John Armstrong's Harvey and Lee

[David Josephs]

Give me a minute Jim... I will do an overlay and show you and everyone else... Phil has a GREAT eye...
DJ

Not only is the writing VERY similar... the names of the Science teacher at the top of the card is not the same as the bottom (R. Beaver and S. Bush - hey... did someone pull a pretty suggestive joke at our expense here... or was that vernacular more recent ?? )

This almost makes it sound like the real science teacher was trying to be funny. Have you ever seen any humor (crude or otherwise) EVER displayed by anyone in the FBI? No idea when those terms came into our lexicon, but it sure sounds like a joke.

Jim... there was what looks like only 5 absences not 12... someone must have known the 180 day rule... Please address the FACT only one term report appears for both part-time classes... STILL suggests he was there during that term.. only means to me that possibly HARVEY did not enter BJHS until much later in the year (Nov/Dec) and may have spent time in Ft Worth or elsewhere those months... sorry, I am still not convinced the 179 plus 5 absences is an accurate reflection of ANY child's time there, let alone indicative of a child having been there the entire FALL TERM... but only a part of it.

That's not so clear to me. The 53-54 Science report seems to indicate an isolated grade of 70 for the FIRST TERM, and then the card seems to be cut off where the second term info would be. Did you cut that off, or is that how it appears in the WC? Grades for both terms are shown for Phys Ed.

Jim - the comparison I am making is between the SPRING 54 TERM where we know a child attended since 1-13-54 shows 3 TERM REPORTS.
The two classes from the FALL TERM (if they were indeed from the fall term) only have 1 TERM REPORT before the final TERM grade. (yes - the card is cut off yet all I wanted to show was the 1 TERM report)

If you can, reconcile why one FULL TERM's GRADES do not mirror another FULL TERM's grades as they do for the rest of his time at BJHS. If he was attending BJHS from day one FALL TERM we should expect to see 3 TERM REPRTS for just those two classes and no grades for anything else. That's not what we see. I am NOT syaing HARVEY didn't attend in the FALL, just that these cards suggest he did not start at the beginning of the TERM -

My concern is if the SPRING TERM does not start until later, these 2 FALL grades could be for a 4-5 week period AFTER 1-13-54 and not be related to HARVEY at all. Even DeRouse did not see HARVEY in the FALL and the PE absences are 2, not 1. What happened to the other absence from this FALL term on the final cumulative form? (like the 12 absences for the next year yet only 5 recorded on most of the grade cards)

I am inclined to first believe the "89" is part of the forgery and designed to have it add to 180 again and NOT the # of days HARVEY attended BJHS in the FALL... but he DID attend while he was supposedly at PS44 in NYC....

and that's the important point.

But 89 days weren't needed if the goal was to reach 180. Look at the second term: 90 days present plus 4 days absent. I'm guessing, but I'm not sure fall and spring terms had to have an equal number of days. The lengthy Christmas vacation occurs in the fall term, plus New Year's, so perhaps it was a little shorter, but these records are strange indeed!!

The MINIMUM was 180... that school year had 184 days imo, and I still believe the Re-Ad column represents TOTAL DAYS in the school year... there does not seem to be any record of ATTENDED DAYS in the BJHS records... does it not make sense to put "absences" and "total days" and not worry about attended days which SHOULD always be a very large # (TOTAL - Absent). That NYC kept records of days attended is still unknown - have you ever seen another of either form for any other student?

That would help settle quite a lot.

DJ

Jim

I think I need to add this line so it will take my post... I guess if you post within another post it doesn't recognize any new characters...
DJ