Edmonton man finds 60-year-old report card in wall of house
Sanj Maisuria was replacing some closets in his house over the Christmas holidays. During the demolition of one wall, he found a piece of paper.
Confused, he picked it up to find it was a report card.
"There's nothing else in that wall — it really shouldn't have been back there," he said on CBC's Radio Active.
The Grade 8 report card was from now-closed Ritchie School, in the same Edmonton neighbourhood as Maisuria's home.
At first, Maisuria thought the report card was only a few years old. But on closer inspection, he saw it was from June 1958. It also had a name on it — Maureen Kiernan.
Maisuria decided to try to track her down.
"I got to see the comments that were within this report card, what her teacher had commented, what type of person she was when she was a teenager, and honestly, I saw a lot of myself in her," he said.
When Maisuria learned that Kiernan had died in 2012 at age 69, he was disheartened.
But he found the next best thing — her son, Roy Phillips.
Small world
Phillips said when he first received a Facebook message from Maisuria, he thought it was a scam.
"I ignored it at first," he said.
But Maisuria had also made a post on Facebook and after reading some of the comments, Phillips began to believe the message.
And it turned out Phillips had met Maisuria before.
Maisuria is a DJ and one of his clients is STARS Ambulance. A few years back, STARS asked Maisuria to DJ at a retirement party.
The person who was retiring? It was Phillips.
"I honestly don't believe in fate," Maisuria said. "But when you take a look at all the coincidences in this whole episode, my lack of faith all of a sudden becomes shaken a little bit."
Something to hide?
Maisuria speculated about why the report card was in the wall. He figures it happened during the original construction.
He wondered if the grades were the reason it was hidden.
"We figured that maybe she was trying to hide it from her parents at that time," he said.
Many of the marks were below class average. One comment from Kiernan's teacher reads: "Maureen's marks are dangerously low!"
Another says: "Maureen's marks necessitate her repeating of Grade 8."
Phillips said he thinks his mother hid the report card because she was embarrassed of her grades.
"She simply wanted to keep her high standings in school [and] keep that information from her nine siblings," he said.
Phillips said his mother went on to live a great life and was always telling stories. After receiving the report card, Phillips said he spoke to his daughter.
"My daughter said it best," he said. "Grandma had one more story to tell."
