They were to pay for the damage, and if it happened again, they were out. In January 1954, the Oswalds returned to New Orleans, reducing the New York City population of 7.89 million by two, their faintest of marks on the metropolis soon forgotten. For a while. Nearly 10 years later, the traumatised country tried to make sense of a presidential assassination by reconstructing Oswald's 24 years, from his birth in New Orleans to his own murder, two days after Kennedy's. This included his brief time in the Bronx. A reporter for The New York Times found Gussie Keller, a longtime tenant in the building at East 179th Street, who recalled how Marguerite Oswald would cry about her inward son. The tenant then referred the reporter to Philip Jacobs, who declined to say much to The Times; he told his granddaughter years later that he had not wanted to get involved. Keller also directed an agent for the FBI to Jacobs. But the landlord again chose not to mention the BB-gun story - or any story, for that matter - about the former tenants of Apartment 3C. The FBI agent later reported this: PHILLIP JACOBS, 1401 Carroll Street, Brooklyn, New York, advised SA INGRAM on December 10, 1963, he was the landlord of the building at 825 East 179th Street, Bronx, during 1953, but he could not personally recall Mrs. OSWALD. He said the tenants mailed in their rents and he had no contact with the tenants. He has no records and the person who might recall the OSWALD family would be Mrs. GUSSIE KEL-LER.The dark-brick apartment building at 825 E. 179th St. has been torn down. Philip Jacobs died in 1985 at age 74, a year after his grand-daughter interviewed him. A Gussie Keller, for-merly of this Bronx neighbourhood, died at 94 in 1990. And Alysha Jacobs, the schoolgirl curious about the past, is an optometrist who lives in Manhattan. She says that every time the Kennedy assassination comes up, she thinks about how close it all seems.