From Steamshovel Press #11:

Sherman Skolnick Sounds Off!
An Interview
by Kenn Thomas

     Steamshovel Press editor Kenn Thomas recently had the
distinct pleasure of having dinner with legal researcher Sherman
Skolnick at his usual haunt, the River Flame restaurant off
Highway 94 outside of Chicago. Sherman Skolnick has been on the
scene since his early courtroom victories regarding the
corruption of Illinois state courts and congressional
reapportionment in that state. His research has made him a
perennial figure in national politics. He helped expose the
existence of a Chicago-area assassination plot against JFK
involving a Lee Harvey Oswald. He demonstrated that sabotage was
the probable reason for a United Airlines crash that killed the
wife of E. Howard Hunt and eleven other Watergate figures. He
surfaced a great deal of information regarding witnesses to
events surrounding the Inslaw investigation. In fact, he
continually exposes interesting and under-reported details about
current political scandals on the hotline of his group, the
Citizens Committee to Clean Up the Courts (312-731-1100), which
also has helped many people with their struggles in bankruptcy
court. Sherman also produces a Chicago public access cable
television program that further documents the issues and cases he
has brought to public scrutiny. Virtually dismissed entirely by
the mainstream and often labeled a kook even by some in the
conspiracy research community, Skolnick's work has nevertheless
had a remarkable staying power and his successes in court and in
the media have earned him much respect as a champion dirt-digger
and exposer of hidden truth. This interview provided a rare
opportunity to discuss history with him, his own as well as that
of the people and events he has investigated over the years.

Q: How did you get in to this line of work, Sherman?

A: It's not a line of work. It's unpaid work if I ever saw it. I
lived all my life with my parents. Since the age of six I have
been a paraplegic from polio, similar to the late President
Roosevelt, who was a hero when I was a child. In later years, I
didn't consider him so much of a hero, I considered him one of
the greatest counter-revolutionaries of American history in that
he prevented a genuine upheaval against the ruling elite in this
country which was overdue.

Q: They also went to great pains to hide his disability.

A: Right, although the Chicago Tribune use to call him the
cripple in the White House. In some ways the Tribune wasn't nicer
to me either. What I should have learned from Roosevelt about the
media because I was often videotaped sitting in my wheel chair
and I didn't realize they were looking at me as a crippled bug in
a wheel chair, a nut, a crackpot.

Q: That's precisely why they tried to cover up Roosevelt's
disability, so he wouldn't look weak or infirm.

A: It took me up to about 1979 to figure this out, after my
friend says, "Hey, no more videotaping by the media, only sitting
at a table in a restaurant like everybody else. None of this
standing on your crutches, none of that sitting in the wheel
chair, and stuff like that." 
     My father was a Ladies Garment Worker and I was born in the
bad years, 1930, and my folks had a very great problem in taking
care of me. In fact, the only way I could get hospital treatment-
-no hospital would let me in and my folks didn't have any money--
so my mother took a long shot and she wrote directly to
Roosevelt. She said, "I got a son that seems to be like you. What
do you want to do about this?" And we got a letter back from the
labor secretary, Francis Perkins, and that letter opened a lot of
doors for me. It got me into the HDCC, which is the Home for
Destitute Crippled Children, which was a hospital on the
University of Chicago campus.

Q: So you do owe Roosevelt a debt.

A: Yeah. He was a hero because he looked very much like me, he
had braces, he was paralyzed from the legs down just like me and
he needed a wheelchair. But he could walk a hundred feet, like I
can. I can walk a hundred, two hundred feet max. The only
difference was that I was poor and he came from a rich,
aristocratic, up-state scene.
     So my parents were always concerned over the years with what
will be with me. I had sixteen experimental operations and I
thank heaven that I didn't get into the anti-doctor field, as
some people are, you know, rapping doctors, because there is no
way I could be objective.
     One of my doctors was Mary Sherman, who was murdered as
result of the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans. She was
my doctor until about 1954. She was an orthopedic specialist.
(Steamshovel Debris: a new book, Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey
Virus by Edward Haslam, not available at press time, connects
Mary Sherman and Oswald associate David Ferrie with an
underground medical laboratory experimenting with monkey viruses
to develop a biological weapon.)
     As I got older, I was very good at the special school I went
to. Early on my folks...

To read the rest of this article and the others listed on the
contents page of Steamshovel Press #11, order the back issue. $5
post paid from Steamshovel Press, POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121

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