SCHOOL DAZE

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.

--Warren Commission, Vol. 1, p. 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 the Report:

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.

Warren Report, p. 67

Much later in the Report, we are told:

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.

Warren Report, p. 680

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 Mr. Armstrong, Myra 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."

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. He recognized all of them. But then he was shown the well-known picture of Oswald at the Bronx Zoo (CE 2893).

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

Commission Exhibit 2893

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.

Mr. 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," Mr. 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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