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A Couple of Real Gems from the "Harvey and Lee" Website


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6 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Oh, puh-leeze!  Oswald was not able to have a two hour conversation with Rosaleen Quinn entirely in Russian in the spring of 1959 because he managed to learn how to say “Where is the train station, comrade” from some Russian guide book.  Not even the Warren Commission had the chutzpa to try to sell that one to us.  Ms. Quinn, by the way, took REAL Berlitz courses in Russian! 

Jim,

You're not paying attention to my narrative.   I said that Lee Harvey Oswald taught himself to READ Russian language in 1959.   

I didn't say he had mastered CONVERSATIONAL Russian in one year.    That would be very nearly impossible.

Another year or so of IMMERSION in Russia, however, would allow somebody intelligent enough to teach himself to READ Russian in 1959, the ability to SPEAK Russian FLUENTLY by 1961.

Makes perfect sense.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo 

Edited by Paul Trejo
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36 minutes ago, Paul Trejo said:

You're not paying attention to my narrative.   I said that Lee Harvey Oswald taught himself to READ Russian language in 1959.   

I didn't say he had mastered CONVERSATIONAL Russian in one year.    That would be very nearly impossible.

Another year or so of IMMERSION in Russia, however, would allow somebody intelligent enough to teach himself to READ Russian in 1959, the ability to SPEAK Russian FLUENTLY by 1961.

Makes perfect sense.

 

Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Not many people could accomplish that, and have the level of proficiency Oswald was said to have.

 

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3 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Not many people could accomplish that, and have the level of proficiency Oswald was said to have.

 

"But as I recall now, my genius first wife from Tim-Buk-Too was able to speak and write it perfectly after only half-a-year. You owe me 25 cents."

(sarcasm, but a point well made, da?)

Edited by Thomas Graves
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Last August in this very thread, foreign language instructor Mathias Baumann wrote about Oswald passing a Russian language exam while still in the Marines....

Quote

 

And I'm sure you know why the test was rated "poor" - because the target level was that of a native speaker. And yet Oswald got about half the answers right - which puts him at about level L2/R2. To reach that level a person of average intelligence would need hundreds of lessons. The evidence that Oswald could not have reached that level just by reading a dictionary is compelling. Please read my other posts where I present the evidence in more detail and tell me where exactly you disagree with my reasoning.


 

In another post that same month, Mathias wrote:

Quote

 

I talked to an American colleague of mine today, who teaches English at our school. He's a very well educated man, he has a college degree and he's reached Level CEF-B2 (https://www.examenglish.com/CEFR/cefr.php) in German. He's been learning Russian for a while. Today he told me that he's got a C on his A1 test. And do you know how many lessons he's taken so far? 350!

Oswald achieved the equivalent of A2, a whole level above A1, on his test, supposedly without any formal instruction. Which is ludicrous in my opinion. There's nothing in his school record that would indicate that he was some kind of language prodigy.  The most logical conclusion is that he had received extensive language training before he took the test, maybe at Monterey Language School.

 


The argument that Oswald learned Russian by reading a Russian guide book is ludicrous!

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21 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Not many people could accomplish that, and have the level of proficiency Oswald was said to have.

Sandy,

According to WC witnesses -- native Russian speakers -- Lee Harvey Oswald did not have an academic level command of the Russian language.

Oswald was a "semi-educated hillbilly" according to George DeMohrenschildt.    Furthermore, here is a snippet from the WC testimony of the elderly Peter Gregory:

Mr. LIEBELER - Would you tell us about your first contact with Lee Harvey Oswald?
Mr. GREGORY - Yes, sir.  It was in the middle of June 1962. On that particular morning, I was in the office, my telephone rang, and the voice on the other end told me that my name was given to him by the Fort Worth Public Library. He knew I was teaching Russian at the library, that he was looking for a job as a translator or interpreter in the Russian and English languages, and that he would like for me to give him a letter testifying to that effect. He spoke to me in English, so I suggested to him, not knowing who that was, that he might drop by my office and I would be glad to give him a test. He did. He came by the office, about 11 o'clock that morning, and I gave him a short test by simply opening a book at random and asking him to read a paragraph or two and then translate it.  He did it very well. So I gave him a letter addressed to whom it may concern that in my opinion he was capable of being an interpreter or a translator.
Mr. LIEBELER - ...This individual was Lee Harvey Oswald?
Mr. GREGORY - Yes, sir; that individual was Lee Harvey Oswald.  After that...I noticed that he spoke with what I thought to be a Polish accent, so I asked him if he were of Polish origin, and he stated that he was not, that he was raised in Fort Worth, Texas, but that he learned Russian in the Soviet Union where he lived for 2 1/2 years...I told him that I knew of no openings at the time...for services of a translator or interpreter, but that if he would leave his address I would be glad to get in touch with him if and when I learned of any such openings.  He gave me his address. He lived with his brother at that time at the western edge of Fort Worth.
Mr. LIEBELER - Did you ever send him any work as a translator or interpreter?
Mr. GREGORY - No, sir.

So, there we have the introduction.   Peter Gregory, a native of Russia, was impressed that Lee Harvey Oswald could read from a book written in Russian, taken at random, and then translate it into English.  This was good enough for Oswald to translate business letters and the like -- the usual sort of Texas-level work that would probably come in for translations, so he gave Oswald a generic letter of reference.  He also noted two things: (1) Oswald spoke with what he thought was a Polish accent; and (2) he sent Oswald no work after that.  

Peter Gregory, however, did visit Lee Oswald at Robert Oswald's house, and met Marina.   Then, when his own college-age son, Paul Gregory, wanted help with his conversational Russian, he did not recommend Lee Harvey Oswald -- instead he recommended MARINA OSWALD.   Here is a little more of his WC testimony:

Mr. LIEBELER - Did your son tell you whether he had discussions with Oswald concerning politics and economics and things like that?
Mr. GREGORY - ...He told me that he thought Lee Oswald was pretty silly in his views.
The CHAIRMAN - Pretty silly?
Mr. GREGORY - Silly.
The CHAIRMAN - Silly.
Mr. GREGORY - He also mentioned that he saw some book on Marxism...in Lee's residence when they lived on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth.
Mr. LIEBELER - Did he say in words or substance that he thought that Oswald was a half-baked Communist?
Mr. GREGORY - I think that is the expression he used, yes.

That is perhaps tangential to this argument, or perhaps not.  It speaks to the respect (or lack of it) that the Fort Worth and Dallas Russian Community had for Lee Harvey Oswald.   Here is a little more from Peter Gregory's WC testimony:

Representative FORD - I have one more, Mr. Gregory. I believe Marina has testified when she first met Lee Harvey Oswald it was approximately 17 months after he had arrived in the Soviet Union. She testified, also, that she could not tell whether he was a native born resident of the Soviet Union or a foreigner by the way he spoke.
Mr. GREGORY - Yes.
Representative FORD - Is that unusual?
Mr. GREGORY - Well, frankly, I don't know. You see, Congressman, the city of Minsk...you know they called this the Union of Republics, you know, in the White Russian Republic, and Minsk, I guess, is the capital of it.  It is fairly close to Poland, and there are all sorts of people, Poles, Lithuanians, probably Latvians, that lived in that part of the country, and none of those people speak pure Russian.  Now, whether she had reference, whether that had anything to do with her statement--
Representative FORD - Her observations?
Mr. GREGORY - Right; I don't know.   Now, I thought that Lee Oswald spoke with a Polish accent, that is why I asked him if he was of Polish descent.

So much for Oswald speaking with a "pure" Russian accent.  He was only confused for a "Russian" on the basis that so many people living in Minsk came from Poland, Lithuania and Lavia!

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited by Paul Trejo
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19 hours ago, Thomas Graves said:
21 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Not many people could accomplish that, and have the level of proficiency Oswald was said to have.

"But as I recall now, my genius first wife from Tim-Buk-Too was able to speak and write it perfectly after only half-a-year. You owe me 25 cents."

(sarcasm, but a point well made, da?)


It's one thing using the "gerund takes the possessive" rule (which can easily be learned from parents or from reading a lot). It's quite another learning a new language and attaining the proficiency of a translator in three years

(So sarcasm, da. Point well made, nyet.)

 

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1 hour ago, Paul Trejo said:
21 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Not many people could accomplish that, and have the level of proficiency Oswald was said to have.

Sandy,

According to WC witnesses -- native Russian speakers -- Lee Harvey Oswald did not have an academic level command of the Russian language.

 

Yes, he did Paul. Jim Hargrove has posted strong evidence of this repeatedly.

 

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8 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Yes, he did Paul. Jim Hargrove has posted strong evidence of this repeatedly.

Sandy,

Please repeat ONE VERIFIED example.    The strongest one, in your opinion, please.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

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25 minutes ago, Paul Trejo said:
28 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Yes, he did Paul. Jim Hargrove has posted strong evidence of this repeatedly.

Sandy,

Please repeat ONE VERIFIED example.    The strongest one, in your opinion, please.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

 

Jim,

Will you do this for Paul please?

 

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On 4/9/2017 at 9:28 AM, Jim Hargrove said:

The best evidence that Harvey Oswald’s first language was Russian was his sheer mastery of it as a young man.  He clearly spoke Russian and read Russian literature in the Marines prior to his false defection to Russia.  When he returned, the White Russians in and around Dallas were amazed at his fluency, even though he had spent two and a half years there, mostly working full time in a factory.

In his manuscript  I AM A PATSY! I AM A PATSY!  Russian immigrant George De Mohrenschildt, who Harvey in 1963 called his closest friend, described his amazement at Harvey’s Russian fluency.

DeMohren_Russian.jpg?dl=0

For those who can’t see the graphic above, here’s what the main paragraph from this page of De Mohrenschildt's manuscript says:

Incidentally I never saw him interested in anything else except Russian
books and magazines . He said he didn't want to forget the language -
but it amazed me that he read such difficult writers like Gorki, Dostoevski,
Gogol, Tolstoi and Turgenieff - in Russian . As everyone knows Russian is
a complex language and he was supposed to have stayed in the Soviet Union
only a little over two years . He must have had some previous training and
that point had never been brought up by the Warren Committee - and it is
still puzzling to me. In my opinion Lee was a very bright person but not
a genius . He never mastered the English language yet he learned such a dif-
icult language! I taught Russian at all level in a large University, and
I never saw such a profficiency in the best senior students who constantly
listened to  Russian tapes and spoke to Russian fiends . As a matter of
fact American-born instructors never mastered Russian spoken language as
well as Lee did .

De Mohrenschildt would have made a fascinating witness at the HSCA hearings and, in fact, in early 1977 the HSCA sought to interview him. But on March 30 he was found in his home with a shotgun blast to his head. The last person to see him alive was author Edward Epstein, a close friend of CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton.

There are a number of people here on the Education Forum who will undoubtedly claim there is nothing unusual about Harvey Oswald’s Russian fluency.  But that is not the view of the Russian immigrants who met him in Dallas in 1963.  No doubt the Harvey and Lee critics here will say they know better.

 

On 4/10/2017 at 7:12 AM, Jim Hargrove said:

George De Mohrenschildt was hardly the only White Russian immigrant in Dallas who was amazed by Harvey Oswald’s fluency in Russian.

 

From Harvey and Lee:

 

On Christmas Day, Mr. and Mrs. John (Elena) Hall visited the Oswalds at their

apartment on Elsbeth Street.166 Three days later, on Friday, December 28, Mrs. Declan

(Katya) Ford held a post-Christmas party gathering at her house in Dallas. At the request

of Jeanne DeMohrenschildt. who Mrs. Ford had known for 14 years. she invited the

Oswalds to her party.167 This was the third and last time Katya Ford would see either

of the Oswald's.

 

[….]

 

Party attendees notice Oswald's ability to speak Russian

 

Natalie Ray, one of the party attendees, said, "Oswald was very proud of the fact

that he spoke Russian so well." As a native of Russia Natalie said that she was amazed

that he had such a good command of the language.169 Other attendees of the party were

equally amazed at his proficiency in the Russian language and discussed their thoughts

with the Warren Commission:

Natalie Ray was asked by Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler, "Did he

(Oswald) speak to you in Russian?" Mrs. Ray replied, "Yes; just perfect; re­ally

surprised me .... .it's just too good speaking Russian for be such a short time,

you know .... .l said, 'How come you speak so good Russian? I been here so long

and still don't speak very well English."'

George Bouhe was asked by Liebeler, "Did Oswald's command of the Rus­-

sian language seem to be about what you would expect from him, having been

in Russia for that period of time? Would you say it was good?" Bouhe replied,

"I would say very good."170

Mrs. Teofil (Anna) Meller was asked by Liebeler, "Do you think that his com­-

mand of the Russian language was better than you would expect for the pe­-

riod of time that he had spent in Russia?" Mrs. Meller replied, "Yes; absolutely

better than I would expect."

Elena Hall was asked by Liebeler, "In your opinion, Lee did have a good

command of the Russian language?" Mrs. Hall replied, "Very good ..... "

Mrs. Dymitruk was asked by Commission attorney Albert Jenner, "He did

speak Russian?" Mrs. Dymitruk replied, "Yes; and I was really surprised--in

short time, he spoke nicely."

George DeMohrenschildt told Jenner, "He loved to speak Russian ..... he spoke

fluent Russian ..... he had a remarkable fluency in Russian ..... he preferred to

speak Russian than English any time. He always would switch from English

to Russian."

Peter Gregory told Warren Commission Representative Gerald Ford, "I

thought that Lee Oswald spoke (Russian) with a Polish accent, that is why I

asked him if he was of Polish decent."

 

--From Harvey and Lee, pp. 425-426, Copyright © 2003 by John Armstrong

 

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Jim,

You say the best evidence of LHO's first language was Russian was his "sheer mastery of it as a young man."    Let's review.

Marines at the El Toro Base in 1959 were widely aware that he read Russian magazines and newspapers there, since LHO made no secret of it -- it was unique on the base.  He could not speak it freely, since he had nobody else at the base with whom to practice speaking -- but he read as much as he could -- evidently in every spare hour of his time at El Toro Marine Base in 1959.   During most of that year, LHO was 19 years old.

It is well known in linguisitic science that younger persons learn foreign languages more easily than older people.  It is typical for a 30 year old immigrant to America, knowing no English at all, to live in the USA for 10 years, clinging closely to others who speak his original language, and still speak English with a tremendous accent, and a severely limited vocabulary.  Foreign languages favor the young.

You also say that the White Russians in and around Dallas were "amazed at his fluency."

You note that LHO worked mostly full time in a factory in the USSR, as if this was some sort of obstacle to language learning.  On the contrary.  Again, the youth are favored, because they are often unmarried, and so they hang out with each other on breaks and after work, and talk a lot.

As for George De Mohrenschildt's book, I'M A PATSY! I'M A PATSY! (1978), he described his "amazement" less than he expressed his sorrow that Lee was killed by a conspiracy to kill JFK.

George DeM claims that he was a teacher of the Russian language "in a large University".  Yet records show that George was a teacher of Geology.   Did he teach Russian at night?   How many students did he have?   Eight?  Six?  Four?

As Armstrong alluded, shortly after he completed this manuscript, George DeM committed suicide.  His friend, Volkmar Schmidt, described George as "seriously depressed" during this period.  George had lost his Haiti oil exploration contract, and his wife and children had left him. George always believed that Texas oil men killed JFK, and that LHO was a Patsy.  He blamed himself for calling General Walker "General Fokker" to LHO, and he cited Volkmar Schmidt and that party in which Schmidt spent hours convincing LHO that General Walker was as bad as Adolf Hitler.  When the HSCA called George to testify, he snapped.  He wrote his final statement and shot himself.  

My point is that what George DeM said in his book, I'M A PATSY! I'M A PATSY! (1978) should be taken as an extremely emotional book of a distraught man, with secrets to hide, and some guilt for the death of his sometime pal, LHO.
 
Next you cite what six more of the Russian Immigrants said about LHO's Russian fluency.  Let's review:

--------------------------------------
Natalie Ray: "Yes; just perfect; really surprised me...it's just too good speaking Russian for be such a short time...I said, 'How come you speak so good Russian?  I been here so long and still don't speak very well English."'

George Bouhe: "I would say very good."

Anna Meller: "Yes; absolutely better than I would expect."

Elena Hall: "Very good..."

Mrs. Dymitruk: "Yes; and I was really surprised -- in short time, he spoke nicely."

Peter Gregory: "I thought that Lee Oswald spoke (Russian) with a Polish accent, that is why I asked him if he was of Polish decent."

--------------------------------------

Yet there are problems with these seven opinions.  These were not academics responding to official language tests.  They were ordinary people giving their personal anecdotes.  Let's review:
.
Ray: "too good speaking"
Bouhe: "very good"
Meller: "better than I would expect"
Hall:  "very good"
Dymnitruk: "he spoke nicely"
Gregory: "a Polish accent"
George DeM: "a remarkable fluency in Russian."

.
These are mostly ordinary people -- not academic experts of Russian fluency.  We must take them in context.   For example, Meller said, "better than I would expect."   Expect from whom?   From a Texan living in the poor side of town?   Yes.

Nor are the words, "very good," or "nicely" the same as "amazed."

As I pointed out before, when Peter Gregory's college age son needed Russian lessons, he chose Marina Oswald for that -- not LHO. 

So, all these expressions must be qualified by their context.

LHO was a motivated and rebellious 19-year old at a Marine base.  He loved to read, and chose to teach himself Russian -- perhaps to stand out like a sore thumb at the base.   He spent most of the year 1959 -- every single day -- studying the Russian alphabet and Russian newspaper front pages.   With 2.5 years in the USSR, his conversational skills became very well practiced -- because he was MOTIVATED.   Perhaps most of all, LHO's wide reading in Marxist literature since he was 15 years old, was his greatest boon to his Russian vocabulary living in the USSR.  Yet look at what George DeM testified about that.

Mr. JENNER. What was your impression of his command of Russian? 
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Well, he spoke fluent Russian, but with a foreign accent, and made mistakes, grammatical mistakes, but had remarkable fluency in Russian...for a fellow of his background and education...

Notice how George DeM qualified his remarks.  This is because George DeM also said:

Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Well, he was not sophisticated, you see. He was a semieducated hillbilly. And you cannot take such a person seriously. All his opinions were crude, you see. But I thought at the time he was rather sincere.
Mr. JENNER. Opinion sincerely held, but crude? 
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes
Mr. JENNER. He was relatively uneducated
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Oh, yes. 

A hillbilly??   A semieducated hillbilly?   Now we begin to see a context for all these Russians' opinions.   How could this hillbilly from Texas speak Russian with any fluency?   But wait, there's more.  Let's specifically look at LHO's Marxism, which was such a boon in his goal to surround himself with Russian language in the USSR for 2.5 years:

Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. ...His mind was of a man with exceedingly poor background, who read rather advanced books, and did not understand even the words in them. He read complicated economical treatises and just picked up difficult words out of what he has read, and loved to display them. He loved to use the difficult words, because it was to impress one. 
Mr. JENNER. Did you think he understood it? 
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. He did not understand the words--he just used them.  So how can you take seriously a person like that?  You just laugh at him. But there was always an element of pity I had, and my wife had, for him... 
Mr. JENNER. Did you form any impression in the area, let us say, of reliability---that is, whether our Government would entrust him with something that required a high degree of intelligence, a high degree of imagination, a high degree of ability to retain his equilibrium under pressure, a management of a situation, to be flexible enough? 
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important. 

So, there we are.  The quotations from the WC Russian WC witnesses presented by John Armstrong were cherry-picked, and presented without the actual context.  Here, finally, is the context.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited by Paul Trejo
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30 minutes ago, Paul Trejo said:

So, there we are.  The quotations from the WC Russian WC witnesses presented by John Armstrong were cherry-picked, and presented without the actual context.  Here, finally, is the context.

John's quotes were picked to show that the White Russians in and around Dallas who met Oswald in 1963 were amazed at his fluency in the language.  Nothing you have said changes that fact.  Whatever his mental state, De Mohrenschildt was a university-level Russian language instructor who Harvey Oswald considered his best friend in 1963.  No one on earth was better qualified to make the assessment you asked for.  If you refuse to accept it, that's your choice.

The fact, by the way, the Harvey Oswald made grammatical errors despite his general fluency in the language is entirely consistent from what you would expect for someone who learned a language as a young child and only came back to it as a young adult.  It also explains how he could read, write, and speak Russian before he even traveled to the Soviet Union.  This makes far more sense than your silly contention that he learned the language from reading a Russian tour guide in his spare time while stationed in California.

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11 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

De Mohrenschildt would have made a fascinating witness

One person - like our one and only Lee Oswald - can drop out of high school but be well read. We've all been around a wide variety of people in our lives - HS drop outs; college education folk; PhDs; book smart; clever.

The point is that to base an entire story that there just had to be clones - one a HS drop out who was an expert in a foreign language (but he didn't write so well in his native tongue) - and the other a refugee from Hungary - because it's intellectually impossible is absurd.

And being a hillbilly according to GDM? Big deal. A brain is a brain and anyone with a keen interest in something can teach themselves things, no matter what side of the track they're from.

1 hour ago, Paul Trejo said:

So, there we are.  The quotations from the WC Russian WC witnesses presented by John Armstrong were cherry-picked, and presented without the actual context.  Here, finally, is the context.

I agree here and what I never understand is how can the clone supporters not see the irony that they do not support what the government presents, yet freely pick through it to make a clone story?  It's disingenuous to say the least.

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On 2/3/2018 at 7:16 AM, Jim Hargrove said:

...Whatever his mental state, De Mohrenschildt was a university-level Russian language instructor who Harvey Oswald considered his best friend in 1963.  No one on earth was better qualified to make the assessment you asked for.  If you refuse to accept it, that's your choice....

Jim,

Have you fact-checked this claim by Armstrong?   What evidence do you have besides this one sentence by George De Mohrenschildt himself, who wrote that sentence while suffering from severe depression -- that he taught Russian language at "a large university?"

You know, of course, that De Mohrenschildt in1963 led a team of oil exploration professionals for the government of Haiti, on a contract worth the equivalent of $2.5 million today.   What Russian language instructor is hired by any government to do geological oil exploration?

George De Mohrenschildt, who was from Minsk in Russia, was sorely disappointed that his own children could not speak Russian and had no interest in Russian language.   They were 100% Americans, and were spoiled by America, in his opinion.   Lee Harvey Oswald was their age, and spoke fairly fluent Russian (with errors) and Marina Oswald was from the old home town of George himself.   

So, there was George, in Texas, working among all these oil men, because he had geological knowledge of oil exploration -- and not one of them could speak Russian.  In order to get his society, his evening and weekend friends were among the White Russian Expatriates in Dallas and Fort Worth.   Yet every single one of them was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, while George and Jeanne were ATHEISTS.    So, they didn't blend very well.

They once went to Church wearing their tennis clothes -- and raised a lot of eyebrows.     George was widely considered an eccentric.   I say he was a fairly lonely fellow -- disappointed in the hand that life had dealt him.   His family in Russia had been barons -- extremely wealthy.   (That was why George had such a superb education in almost everything.)  After the Soviet Revolution, they lost everything; every square inch of their huge Estate.

George was disappointed in life, and lonely, and bored -- and then here comes this "semieducated hillbilly," Lee Harvey Oswald, waltzing into his life from Minsk -- and George had a new toy  That best explains why George befriended Lee and Marina.   He was bored.   He always wished his own children could speak Russian.   Why this hillbilly?

Anyway -- George De Mohrenschildt worked at the University of Texas as a Geology professor -- not as a Russian language instructor.   Unless you  or John Armstrong have official documents that confirm otherwise, then I will submit that you're selectively cherry-picking sentences to build your CT.

By the way -- if you're looking for a thorough biography of George De Mohrenschildt, you can do no better than the CD ROM set published by Bruce Campbell Adamson (1998).

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited by Paul Trejo
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18 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:


It's one thing using the "gerund takes the possessive" rule (which can easily be learned from parents or from reading a lot). It's quite another learning a new language and attaining the proficiency of a translator in three years

(So sarcasm, da. Point well made, nyet.)

 

Sandy,

With all due respect, how likely is it that a boy whose first language is Hungarian and second language is Russian can end up speaking English better than most college graduates?

Expected answer:  "I gotta admit that it's not very likely, but Harvey did it, and that's all that matters."

--  Tommy  :sun

Edited by Thomas Graves
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