DALLAS—Gladys Johnson didn’t allow drinking.

If a liquor bottle or beer can was found inside a room, the landlady wouldn’t issue a warning.

Patricia Puckett Hall’s grandmother simply piled a tenant’s belongings on the front porch, her method of informing the rule-breaker that he was no longer welcome at her Oak Cliff rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley Ave.

Hall, 57, loves the old place.

It’s hers now — her inheritance, her responsibility.

Her childhood dwells within its walls, memories as timeless as the family portraits.

One autumn day in 1963, her two younger brothers got into a scuffle in the front yard where Johnson’s grandchildren, who lived six blocks away, spent most of their free time.

A roomer witnessed the roughhousing and stepped in.

Hall, then 11, watched as he sat the boys on the porch, one on each side of him.

“I want to tell you something really important,” Hall heard the slender young man say. “I want you to listen. You’re brothers. You have to look out for each other.”

Then, “don’t ever do anything to harm another human being.”

On Nov. 22, just weeks later, that quiet man, who rented a 6-by-13-foot room from Hall’s grandmother, was arrested for assassinating President John F. Kennedy and gunning down a Dallas police officer.

“I do believe he was involved,” Hall said of Lee Harvey Oswald. “I do not believe he was the lone shooter.”

The 1930s-era home, two miles from Dealey Plaza, is showing signs of age.

Its red shingled roof leaks. The ceiling is peeling in places. The structure needs foundation work.

Even though two rent-paying tenants live in her basement, Hall says she doesn’t have money to make repairs. So she’s doing what neither her grandmother (“she was very embarrassed that Oswald lived here”) nor Hall’s mother, Fay Puckett, who later lived in the home, would do.

After Kennedy’s, death Hall said her grandmother received hate mail from around the world.

“People said if she rented to that man she must have known what his character was,” Hall said, and gave a little smile. “People get silly sometimes.”

On that Friday, Nov. 22, shortly after the president was shot, Oswald returned to his room, where he was seen by Earlene Roberts, the live-in housekeeper. Roberts told reporters she told him, “You sure are in a hurry.”

Oswald left the house wearing a zippered jacket. Investigators concluded that Oswald returned to North Beckley to retrieve a pistol, which he used moments later to kill police officer J.D. Tippit less than a mile from the rooming house.

“I don’t believe the gun was here,” Hall said. “Back then, if you lived in the rooming house, you didn’t have the expectancy of privacy. People were in and out (of the rooms) all the time. Grandmother knew what was in these rooms. If there was a gun here, it was awfully well-hidden.”

Hall hopes to use donations to restore the room to appear as it did Nov. 22, 1963.

The bed and other original furnishings, she said, are stored at an undisclosed location.

Hall said that on that historic date 46 year ago, either the FBI or Dallas police searched Oswald’s belongings and left with the bedsheets, which upset her grandmother. Johnson, she said, had as many as 16 roomers living under her roof.