"Harvey and Lee" Part 03: School Daze
Jim Hargrove
H A R V E Y A N D L E E :
S C H O O L D A Z E
From Robert Oswald's Warren Commission testimony:
Mr. OSWALD. Just a minute, please.
In 1952 Lee was 13 years old. He would be attending W. C. Stripling
Junior High School then.
Mr. JENNER. I see. For the school year 1951-52?
Mr. OSWALD. Yes, sir. Junior high school there was from the seventh to
the ninth grades. And as soon as he was through with his sixth year,
he started attending W. C. Stripling Junior High School.
Mr. JENNER. As soon as he finished the sixth year at Ridglea Elementary
School, he entered W. C. Stripling High School, as a seventh grader?
Mr. OSWALD. Yes, sir--junior high school.
Mr. JENNER. Now, the condition that you described as to Lee shifting
for himself during the daytime, when your mother was away working and
you were away working, and your brother John was in the Coast Guard,
continued, I take it, when he began attendance and while he was
attending W. C. Stripling Junior High School?
Mr. OSWALD. Yes, sir.
--WC Volume 1, page 299
Lee Harvey Oswald's brother Robert told the Warren Commission that the alleged
assassin of President Kennedy attended W.C. Stripling Junior High School in
Fort Worth, Texas. In two interviews in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, one in
October ‘59 when Oswald defected, the other in June ‘62 when he returned,
Robert repeated his recollection that his brother had attended W.C. Stripling
in Fort Worth.
A student a year behind Oswald at Stripling, Francetta Schubert, recalled
watching Lee Harvey Oswald walk home and remembers discussing him with her
friends. She reported that Oswald lived at 2229 Thomas Place, across the
street from Stripling, the same house Marguerite lived in at the time of the
assassination. In her videotaped interview shown during John Armstrong's
remarkable 1997 November in Dallas presentation, Francetta pointed to the house
as the camcorder panned to indicate its close proximity to Stripling school.
In another videotaped interview, the W.C. Stripling assistant principal at the
time of the assassination, Frank Kudlaty, recalled how he was contacted by the
FBI and how he handed over to them Oswald's Stripling school records. He also
remembered looking through the files and noting that Oswald had attended "not
quite a semester" in the ninth grade.
But where, Oh Where, have those records gone? John Armstrong reports: "Don't
bother to look for Oswald's Stripling records in the Warren volumes, and don't
waste your time filing a Freedom of Information request with the FBI--the FBI
denies any knowledge of Stripling records." The word "Stripling" appears
nowhere in the Warren Report. In the other volumes, it appears only in brother
Robert's testimony. Why? Because the Warren Commission has Lee Harvey Oswald
attending and graduating from Beauregard Junior High School in New Orleans.
From Appendix XIII of the Warren Report, p. 679:
In New Orleans, Lee and his mother stayed with the Murrets at 757
French Street while they looked for an apartment. Lee enrolled in the
eighth grade at Beauregard Junior High School on January 13 and
completed the school year without apparent difficulty. He entered the
ninth grade in September and again received mediocre but acceptable
marks. In October 1954, Lee took a series of achievement tests, on
which he did well in reading and vocabulary, badly in mathematics. At
the end of the school year, on June 2, 1955, he filled out a "personal
history." He indicated that the subjects which he liked best were
civics, science, and mathematics; those he liked least were English and
art.
And from WR p. 680:
After a short period with the Murrets, Mrs. Oswald and Lee had
moved to an apartment. owned by Myrtle Evans at 1454 Saint Mary Street,
which she and Mrs. Murret helped to furnish; later they moved to a less
expensive apartment in the same building, the address of which was 1452
Saint Mary Street. Relations between Mrs. Oswald and Mrs. Evans became
strained, and in the spring of 1955 the Oswalds moved to a new
apartment at 126 Exchange Place in the French Quarter. Although Lee
gave the Exchange Place address on a school form at the end of the
ninth grade, the school authorities had apparently not been advised of
these moves earlier, because Mrs. Oswald did not want Lee to be
transferred from Beauregard, which she considered a good school.
John Armstrong believes that it was Harvey Oswald who attended classes at
Stripling Junior High in Fort Worth, but in a bizarre and telling twist, the
evidence indicates that Harvey also attended Beauregard school in New Orleans
for a time, while Lee was still enrolled at Public School 44 in the Bronx, New
York. Myra Darouse recalls that Lee Harvey Oswald was enrolled in her 8th
grade homeroom at Beauregard during the 1953-54 school year.
In a videotaped interview with Armstrong, Darouse indicated that Oswald was
short, reaching only about to the level of her chest. Based on her own height
of 5'4", she estimated Oswald's height at 4'6" to 4'8". According to NYC
Public School System health records, Lee Harvey Oswald was already 5'4" tall in
1952, the same height as Harvey Oswald's 8th grade Beuregard homeroom teacher,
Myra Darouse. Since Darouse recalled specifically that her student was quite a
bit shorter than she was, we know that it was the bilingual Harvey who attended
Beauregard a year before Lee. Myra also recalled that on the first day of
school her student asked her to be called "Harvey."
Just two days ago, at the urging of HSCA consultant Jack White, I telephoned
John Armstrong to talk about his work. During our discussion, John said, "What
I have done is very, very simple. All I did was to take thousands of old
documents about Lee Harvey Oswald and put them in chronological order." From
that simple start, one of the greatest mysteries of our time starts to unravel.
According to the legend, in August 1952 Marguerite drove with Lee to New York
to be near her oldest son, John Pic, who was Lee's half-brother. But problems
for the legend begin within months. During his Warren Commission testimony, Pic
was shown a series of photographs of Lee taken between the ages of 2 and 12.
Pic recognized all of them. But then he was shown the well-known picture of
Oswald at the Bronx Zoo (CE 2893). Here is his testimony:
Mr. JENNER. Then right below that is a picture of a young man standing
in front of an iron fence, which appears to be probably at a zoo. Do
you recognize that?
Mr. PIC. Sir, from that picture, I could not recognize that that is Lee
Harvey Oswald.
Mr. JENNER. That young fellow is shown there, he doesn't look like you
recall Lee looked in 1952 and 1953 when you saw him in New York City?
Mr. PIC. No, sir.
--WC vol 11, p. 65
Why couldn't John Pic recognize a picture of his own half-brother at the Bronx
Zoo in New York?
Lee Harvey Oswald's grammar school records at Ridglea West Elementary School in
Fort Worth are quite thorough. In an FBI report of June 5, 1964 (CE 2221), SA
Earle Haley described his interview with one of Oswald's Ridglea West
classmates, Richard Warren Garrett. The report indicated that Oswald and
Garrett had played together at school, and Garrett had once been in Oswald's
home. The two students did not see each other during their junior high years,
the report continued, until they were reunited at Arlington Heights High School
in Fort Worth. Here is how the Feb. 21, 1964 Life magazine described that
encounter:
There was a poignant reunion with a grammar school acquaintance,
Richard Garrett. "He walked up to me in the hall at school," said
Garrett. "I remember I had to look down to talk to him, and it seemed
strange, because he had been the tallest, the dominant member of our
group in grammar school. He looked like he was just lost. He was very
different from the way I remembered him.
Did Garrett play with Lee in grammar school and then meet Harvey in high
school?
In contrast to Oswald's grammar school records, Warren Commission documents on
his school attendance in New York are notably spotty. On March 23, 1953,
records have Oswald enrolled in the 7th grade at Public School 44. Following
his brief Youth House appearance, by May 7, 1953 an FBI report has him
attending the same Public School 44 in the 9th grade. And, of course, Robert
Oswald and others place the eighth grader at Stripling school in Fort Worth
while the Warren Commission has him splitting time between New York and
Beauregard school in New Orleans.
Armstrong writes: "It should be easy to determine which grade Lee Oswald
attended during 1953. There are grammar school report cards, student lists,
enrollment forms, personal photos, class photos and interviews with teacher,
students and friends. Yet when we try to find similar records in New York, we
find almost nothing. Not one report card, not one student list, no enrollment
forms, no interviews nor even the names of his teachers, students, or
neighbors, and only one photograph--a photograph which his brother, John Pic,
says is not Lee Oswald. The FBI took down the names of every student who
shared Oswald's home room and intended to locate them. Yet not a single New
York student was interviewed or mentioned in the Warren Report. The absence of
records is significant. Something is being hidden."
That "something" that was "being hidden," Armstrong shows, is the fact that two
boys named Lee Harvey Oswald were in New York City, and elsewhere, during 1953.
Lee, the taller Southern boy, arrived with his mother from Fort Worth in 1952.
Harvey, the shorter bilingual kid, was already there. From New York, Harvey
spent the summer of 1953 in North Dakota and then went on to New Orleans, where
he attended Beauregard Junior High School, and then Stripling Junior High
School in Fort Worth. The fact that the 1953 date conflicts with Robert
Oswald's testimony remains unresolved, but in a remarkable coincidence, Lee
began attending Beauregard the year following Harvey's appearance there.
Was it one of Lee's first field tests in the impersonation game?
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This post was based on the research of John Armstrong.
--Jim Hargrove