I grew up in Eastern Europe (born in 1976,) not quite sure how I can help. Back before the fall of communism, many had neglected dental care but - having lived in the United States - I kind of feel that is not unlike low-income people anywhere else in the world (and, in communism, pretty much everyone was low-income.) If you have any specific questions, I'll do my best to give a coherent response.
MOO, but I do not recognize the handwriting on the notes found with JD as Eastern European. May I add, I was big on snail mailing all over the world for about a decade starting in the mid-80s, and I really enjoyed looking at all the different kinds of handwriting, to a point where I had a little game of trying to guess where a new penpal was from, based solely on their handwriting. (Yeah, I found fascination in some weird stuff when I was a youngin'.)
Together with the spelling issues, the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the notes was someone with
very little formal education. One has to write quite a lot to have the sort of "flowing" handwriting someone on this thread has mentioned.
Or - and that should fit the foreigner theory more - it could belong to someone who first learned to use something other than our Latin alphabet. (Not Russian, though. Their handwriting when not using Cyrillic letters is quite specific and easy to spot.) If anything, it reminds me of the handwriting of some of my penpals from the Middle East.
Just my thoughts.
ETA: Just to be clear, I am not suggesting he was from the Middle East at all. Thanks to all the information provided on this thread after some magnificent sleuthing by others, and taking into consideration the handwriting, the complete amateur in me tends to side with LE who think JD was probably relatively local, simply adding that in my opinion, he was most likely a person with very little formal education.[/QUOTE
Very interesting insights. Also made me think that in 77 would not have been many young recent immigrants from what was then Soviet Union.