The H&L "two schools at the same time" mystery

[Guest]

I feel sure this has been discussed to death here, but for my own amusement I decided to take a look at yet another Harvey & Lee claim, to wit (from the H&L website):

 

“In the fall of 1953 LEE Oswald entered the 8th grade at PS 44 in New York City, according to school records published by the Warren Commission. But the Warren Commission also published school records that showed (HARVEY) Oswald attended Beauregard Junior High School in New Orleans in the fall of 1953. LEE in New York. HARVEY in New Orleans.”

 

Is that true?

 

The Beauregard records that I have seen indicate LHO attended not during the "fall of 1953," but rather during the 1953-1954 term.  As best as I can reconstruct from old newspapers, the Louisiana school term at that time ran from early September 1953 to late May 1954.

 

The Beauregard records show LHO was “originally admitted 1954-1-13” (i.e., January 13, 1954).  This is right on the face of the record reproduced at the H&L website.  This would have been smack in the middle of the 1953-1954 term.  They show LHO was present for 89 days and absent for 1.

 

According to the 1954 calendar, there were 93 weekdays between January 13, 1954 and May 21, 1954, 98 weekdays between January 13th and May 28th.  Some of these days were school holidays, of course, but the number of days for LHO’s attendance at Beauregard from and after January 13th dovetails nicely with the number of weekdays available.

 

LHO had begun the fall term at P.S. 44 on September 14, 1953.  LHO and his mother moved to New Orleans on or about January 9, 1954, which fits nicely with his attendance at Beauregard beginning on January 13th.  The P.S. 44 records show that during this term he attended 62 full days and 8 half days, missing 3 full days and 8 half days. 

 

According to the 1953-1954 calendars, between September 14, 1953 and January 8, 1954 (a Friday) there were 85 weekdays.  Some were school holidays, of course, but 85 days easily accommodates the 73 days that LHO either attended or missed at P.S. 44.

 

I’m sure my analysis is comically simplistic and the True Believers will quickly point out the flaws, but I’m not seeing any mystery at all.  I really am hoping some day to spot-check some H&L claim and be able to say "Wow, that really is a mystery!!!"

[Jim Hargrove]

Sigh.... Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, even the H&L critics such as Mr. Payette!

Here is the NYC school record showing that "Lee Harvey Oswald" attended one of the Public School 44s starting 3/23/53 and extending through mid-January 1954 (which is normally described as the fall (or second) semester of 1953

And here is the Beauregard record showing that "Lee Harvey Oswald" also attended school for 89 days in New Orleans during the same semester.

Without any evidence whatsoever, at least one H&L critic claimed that the 89 days in the top “Re-Ad” column of the Beauregard cumulative record included days Oswald attended one of the PS 44s in New York City.  But there are no forwarded records from any PS 44 in Oswald’s Beauregard file.  The only mention of PS 44 in the Beauregard file is in a record that indicates he previously attended “PS #44-Byron Junior High" in New York City.

But there is no “Byron Junior High” in New York City and, according to the New York Historical Society, there never was.  Since there are PS 44s in at least four of the five New York City boroughs, how would Beauregard have requested information from an incorrectly identified school?  And if they had received information, why didn't they know the name of the school?  And if they did get information about Oswald's course work in NYC from a school they couldn't identify, why was the Oswald in New Orleans given a passing grade in an entirely different course from the NYC courses he supposedly took that very semester? John wrote: “Perhaps a false name for the school was provided so that Beauregard school personnel would be unable to obtain Oswald's New York school transcripts by mail.”

H&L critics, including Mtr. Payette, will no doubt tell us they have a better explanation, but they don't.  They'll point to another website and say the answer is there, but it isn't.  But back to the two Oswalds....

The very next year after the one discussed above, there is considerable evidence that one LHO attended Beauregard in New Orleans while the other went to Stripling Junior High in Fort Worth.  The explanation by Mr. Parnell for this is a hoot, and involved an ENORMOUS conspiracy!

 

[Jim Hargrove]

BTW, Mr. Payette's assertion that a Beauregard "term" consisted of an entire school year is debunked by the very records we are looking at.  Two different terms for the 53-54 school year at Beauregard are clearly shown on the documents above and the FBI report below.

 

 

 

On pages 9 and 10 of the report above, "Report 1" indicates the first semester of the '53-54 school year, "Report 2" summarizes the second semester of the '53-54 school year, and "Report 3" is a summation of the two previous semester reports.

Page 10 of the FBI report summarizes the attendance data in the “Absent,” “Tardy,” “Left” and “Re-Ad” columns, which are explained, according to the FBI agents, starting at the bottom of page 10 and continuing to page 11 by William Head, assistant principal at Warren Easton High School, who received the Beauregard records for incoming students.  The FBI’s summary of Head’s explanation has caused Greg Parker and Tracy Parnell to argue against David Josephs and me for years, because Head seemed to say two contradictory things.

At the bottom of page 10, the FBI indicates he said that the “Re ad” column stood for “Re Admitted” and “would represent a total listing of the school days for a given school year.”  But later in the very same paragraph, now at the top of page 11, the report indicates that Head said a school year regularly consisted of 180 days and that “school days in any given year must not fall below 170” and that “therefore the numbers listed opposite this abbreviation indicated the number of school days that Oswald attended for a given school year.”

So which is it?  Does the “Re-Ad” column represent the number of school days in a school semester or year, or the number of days a student actually attended during that period?

The answer is right before us in the documents shown above.    In the actual Beauregard cumulative record for LHO (top document above), look at the very last entry on the far right under the “Re-Ad” column.  It shows a total of “168” days for the 1954-55 school year.  Tracy Parnell wants you to believe that number, like the numbers in the “Re-Ad” column for the previous school year, represent the number of total days in the school year.

But that can’t be!  Head indicated that Louisiana law dictated a minimum of 170 school days in a school year, and so if we’re to believe Tracy’s interpretation, every student report card at Beauregard for the 1954-55 school year was evidence that Louisiana law was being broken.  On the other hand, using my interpretation (that the “168” indicated the actual days LHO attended school) we can make perfect sense of these numbers.  Adding Oswald’s 168 days of attendance and his 12 absences comes out to exactly 180 days, just what Head said comprised a typical Beauregard school year!

The “Re Ad” column clearly indicates the number of days a student actually attended school.  So let’s look at the first semester of the 1953-54 school year at Beauregard.  It indicates that Oswald attended 89 days and was absent once, for a total of 90 school days.

For the 1953 fall semester at PS 44 in New York, Oswald attended 62 and a fraction days and was absent three and a fraction days for a total of 66 school days accounted for.  Add those 66 days to the 90 days from Beauregard and you get at total of 156 days, equivalent to nearly an entire school year! Despite whatever spin Tracy cares to put on this, the NYC and Louisiana school records for fall semester starting in 1953 clearly show two Lee Harvey Oswalds attending two different schools at the same time!

[Michael Walton]

More blather from Team Hardly.

Lance I  don't  proclaim to be an expert on the school records (but I  think I  did a decent job on other aspects of the Hardly Lee fantasy) but there are pretty good debunks on Parker's site...

https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/f13-the-harvey-lee-evidence

...and Google Tracy Parnells blog as well. IMO I  think it's  shameful  that Team Hardly works so hard to keep this going yet they won't  take it to a respectable  alt news site to let them see if it's  a viable story.

[James DiEugenio]

Oh no, not Lance again.

 

What's next Lance, JFK was not really withdrawing from Vietnam?

[Michael Walton]

Jim DiEugenio -  I don't know what else Lance believes in with the JFK case. But here, he's discussing the Hardly Lee story. And please tell me you don't believe in the Hardly Lee story. In order to do so, you'd have to believe:

That a boy was snatched off the streets of Hungary because secret agents thought he looked exactly like Oswald
That this boy's mother, also from Hungary, looked exactly like LHO's Mom, except she was frumpy and never smiled and had a unibrow
That when LHO had his mastoid, the secret agents hurriedly also did a mastoid on the Hungarian boy because, you know, they're clones
That for 10 whole years before 11/22/63, these two clones were practically living in each other's shadows for some as yet unknown secret mission
That matching pictures of the one and only LHO do NOT match per Team Hardly because, you know, CONTRAST
That LHO had shoulders that did not slope while the clone LHO had sloping shoulders
That the clone was murdered by Ruby on Sunday and the other one escaped never to be heard from again
That when the body was exhumed, they switched skulls because, you know, they had the other skull on ice waiting for the exhumation to take place 20 years after the fact

...and many, many more.

Edited December 28, 2017 by Michael Walton

[Sandy Larsen]

Jim goes into a great deal of detail to cover all bases regarding the "attending-two-schools-simultaneously" issue. But all a researcher really needs to know is what is shown in the two school records below. This is easy to understand.

The upper record is for Public School 44 in New York City, and the lower one is for Beauregard Junior High School in New Orleans. They both show Oswald attending the school and passing classes for the Fall Semester of the 1953/1954 school year, which began in September 1953

To see this for yourselves, in the upper report look at the third column from the left. You will see that that semester began on 9/14/1953. (The yellow highlighted part of the report also refers to that semester.)

Then, in the lower report, look at the top row that is highlighted in yellow. That row is also for the fall semester of  the 1953/1954 school year. Oswald attended part time and passed two classes... general science and phys ed. The column just below that is for the spring semester of 1953/1954. And the column below that is where the average scores to the fall and spring semesters are recorded.

See, wasn't that easy?

 

 

 

 

Edited December 28, 2017 by Sandy Larsen

[Michael Walton]

The school records as well as all the rest have all been debunked Sandy. The whole HL story holds about as much water as the body alteration story and the JVB one.

The people who come up with these stories give the government way too much credit for being all-seeing and all-knowing.

And like Jim HARGROVE pointed out unintentionally on another thread, those who believe in them are the same folks who take these stories like gospel.

[Guest]

21 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Here is the NYC school record showing that "Lee Harvey Oswald" attended one of the Public School 44s starting 3/23/53 and extending through mid-January 1954 (which is normally described as the fall (or second) semester of 1953

OK ... and so?  That was my reading of the records as well.  The H&L quote in my original post refers specifically to the fall of 1953.  The NY record shows that Our Hero began the 1953/1954 school year on 9-14-1953, and we know he and Mom left on about January 9th.  So I'm not following your point.  Do we actually know what the NY school year for junior high students consisted of in 1953/1954?  For example, I attended K through 12 in Arizona.  I don't recall exactly how it worked, but I had no concept a "fall semester" and "spring semester" until I got to college.  There was simply a school year, lasting from September through May.  We received several report cards with grades during that year (my memory is a report card every six weeks).  It appears to me that this was the system in New Orleans as well and that the summary you have reproduced is entirely consistent with this.  As far as I can gather, it was also the system in NY.

21 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

BTW, Mr. Payette's assertion that a Beauregard "term" consisted of an entire school year is debunked by the very records we are looking at.  Two different terms for the 53-54 school year at Beauregard are clearly shown on the documents above and the FBI report below.

I'm not sure what I said that caused you to think I was saying a "term" consisted of an entire school year.  I was simply saying, perhaps not clearly, that the H&L quote in my original post states that Our Hero was attending in both NY and Louisiana in the "fall of 1953," when in fact it appears that he was attending P.S. 44 in NY in the fall of 1953 and Beauregard in Louisiana beginning in January of 1954.  My point was simply that the Beauregard record stating "53-54" would have been referring to the school year beginning in September 1953 and ending in May 1954, which I referred to as the "fall term" when a better description would have been "the 1953/1954 school year beginning in the fall of 1953."  In all states of which I am aware, the term "school year" is defined by statute and in 1953 typically ran from September through the following May.

4 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Then, in the lower report, look at the top row that is highlighted in yellow. That row is also for the fall semester of  the 1953/1954 school year. Oswald attended part time and passed two classes... general science and phys ed. The column just below that is for the spring semester of 1953/1954. And the column below that is where the average scores to the fall and spring semesters are recorded.

See, wasn't that easy?

Well, no, it wasn't that easy.  I don't see that you are saying anything that contradicts what I am saying.  Yes, Our Hero attended in NY during the 1953/1954 school year.  I'm not saying he didn't.

I believe your references to "fall semester" and "spring semester" are incorrect.  I was not able to find a 1953/1954 school calendar specifically for P.S. 44, but I did find one for several other NY schools.  In those, there were six "marking periods" in which grades were given, which is consistent with my memory from Arizona as well.  In other words, in Arizona I got six grades in Geography or Physical Education during the school year.  There was no averaging or anything of that sort - the issue was simply whether, at the end of that school year, I was promoted to the next grade level.  It appears to me that you are simply misreading what the records state.  There is no way that grades from March of 1953, which was part of the 1952/1953 school year, would have been averaged with grades from the 1953/1954 school year.

As with the postal money order non-mystery, wouldn't it be a simple matter to have persons experienced in the NY and Louisiana school systems opine as to whether these records actually do or do not show some inexplicable mystery?  If the H&L theory were correct, would there not be mysterious educational record inconsistencies for all of "Harvey's" and all of "Lee's" school years?

18 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Oh no, not Lance again.

 

What's next Lance, JFK was not really withdrawing from Vietnam?

An irritant to a self-aggrandizing True Believer with books to sell, no doubt, but Lance's batting average in pointing out self-evident silliness is really Rather Good.

In the Real World in which Lance operates, JFK could well have been intending all sorts of actions that would have enraged the CIA, FBI, Military Intelligence and others ... but this is not necessarily of any relevance whatsoever to the events of November 22, 1963.  It may be; it may not be.  The question is, what theory is most consistent with the actual evidence and reasonable inferences therefrom, what theory requires the fewest unsupported suppositions and unwarranted connecting of dots?  That's the difference between the Real World and the World of the True Believer.  The True Believer wants - and thus finds - an explanation that satisfies his psychological need for some deep and dark significance to the assassination of JFK.  Or perhaps he just wants to sell books and be a big shot in this weird little niche.

I happen to be re-reading Oswald's Game by Jean Davison (BOO! HISS! see Jim's review in which he DEMOLISHES this piece of trash!!!).  Right at the start, she makes a point that leaped out at me because it is exactly what I have concluded:  Because this was the assassination of a President who was despised by any number of highly disparate groups that might have seen themselves as benefitting from his elimination, the Grand Conspiracies all have a superficial plausibility until you carefully examine who LHO actually was, and then they simply go poof.

Edited December 28, 2017 by Guest

[W. Tracy Parnell]

10 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

As with the postal money order non-mystery, wouldn't it be a simple matter to have persons experienced in the NY and Louisiana school systems opine as to whether these records actually do or do not show some inexplicable mystery?  If the H&L theory were correct, would there not be mysterious educational record inconsistencies for all of "Harvey's" and all of "Lee's" school years?

First, good analysis Lance and you are correct that there is no mystery here at all. As you point out, it is known (app.) when LHO and Marguerite left NYC and her growing disillusionment with the legal process (which was her motive for leaving) resulting from LHO's absences is fully documented. A few short days after they left, LHO is "originally admitted" at Beauregard, all of this is logically and chronologically sound. But the H&L people do not view the situation in the context of the complete historical record. They take inconsistencies, errors and most notably witness statements, some made 40 years after the fact, and use this as "proof" of the theory. In the case of the school records, they are using their own interpretation of the records and holding this up as a hard fact when other interpretations exist.

To get back to your question above, the H&L folks would say that all such inconsistencies in the record were simply made to disappear by the CIA plotters to cover up their crime. Of course, the plotters were not perfect and left many clues to the mystery that only they are smart enough to pick up on. And in addition to the conspiracy to kill JFK, there is another ongoing conspiracy by the media, academia etc. to ignore the H&L theory and keep the world in the dark about the truth.

[Guest]

Just so there's no confusion, my points are simply:  (1) I don't see any evidence that, as stated on the H&L site, school records show that LHO attended Beauregard Junior High in the fall of 1953.  (2)  If I had attended a junior high in Arizona from September of 1953 to January of 1954 and had then attended a junior high in Louisiana from January of 1954 to the end of the 1953/1954 school year, I would expect my school records to look pretty much exactly as LHO's look - with periodic grades from each school during my period of attendance, and the issue in Louisiana at the end of the 1953/1954 school year simply being whether I would be promoted to the next grade level for the 1954/1955 school year.  (3) LHO's attendance and absence records from P.S. 44 and Beauregard Junior High mesh nicely with the number of school days available to him if he attended P.S. 44 from September to early January and Beauregard from early January to late May.  In short, I simply see no mystery when looking at the school records.  Honestly, the theory that these records, which mesh so nicely with each other and with what we know about LHO's life, are actually the records of two different people, strikes me as almost insane - truly, Flay Earth sort of stuff.

[Sandy Larsen]

6 hours ago, Michael Walton said:

The school records as well as all the rest have all been debunked Sandy.

 

LOL, quit making stuff up Michael.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

4 hours ago, Lance Payette said:

For example, I attended K through 12 in Arizona.  I don't recall exactly how it worked, but I had no concept a "fall semester" and "spring semester" until I got to college.  There was simply a school year, lasting from September through May.

My 7 year old daughter isn't aware of the semesters either. But my wife and I are.

There is no question that both Beauregard and P.S. 44 divided school years into two semesters. Their records plainly show that they did.

The three columns in the P.S. 44 school record (see below) are labeled 7-7, 7-8, and 8-8. Those are from the notation the school district used for identifying school year and semester:

7-7  =  1st semester of 7th grade
7-8  =  2nd semester of 7th grade

8-8  =  1st semester of 8th grade
8-9  =  2nd semester of 8th grade

9-9   =  1st semester of 9th grade
9-10  =  2nd semester of 9th grade

The three columns are also labeled by their begin dates, Sept. 1952, Mar. 1953, and Sept. 1953. So those three columns each represent a semester:

1.  Sept. 1952  =  1st semester of 7th grade
2.  Mar. 1953   =  2nd semester of 7th grade
3.  Sept. 1953  =  1st semester of 8th grade

Our focus is on the Fall Semester (1st semester) of 8th grade, which is column 3.

Similarly, the Beauregard school record has a row for each semester of a school year. The third row for each school year is used to record the average scores of the two semesters. This is easy to confirm. Look at the three rows for the 1954/55 school year. I will take the scores from the first row (1st semester) and add them to the scores from the second row (2nd semester). Then divide by 2 and round off to the nearest integer to get the average scores:

English:
     (62 + 77.3)  =  70

Civics:
     (82 + 84)  =  83

Math:
     (77 + 72)  =  75

Science:
     (75.6 + 77)  =  76

Art:
     (80 + 81.6)  =  80.8

Phys Ed:
     (75 + 80)  =  78

 

Now compare these averages to the scores in the third row of 1954/55 and you'll see they are identical.

 

 

 

 

[Sandy Larsen]

6 hours ago, Lance Payette said:

It appears to me that you are simply misreading what the records state.

I'm afraid that you have poor chart reading skills. Or maybe your skepticism is mucking up your thinking. These records are very easy for me to understand and I'm sure they would be for all my high school buddies. And certainly for all my college mates given that I was in engineering.

 

[James DiEugenio]

That is correct Sandy.

The idea that high schools did not divide up the year into two semesters is simply bunk. Having taught there for decades I know.

Lance, in your own mind you may think that you have a good batting average.  I mean lawyers are like that, aren't they?  They have a tendency to exaggerate their records.

You did nothing but team up with DVP on the whole money order thing, and meanwhile people like Sandy, myself, and David Josephs got plenty of new documents to fortify that concept, that the money order never passed through.  And BTW, you should have seen the look at my bank supervisor's face when I asked him about that matter re postal money orders.

See, when you try this stuff about "you people in the critical community are weird", that is not the case.  Quite the contrary.