Report card stories
Paul Lukas came into possession of hundreds of report cards from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls from the 1920s but never knew what to do with them.
Recently, he started trying to track down the families of the women they belonged to in a series for Slate.
I discovered the cards in 1996 (more on that in a minute). I found them fascinating, but I didn’t have a good sense of what to do with them, so for a long time I just kept them as curios and occasionally showed them to friends. Eventually, though, I decided to track down some of the students’ families (including Marie’s). Even after doing it numerous times, I still find it a bit surreal to call a stranger on the phone and hear myself saying, “Hi, you don’t know me, but I have your mother’s report card from 1929. Would you like to see it?”
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