The Winslow Boy

Although I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, where my father taught at the St. Louis Country Day School, I spent the first couple of decades of my life in Chatham, New Jersey. My father had left teaching and had come to work in an insurance company in New York City. In his mind, that meant commuting from a suburb. My parents chose Chatham because it had a good reputation for its schools, which was important for my older sister, Georgia Lee Strong, my older brother, Theodore (Ted) Strong, and for me. For my father, however, it was about an hour’s commute to the City. In the beginning he would take the ferry across from New Jersey to the lower part of Manhattan. When the company moved almost up to Central Park, the commute was extended by an extra hour a day. Over time, the long commute became harder for my father, as he got older. The journey became more wearing and ultimately affected his health.

My father was a well-educated man who had attended Yale and studied electrical engineering for a year at MIT. He also came to Princeton to study at the Theological Seminary for a while. I don't think he quite finished his studies there but he did spend some time at the Moody Bible Institute¹, a more conservative Christian school in Chicago.

In the First World War, my father didn't serve in the combat military. I don’t know the whole story but I do know that he worked for the YMCA in France, in a place where soldiers who had been in combat could have rest and rehabilitation. He was not a pacifist as far as I know but he was a religious man by upbringing, a very serious Presbyterian. That side of him came out when I went to Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church, where, I recall, we were given each year little chest pins for perfect attendance. I had 12 of them, 12 out of 12! They hooked together down your chest, although they were never worn.

My father was the oldest son of three children, and his father was a manufacturer of glazed tiles and owned the Old Bridge Enameled Brick and Tile Company, which made fireplace tiles. The original building stands to this day.

My mother, Tess Shaak, complemented my father in terms of religious upbringing. She had been a nurse-missionary in China for two years, from 1919 to 1921. She wasn't a missionary making converts, she was a nurse in charge of two hospital floors ‑ a wonderful responsibility and a life-inspiring experience that she had to give up when she needed to return to the United States for gallstone surgery. My mother grew up in Avon, a little town in Pennsylvania, where her parents were farmers. It is quite amazing that she got all the way to China from this little town.

I would refer to my own religious upbringing as severe. I found pastoral prayers in the Presbyterian Church to be very difficult. As a kid, they seemed to me to be almost interminable and I never saw anything happening during the rest of the week. In part, that is why I am now a Quaker. It's a doing religion rather than a talking religion. Quakers “do” first and talk second. Perhaps we don't speak enough, but we try to do what is necessary to make a contribution to the world.

We lived in three houses on Washington Avenue in Chatham. I hardly remember the first house we lived in before I was in school, but I do recall that the house was right next to the southern side of the railroad tracks. It was a double house and we lived in the half closest to the tracks. The proximity to the train station made commuting easier for my father for a while. Then we moved two houses up on the other side of the street to a house with a barn where my brother set up a sea scouting arrangement. Later on we moved up four blocks to the other side of the street.

When I was in second grade, my parents were both ailing. I was born in 1930 and this was the time of The Great Depression. These were stressful years. My mother was given an allowance of ten dollars a week from my father's salary. Out of this, she served a hundred meals each week. That’s about ten cents a meal for five people and yet we ate well. My mother made applesauce from the apple tree in the backyard. Our second home on Washington Avenue had a large garden. My father was a meticulous gardener, staking his tomato plants, sifting the soil with a screen to constantly improve it. He was a kind of Victorian figure, very strict. When you cut the lawn, if you didn't edge the sidewalk, you heard about it. He had a habit of smoking a lot and coughing a lot and he didn't clean that up exactly, my mother did that. I was closer to my mother than my father for those kinds of reasons. If my mother really got fed up with some of my antics, she would say "your father will be speaking to you at the end of the day," and maybe he would use a hairbrush. He had his fun moments but I don't remember them so much. He had a religiosity but it was insubstantial, merely verbal. In contrast, my mother was less verbal, but had a deep Christian core. She didn't complain. The injustice I observed in their relationship engendered my hunger for justice. Justice needs to be done, lived, not just talked about.

At this time, 1937, when I was seven, my sister and brother went to live with my mother's family, with Uncle George (Shaak), Aunt Alice and Grandma Shaak. I went to New Brunswick to live with my grandfather, my father's father. It was a wonderful experience. In some ways it was a more affectionate home than my own. My father’s sister Dorothy, my Aunt Dorothy, also lived at my grandfather’s house. Dorothy was a spinster who took care of her parents. I think her parents had discouraged her opportunities for marriage ‑ what in the Third World you would call primitive social security, although they really didn't need it. Aunt Dorothy devoted herself to Christian mission hospitals in China and India and went by ship to visit these hospitals.

My grandfather was clearly successful. He lived until 1939. My bed was in his office on the second floor of the house and on the window sill there were potted plants. On a certain day of the week there would be two pennies sitting on the dirt in one of the pots. I thus had an allowance of two cents, which I was to enter in a record book and keep a running account. My grandfather was teaching me something that I have used all my life: record keeping. He nurtured my habit of not being wasteful and saving.

In my grandfather's home were two black employees, I don't like to call them servants. Ida was a great cook. She was the second warmest person for me (the first being my grandfather). I could go into Ida’s kitchen and see her making fishcakes, shredding the codfish. It was so neat. I could easily beg something from her between meals. George was the man who brought out the ashes. Nobody knows what that is today but in those days furnaces had to be shaken down and the ashes removed and carted to the street where they were picked up. Homes had coal chutes that fed the coal into the basement. George was a neat guy. He worked on the grounds. Both of these two people, to my knowledge, were kept on the family payroll, even through these Depression years. They came each day and I’m sorry to say that I lost track of them in later years.

In the backyard of my grandfather’s house was a birdbath and I had a chore cleaning it out from time to time. I remember my grandfather would always say to me, “Remember our secret,” and he would whisper in my ear “I love you." This was a demonstration of affection that didn't come from men elsewhere in the family, though both my uncles, Uncle George and Uncle Bill (my father's brother, William Lord Strong Jr.) were fantastic men.

In 1928, on the eve of the stock market crash of 1929, my grandfather's tile company merged with two other tile companies. His great decision was to take cash rather than shares in the short-lived joint company. As a result he spent his life thanking God. Every morning that I lived in that home, no matter where we were in the house, we would gather in the parlor, we would kneel on the floor and press our heads into the seat and Grandfather would lead us in prayer. It was starting the day with a much more serious pause than just saying grace.

My great grandfather Strong was a banker in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. His obituary reads beautifully. From what I have learned, he made loans out of his own pocket to people who couldn't qualify for bank credit and he made it natural for my grandfather to go into business.

There are quite a few Williams in the family and our most famous relative was Judge William Strong². This William Strong was born in Connecticut in 1808 and was a Congressman and a justice on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and later an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. Hearing about him stimulated my early vocational ideas, which were toward the law. He had a law office in Reading, Pennsylvania, and another at some distance from Reading where most of the residents spoke only German. I understand that he learned German so that he could work with the people there. A few years ago I took a bunch of papers and memorabilia that we had of his down to the archives at the U.S. Supreme Court building where they were displayed in glass-case. I received a nice letter acknowledging this gift.

As I grew older I loved to work. I cut lawns and did baby-sitting. Shoveling snow was a bonanza on those days when you could get 12 inches of snow. That meant no school and you could make $20 or $30 shoveling snow for four or five hours. At the age of 15, I was sweeping the rooms of the elementary school. I'll never forget two things from that experience. Mr. Brown, the janitor, under whom I worked, said never leave a broom on its bristles. Stand it on end otherwise the bristles will be all turned under. I remember one time when I was going into the corner of a room and getting the last little tidbit of dust or paper. Mr. Brown, observing – because he cared how neat I was ‑ said “Leave a little to seed.” He meant that I was being a little too fussy. Book repairers are fussy so it lives on in me and in my little records. My son Tom teases me about my record keeping but I think he keeps quite a few records himself.

Those jobs were not chores, not something negative. They were delicious. I learned from all of them. I met good people. Like the time, during my years of scouting, when I got a carpentry merit badge for working in a man’s shop and building a bookcase. I loved my mentors. I was a boy scout, a sea scout, and an explorer scout and had three mentors there. In those days there were lots of mentors.

Chatham was small with a population of about 5,000 people, and the high school was small. Since then the high school has been succeeded by two successively larger high schools, but in those days when you went to grade school or high school, the teachers would know your older sister, or your older brother. The would look at you, see another Strong coming along and wonder will he be interested in poetry and literature like his sister or in chemistry and mathematics like his brother. In those earlier days of schooling that's the way it was. In contrast, my children grew up in Newtown, Pennsylvania and when the bell rang there would be 3,000 kids in the halls. I blame all that on a man named Conant at Harvard who devised these comprehensive high schools so that you could do typesetting or learn gardening ‑‑ education so comprehensive it has lost some of its character.

Chatham was a town where people were proud of their schools and proud of their sports teams. They had no football because a young man was killed in the 1930s, so we all played soccer and became State of New Jersey champions in our school size group. I played goalie on the soccer team and managed basketball and baseball, keeping the scores and writing the newspaper articles as well. That was another job I had. I wrote sports stories and was paid ten cents an inch. You could fly! You could write as much as you could think of saying and they'd print it. That was with The Chatham Courier. We had two papers in the town. Think of it, a town of 5,000 people with two newspapers, The Courier and The Chatham Press. Another one of my jobs was selling stories that had been printed in the newspaper and put together in a booklet called, “Stories of Old Chatham.” The author, Herbert Strong (no relation) got me to sell these from door to door for fifty cents a copy. They sold out quickly.

Chatham was not a diverse community in those days. It was mostly middle class, very white. The real estate company that developed the side of the town that hadn't been developed earlier was clearly not open to minorities, certainly not African Americans, or blacks as we say now. The only minorities in our grade school were a couple of kids from the Middle East. Chatham Township was a sort of a summer place for Jewish families and very soon they began to stay there year round and to send their kids to Chatham High School. That was the extent of the diversity in Chatham.

I remember a Sea Scout leader once telling an Arabian American classmate of mine, Bob Boorujy, who wanted to be an architect, "Oh you'll never be a naval architect." Well, Bob Boorujy went on to become a naval architect and build terminals for Exxon in the Far East. To this day he is still irritated by that remembered remark.

A memorable episode for me was in 8th grade when I did something in class that merited my going to the principal's office. I guess I was showing off a bit. I always did like attention. That's been a life-long habit. Dr. Jeter was chastising me and I made a blowing sound with my mouth. Boy did he get mad. I was told I had to take an extra course, freshman algebra with the class ahead of me. I loved it and did extremely well. I showed off a lot in those days. I needed attention for some reason. Maybe that's a comment on my upbringing. I was the youngest and while discipline for my older siblings seemed to be a little harsher than for me, making funny remarks at times, I never had much discipline at home, I got out of the way and got out of the house to work and do other things that were more fun.

I sold the Saturday Evening Post at the railroad station. That was fun. I would go there and catch passengers on the first train in the morning at 5: 47 a.m. and I had a little route. There would be a distributor, an older man in his twenties and he'd come to my house with his bundle of magazines and I'd haul the appropriate number up to the railroad station and hawk them to the commuters. They were five cents. It was a good magazine, too. And then I'd put them on top of the shelf above the seats in the waiting room where I would be able to leave the extras with a jar with a slot in the top. The man selling the tickets would keep an eye on it for me. I met people doing things like that. It was a welcome experience. Later my mother would often say to me, "Take it easy, you worked so hard when you were young." But it wasn't work. It was growing, absorbing information from people and lifestyles, and seeing what's out there. Home has its limitations and it’s too bad that some people are so tied to all the advantages of home. It's probably worse now that homes have TVs, movie screens and computers.

I saved all my money. The movies were only a quarter and Chatham didn't have a movie house so if you wanted to go to the movies you had to get on the train and go one stop to Summit or to Madison in the other direction. I occasionally saw Errol Flynn and Maureen O'Hara and Westerns.

A major mentor of mine was Coach John Fries, the coach who gave me my shot at soccer goalie. I had a recklessness about me and would dive at the ball when guys were trying to kick it. There was another goalie with whom I competed, who was a natural athlete, which I was not, but he would not perfect his skills. At that time I was a little pudgy and I really couldn't run to the center of the field, so goalie was the ideal Varsity position for me. Coach Fries was my greatest mentor, my friend and subsequently my employer when he opened a haberdashery shop down in the center of town where I would sell clothes and neatly refold clothes that had been tried on and would then be sold at a discount. He was a fun guy. When I graduated from high school and brought down my yearbook, I added a nice cover that I had made from gift wrapping paper from the store. When I came back I found he’d written on it, in green ink, “cover courtesy of John Fries.” He had sayings some of which I can't repeat. If I would use a foreign language, he would say “If you do you'll clean it up yourself!” Imagine just learning Spanish and saying “Buenos dios companeros,” to which he'd respond, “Yeah, yeah, tell me about it.” He was a popular guy. Unfortunately he moved his store from Chatham to Madison and his partner, a Princeton graduate, started taking money from the business. Once you sell a sports coat for thirty-five dollars and it doesn't get into the cash register, you're getting into something that can become addictive. Sometimes it takes a while for it to be found out. That was too bad.

I did so many jobs, in part, because I wanted to build up my references for college. There was never a moment when I wasn't going to college. It was in the family; it was in my genes; it was in my blood. I was putting pennies aside from the second grade. I had such a habit of saving that when I finished college I had more money than when I started even though I had scholarships.

I was in high school through 1948, right through the War, but we kids were mostly oblivious to that. My father would bring home the newspapers from New York and we'd see those maps of how we were progressing in the War and hear on the radio about the Battle of the Bulge and so on but our biggest role as teenagers in the Boy Scouts was collecting tin cans with Mr. Esposito. Everyone was thorough in getting metal for Mr. Esposito’s truck. Both ends would be taken out of the cans, the paper wrapper would be taken off, and the cans would be squashed. We would pick them up and throw them in the truck. That was real work and we learned respect for the man who drove the truck. Mr. Esposito was not middle class, he was an Italian immigrant. Everyone was mobilized for the War effort.

I feel this to be one of the ironies of life. You can mobilize occasionally, ask people to make sacrifices, and certainly for War, but why can't we mobilize for peace? Why can't we mobilize for justice? It seems that we have to have a compulsion. I think in this time of Obama, people feel ready to be mobilized for something other than the negatives of the past eight years.

In 1943, at the age of 13, I bought my first book, which my son Tom read, and my granddaughter is reading now, all 1100 pages of it. The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes. The sticker I typed is still in the book. Later, in college, I read what was assigned but when I got out of college, my first hunger was to read The 100 Greatest Books. I have a running list of all the books I have read since then, over 55 years. I've learned how to handle a book, get the gist and move on ‑ if a book has 400 pages and you want to read the first chapter, the last chapter and the middle chapter, you've lived with it a while. Increasingly now I read history and biography. I just read a 500-page biography of Norman Thomas, The Last Idealist.

In high school, I was into leadership roles. I was probably the only person in the history of the school to be on the student council for five years and I was president of my class in my junior year. My classmates made some nice comments about me in our yearbook, about my speaking skills; most likely to succeed, that sort of thing.

My most favorite teacher was my English teacher, Ruth Partridge. I was planning on going into law, to be a court lawyer of some kind. Ostensibly I was following in the footsteps of the judge in the family but I was probably thinking more of Clarence Darrow defending those who don't have an adequate defense rather than of being a corporate lawyer. I always loved to talk more than to write. Later on I learned that writing is a big part of legal work, as is doing research. In the end, I didn't become a lawyer but that was mainly because of the death of my brother in my junior year of college. My brother died at his own hand after his combat service in World War II. His death influenced me quite a bit. A wonderful, talented guy.

But at this time in high school I had a book called Ethics of the Legal Profession that I had picked up when I was helping a man with a used book store, another job that I had. I wrote a paper about it but it was only about 250 words long. When you have that little experience writing and you go to college with guys from Groton and Lawrenceville, you are up against it, and not just in writing. I was in a good high school and I applied only to Yale.

The day I was admitted to Yale was a big day. I can recall the high school graduation march at the drop of a hat. No one had gone to Yale from my high school for a very long time, if ever. I had a scholarship from the University and a scholarship from a wealthy man who lived on Fairmont Avenue in Chatham, overlooking the cemetery where my family has a plot. His name was MacGregor and he was president of a bank in Summit. His wife was a doctor and they had lost their only son. I received the MacGregor Scholarship of $250 from them.

Looking back on those years, I would say that I was a person who found an un-encouraging upbringing including a Depression and a War and discovered great opportunities for getting out and learning about other people's lives and other people's joys. Sometimes experiences that might be described as not very nourishing turn out to be exactly that. In retrospect I am grateful, especially for all of the people who wanted to mentor me. I once made a list of all my mentors and there were about 20 names. Each of them responded to my willingness to work and saw some potential in me. I owe them a huge debt.

I stayed in contact with Ruth Partridge until she died of osteoporosis. The bone disease grew until finally she was prone and she didn't have enough back strength to sit up without help. We had been very close and when she died she left me her four-volume set of Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War.

One incident in my senior year shows just how remarkable Ruth Partridge was. One day as she came by my desk, she put a little folded paper in front of me. She took the pencil out of her white hair and tapped the paper as if to say, “Pay attention, this is important.” When I opened it up there was a note and a five dollar bill. The note said: “Take this, go to New York and see the play The Winslow Boy.” At that time you could do a round trip to New York and see a play for $5. The Winslow Boy by Terrance Rattigan is the story of a boy whose case of correcting injustice goes all the way to Parliament. His family believed in him. It gives me goose pimples even now to remember it. When you decide that something is right, you are going to get flack from somebody if it doesn't conform to their values. This is the case with Pacifism. Take, for example, Jane Addams out in Chicago who spoke against the First World War. She created the Settlement House movement offering opportunities for women for which she was a hero but when she opposed World War I, she was vilified. So was Scott Nearing, the radical economist, pacifist and advocate of simple living, who lost his job as an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. Later, in the 1930s, Addams won the Nobel Peace prize, the first American Woman to do so. What an odyssey, to go way up, then down and then up again. And even if you never go up, you still have the satisfaction of knowing you did the right thing. In your formative years you are looking for what one of my roommates in college called “cog,” recognition. You want applause, but you learn that sometimes applause is not important. That's the sort of understanding I took from The Winslow Boy.

Yale & Columbia

One of the things my father established for me was that I would go to Yale, because his father had gone to Yale, as had other relatives. All through school I did what I had to do to establish an academic and an extracurricular record, as a lot of kids do today, in the hope that Yale would provide me with a scholarship.

I remember going down to East Orange, NJ to appear as an acneed teenager before a board of older men. They were doing the interview that many alumnae do to see if they wanted to put their signature on a scholarship for me, which they did. I applied only to Yale and was accepted with a scholarship but I soon realized that my academic record from a small high school left something to be desired.

Fellows who were coming from schools such as Groton, Hotchkiss, and Deerfield were much better prepared than I, even though I was certainly in the top five or ten percent in my high school class and would have done more if that had been the milieu. Yale was just then half high school and half prep school. The prep school kids were doing calculus. It was a shock for me to get a 60 in math, which was one of my better subjects and my mark in economics wasn't great. On the other hand, I had a nice bursary job, which made me feel more secure. My bursary job was a great opportunity for me. I worked my freshman year in the freshman dining hall. I was pals with a “townie” and we used to have a lot of fun. I worked for 12 hours a week and this led to my being chosen, in my sophomore year, to be a College Aide, working only 10 hours a week, and doing work that was not that hard in the sports programs, in the library and helping out in the Master's office. I was in the residential Silliman College, later called “The People's College.” In my junior year there were only three of us surviving out of the original six aides. My bailiwick was in the Master's office. In my senior year, I was Chief Aide, working only six hours a week. Professor Theodore Meyer Greene was my employer and my friend and I took a course with him. He was a great man, unforgettable. I corresponded with him after college.

At that time, I was planning to be a lawyer, majoring in history and then English history. I also took a weekly theme course, writing on a variety of subjects. Everything went smoothly but because of my grades in the first half of my sophomore year my scholarship was turned into a loan that year and I was required to be on the Dean's List, which I managed to do the next term. During my freshman year, I lived in a barracks left over from the Second World War. I was happy to move on from my first roommates. My roommates in sophomore year were from Denver. One went on to become a professor of religion at Vassar. The other was a Christian Scientist. They were solid guys.

Those were the days when you automatically sent your laundry home in a box and my mother would wash it and send it back, often with a box of cookies and a five dollar bill. The box was mailed and the cookies often arrived in crumbles.

In my junior year, somehow or other, I acquired the running of a milk bar down in the basement of Silliman College where we made milk shakes and served ice cream and popcorn, etc.. As a result of that and my summer jobs, I had more money when I left college than when I started. I was frugal and still am.

My freshman summer I worked on a wheat farm in Kansas ‑ a great experience. One of my high school friends whose father ran a lumber yard in Chatham arranged it. Dan Hopper and I drove tractors all day long. The great agrarian myth is that some of our American values come out of farming. But with the consolidation of farms, the land holdings are bigger than they once were. There's a lot of back and forth, back and forth, with a mid-day stop to eat a bologna sandwich, drink a coke and get back on the tractor again. Once I neglected to take the tractor out of gear when starting it. I cranked it in front and then had to jump out of the way and catch up with it. For the rest of the summer I was known as the “bright college boy.” The other farm workers did a job on me, which I deserved.

In my sophomore year summer I got a job which was awesome in pain. I worked on a railroad labor gang. We took the stones out between the tracks, took out the dirt and put the stones back, a task that nowadays is done by a machine. The trouble with that job is that you are never in the shade. Halfway through the summer I had had enough. They just took on kids for their shoulders and arms and let them fry. It was a bit much, so I found another job as a “kiln helper,” two or three stops down the Lackawanna railroad from where we lived, where they were making Bakelite parts for television sets ‑ a red dirt that would turn into a purple or brownish part. My job was to load these parts on trays and fire them away. In contrast to the railroad job, I was indoors and had the night shift from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. I worked out a deal with the guy who was sitting by the time clock and he would punch me out at 11 p.m. even though I left just a little before that to catch the train home. My integrity was a little bit challenged that summer by my keeping my railroad pass from the other job. A friend's father questioned whether I should have done that. My justification was that I had earned it with my sweat. I really loved jobs, they were so interesting no matter what.

In my junior year summer, I met Nancy Gruner (my future wife) when we were both participants in a Washington (DC) Student Citizenship Seminar under the aegis of the YWCA. The program took a number of us, about 80, from colleges all over the country, to Washington where we lived in a big house on New Hampshire Avenue and ate our meals across the street. It's perhaps ironic for future Quakers that Nancy worked in the Pentagon and I worked in the Navy department! Those were our summer jobs. During our evening meals we had people like Senator Estes Kefauver talk to the group and Senator Paul Douglas, who had been in all three military services. He was an economist from Illinois and a Quaker. His reputation was scrupulous for not accepting anything from anyone more expensive than a neck-tie, which cost about $2.50 in those days. I don't know what he did about campaign contributions!

Nancy and I didn't know each other very well at this time. Her family was from Detroit where her mother Marge (nee Hubble) was a music teacher working with inter-racial classes. Her father Paul Gruner worked 41 years for S.S. Kresge, later known as K-Mart. When Nancy was growing up, he managed various stores in Ohio, Kentucky and New York. Nancy and her brother and sister sometimes helped out, removing gum (1 cent per wad), filling Easter baskets, and what have you. Her father took over a sizeable camera department in a new K-Mart and did an impressive job of cultivating customers by giving them good advice. Nancy had good parents. She was raised as a Methodist and she connected with Quakers in New York City before I did. My life wouldn't have been what it is without Nancy.

During my college years I took a complete sabbatical from religion. Not a surprise when you consider my early upbringing. William Sloan Coffin, the greatest Presbyterian I ever met, was not yet at Yale, where he became Chaplain. He would say things like “In order for the churches to be believable, they have to take risks, and most of them don't, they build churches.” I thought he was great. In the Vietnam War, he was tried for conspiracy for fostering the burning of draft cards. During the Civil Rights era, he was in the South when the buses were being integrated.

I majored in English history. Oh did I have good professors. In that field there was a professor Dunham in constitutional history. An American history course was taught by a man named Potter. But the greatest of all was European Intellectual History taught by Franklin Baumer. He was so good in going through the minds of Europe, coming down to Freud and Darwin, that students who weren't taking the course would slip into the big classroom and sit in the aisles just to hear his lecture. At the end of a year's study, it was customary for students at Yale to applaud the professor ‑ and not just lightly, they'd jump up. But with Baumer we'd applaud after every lecture! That was the richness of my Yale experience. It was awesome coming from a small town to this rich well-established privileged environment with its magnificent buildings and library. But, as was the case with Chatham, diversity was limited.

After I graduated with a B.A. in History, I went up to Pine Island Camp in Maine as a counselor, where I had an interesting summer. I remember always getting up early in the morning. An older man and I would make coffee round the fire. Cal Calvacca was a Latin teacher at the Collegiate School in New York City. I had Latin in high school for two years and wonder in retrospect why. In college I took Spanish.

The death of my brother when I was a junior changed my career thoughts. Ted was five years older than I was. In the Second World War he traveled to different bases for training and got in marvelous physical condition. He was a Browning Automatic Rifleman, a fact that is acknowledged on his gravestone, provided by the military. He is buried up in Chatham. After he came back from the European War, he was then sent on to the Philippines, where he waited for the end of that part of the war. Although he saw combat in Europe, we didn't know much about it. The censor took care of that. He could only tell us that he found an egg in this or that barn and cooked it up, that he found a place to hang out in a lovely old mansion where there was a globe and a lot of books. This was in France and then he went on into Germany with the Battle of the Bulge. When he came home he was treated right away for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at Lyons Hospital in Northern New Jersey. I remember visiting him there. I noticed that the porches on the second floor had serious screening, not the screening you'd see on normal windows but clearly intended to prevent the fellows from getting angry and trying to jump.

After Ted’s death at 26, I recall that my sister wrote that he would get quite attached to his position on some subject and then get irritated that the other person wasn't willing to see his good mind at work. He was a good guy who should never have gone to Yale and then Drew. He should have gone to a college like the Steven's Institute of Technology because he wasn't interested in the liberal arts, except in the military where he would read Dostoevsky. The military provided a lot of paperbacks.

I have all his correspondence from the war as well as the letters I wrote to him from Yale when he was living in Ticonderoga, where he built a log cabin twenty feet by twenty feet. I went up there one summer and the two of us hauled logs together and you wouldn't have known anything was amiss. It all seemed so healthy. But there were some disappointments in his life. The rest of the family thought for a long time that it was the loss of someone that he wanted to marry. In retrospect, having read his letters again recently, I abandoned that idea. He might have gotten somebody pregnant or he might have had some altercation. There were hints of that. But he didn't confide in anyone. Maybe he didn't want to or maybe he wanted to act like he wasn't hurting.

In my high school time and afterwards, I had a friendship with a young Catholic woman. It was a safe relationship because, as a Protestant, my family would never encourage me to get serious with a Catholic. There was no discrimination against any other nationality or group but that was something that was carried both ways. I'm not sure I ever held her hand. I know I didn't kiss her, but we hung out a lot together. Sexuality was then a dangerous reality. The whole concept that you had in those days was that if you let your emotions get hold of you, you could destroy your life. You wouldn't be going anywhere after high school because you'd be going to get whatever job you could to support a pregnancy that couldn’t be terminated in those days. Now there are so many aids that it is almost risk free in some ways, especially if you want to be smart about it. Smarts then wouldn't get you very far. In college I had a few dates but I didn't have resources or even time for that sort of thing. If you had a young woman come from a neighboring college you had to find a place for her to stay and you were into serious money. Some could stay in the Master's house but you didn't share expenses then as you do now.

I don't really know what was the great precipitant of Ted's self destruction. When I got the news I was devastated. My brother killed himself with a German gun, a war souvenir. I don't know how he got the ammunition. My father had to identify the body and that was a great burden. My mother had a core of strength from her farm background and religiosity. As a nurse she had seen a lot of suffering. Naturally she wanted to protect me and to protect my sister so she said that perhaps it was better that Ted was not suffering. My kids missed having a great uncle. He and Tom would have hit it off.

When this happened I got on a train to come home for the family to reassemble. There was an announcement in the paper so people knew about it, my friends knew about it. On the train was a wonderful man, a Yale law professor named Harold Lasswell, whom I had invited to Silliman College to give a talk. When I saw him I asked if he would mind if I sat next to him. This kind man just held my heart.

After that experience I really questioned what life was all about and within a few months I gave up the idea of law school. I took a course with Theodore Greene and was asked to join a small group of students who had formed an alternative senior society in defiance of the mainstream senior societies at Yale. Two Yale professors were mentors to this group. One was Andy Morehouse, who was a saint in the eyes of many people. He said things like: you don't need to read the newspapers, it's a waste, you'll know what's going on just by listening to other people and by flipping on the radio. The other was a professor of African history, Harry Rudin. These were rare men. But the group dissolved in a couple of years because we didn't follow the best protocols. The interesting thing, however, is that it has been revived recently by other alumnae. I went to a reunion of this group in 2008.

I wanted to learn more about how people understand life and death so I went on to Yale Divinity School with the goal of teaching religion rather than going into a parish. I remember writing a paper titled “My Religious Position.” I never did buy the traditional language of sin and heaven and hell and the miracles of the birth by a teenager, and the resurrection. Instead I favored Paul Tillich’s idea that religion is the ground and abyss of all being and meaning. Tillich was a professor at Union Theological Seminary and a colleague of Reinhold Niebuhr. He wrote The Protestant Era. His is a much more philosophical understanding of religion. If I was destined to be anything at this point it was either a Quaker or a Unitarian. In a sense I was a Quaker long before I knew what a Quaker was. In those days there was no Quaker meeting in Chatham, although now there is.

I didn't like Yale Divinity School at all and I lasted only about three months. I was paying for it myself and I found that my fellow students would argue ad nauseam over John 15:21 or some such. That's not what it's all about. They were aiming for a parish in Upper Montclair or Scarsdale while I was searching for meaning. Such debates held no interest for me. My brother’s death stimulated an anti-war stance in me. I can't imagine a mother raising a child through the vicissitudes of youth to have him or her killed in combat. Men must evolve. Women don’t start wars, they are killed by wars.

I did however make a good friend at Divinity School, a professor of religious vocation, John Oliver Nelson. Nelson was a Scot and a Presbyterian who had brought masons over from the island of Iona to work at Kirkridge, a retreat center that he had founded in the Poconos. The following summer, after I had left Divinity School, I was at Kirkridge with a group of young divinity school students, building the mountaintop lodge. Not so long ago, Nancy and I were there to be with Frida Berrigan. An activist with a capital “A,” Frida is the daughter of the former Catholic priest Phil Berrigan and former nun Liz McAllister. She is an extraordinary young woman who has letters from her parents when they were both in prison for civil disobedience. She spoke about the Jonah House in Baltimore where people have taken their anti-war position as far as they can.

After leaving Divinity School I went home (November, 1952). My parents were puzzled but I had a list of the one hundred greatest books and I decided that I would set about reading them. In college you get reading lists that you can't possibly manage. I decided I would take my time and pick out what I wanted to read. I also went up to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey, and worked as an attendant. I don't recall how I got the job but I suspect it was related to my brother's death. I worked there for eight weeks. This was in the days when state hospitals around the country were being exposed as miserable places. I don't remember much misery but I do remember one incident. I saw a patient limping and when I took off his shoes I found that his toenails had been neglected for so long that they were hitting the leather and were being turned back into his feet. In a way it was more of a religious experience for me to work at this hospital that it was being at Divinity School.

The other attendants and I ate our meals in a white-tiled room. It was dismal. In terms of morale we were just slightly above the patients. Nowadays with pharmaceutical help about three fourths of these patients would be able to live at home with their families.

I discovered that what nobody else wants to do and obviously needs doing has an appeal to me. Even though I pay attention to the economics of things, or lack thereof, that has never deterred me from “cleaning out the attic.” My feeling is that we only have so much life, let's make it count. Quakers have a great phrase for this, “Way opens,” meaning that if you are open to opportunities or if there is something that appeals to you, go for it.

My father took his life in 1953 because of the loss of his namesake son and because of his frustrations. We didn't grieve very much. You see, one of the problems of the Ivy League colleges is what you might call “great expectations.” My father was his family’s oldest son and the son of a man who was successful in his tile business. My father left teaching because he was stressed and unfulfilled. We could see that in his life. He didn't know how to get that fulfillment. He was in a hotel in Brooklyn at the time of his death so as to avoid some of the commuting stress and he fell from the window.

After my father’s death it was time for my mother to get a new life. She left our home in Chatham and moved to an apartment on Parkside Avenue in Trenton where she established herself in the Presbyterian Church and volunteered in the YWCA. My mother could always use her nursing skills anywhere. When my brother broke his ankle up in Ticonderoga for example ‑ when an old man hit him off his motorcycle ‑ my mother went up there and nursed him till he could get around again. Later on when I was a graduate student in New York City and she decided I wasn't eating properly, she took an apartment on 96th Street and got a job nursing in Gramercy Park. She could always get work as a night nurse and at that time she worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. I remember her bringing breakfast home every morning. Then I'd go to my classes and she'd go to sleep. Later still, when I worked in Latin America, I wrote to my mother every week. With my father and brother gone, I felt a strong obligation to her. I still have those letters, she kept them for me. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Somewhere along the line I realized that our emotions are not horizontal, there are ups and downs. There are some neat great moments and there are some down moments. My father’s life made me all the more determined not to get stuck in a job that was not fulfilling. When you start a new job you are on the up-curve. When it begins to plateau, I believe it may be time to look for a new job. I admire people who can stay and renew themselves in jobs, and some of my best friends can do that and work at the same thing for forty years. I on the other hand have rarely worked at anything for more than five years. There is just so much out there.

In 1953, I went to study history, which I’d always loved, at the graduate school at Columbia and got a Master's degree in Economic and Latin American history.

While at Columbia, I got into New York City politics. I became a Ward Captain on the upper West side of Manhattan. I was a Reform Democrat working against Carmine DeSapio's machine politics. DeSapio³ ran a Mayor Hague kind of operation with corrupt politicians paying people with jobs. He was the last head of the Tammany Hall political machine that had dominated New York City politics for about 80 years. But his leadership came to an end in 1961. In 1969, he was convicted of conspiracy and bribery and subsequently went to prison. Mayor Hague was the great example of that sort of politicking here in New Jersey when I was in high school. I loved my residential blocks where I had the head of the Ethical Culture Society, and a single residence hotel where there were some people doing drugs and many inter-racial relationships. It was fascinating to me to be able to knock on doors and have access to the rich varied culture of New York City.

Also when I was at Columbia, a friend from the group that had traveled to Washington, DC for the Student Citizenship Seminar reintroduced me to Nancy on a double date. After graduating from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Nancy was working at the United Nations after waiting to get her foot in the door ‑ they had country quotas. First she worked in the press section during the General Assembly meetings and then worked for ECOSOC, the economic and social council, with an interesting man from Europe as her boss. She had a cold-water flat on the East Side near her work. I lived on the West Side. We started doing things together, going to plays and so forth.

One day, I was in Butler Library and I had all this dust on my hands from the books I was working with. I looked in the mirror and said to myself. “You're not interested in doing research are you? You're not a monk. You're too much of ‘a people person.’” So instead of mastering all this literature and being a student of history, why don't you find a way to make a little history.” And that's what happened. It was a good instinct.

Nancy and I decided that we would see if our relationship was really serious. I had my master’s degree and I needed to take a break from studies. So, off I went to Coconut Grove, Florida, to teach at an all boys private school, the Ransom School. I taught history, math and English from fifth grade to eleventh grade. Nancy and I thought that being fifteen hundred miles apart would test our relationship. Of course it simply meant that Nancy was coming down to Florida and I was traveling up to New York. I stayed at the Ransom School for two years, coaching soccer. Interrupting my graduate studies to go teach provided me with a couple of very satisfying years ‑ one of those steep growth curve experiences. It was a good period in my life.

Ransom is an old school right on the Bay of Biscay and at that time half of our soccer field was sand. Some of my colleagues were fantastic, although the leadership of the school left a little bit to be desired. The fun thing was leading a youth group at the nearby Congregational Church. I remember a German kid, Don Jordan, whose father was ambassador to Cuba. One of my students' fathers, David Stern, was a professor of law. Another family who had me at their home quite a bit was a very bright fifth grader, John Townley. Another of my students' fathers, a Mr. Belcher (of Belcher's Oil Company) turned a movie house in Coconut Grove into a legitimate theater. Coconut Grove is the Greenwich Village of Miami, very arty. I found myself being an usher at the theater and I happened to see the premier of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. In fact I saw the play forty times. I still love Beckett. I feel that I understand him. His paucity of words was in response to what had happened in Europe, where the professional propaganda produced by Goebbels was destroying everything through German fanaticism and Fascism. As Beckett was in the French resistance and had to flee at night, he neglected his teeth and had some strong reactions. That play is about essences.

Bert Lahr had one of the roles. He was famous for being the cowardly lion in the film of The Wizard of Oz and so people came to see the play expecting to laugh. The other ushers and I used to joke that it was impossible to get a taxi anywhere in Miami during the intermission of Waiting for Godot. Disappointed people just left then. When the play came to New York a full page ad ran in The New York Times. It read, “Wanted: 10,000 people to be provoked intellectually.” That play grew out of a DADA-ist movement, questioning the bizarre happenings of the Second World War following in the wake of the First World War. Why didn't anyone notice what was happening in Spain. Eleanor Roosevelt did but Franklin wasn't going to waste political capital on that, especially after he got a visit from the Papal Nuncio. Roosevelt was about to move on the position of neutrality toward Spain until he was reminded that there were a lot of voting Catholics in the United States. (The Catholic Church was all for Franco.)

After the second year of my teaching stint, Nancy and I got married. I had applied for a job with the State Department and didn't get it because I didn't have the right background. Eventually I ended up in the Census Bureau and after we got married we headed to Washington. I went before Nancy and stayed in a wonderful experimental church down there called the Church of the Savior. I had a room in their garret in their building on Massachusetts Avenue. Nancy came down after she had finished her job at the U.N. We got an apartment on R Street. At the Census Bureau, we were waiting for the Univac computer to arrive. It's obviously a computer kind of job and I'd report for work but without the computer there was nothing to do. This was in 1957 and to keep the staff occupied they would come up with useless time wasting activities for us. I'd routinely develop a number of sicknesses, almost on a daily basis. Sometimes, instead of getting off the bus at Sweetland, Maryland, which was where the Census Bureau was, I'd get off in front of the Library of Congress and indulge my reading habit. Clearly that was a situation that wasn’t going to hold us for long and Nancy and I came back to New York City, where I continued my studies and, drawing on her experience working on fundraising for Harvard while in Washington, Nancy got a job with the Advanced Placement Office, part of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). She got her master's in education and we rolled along.

Nancy got pregnant and our daughter Laura was born at St. Luke's Hospital in 1959. Since I was a graduate student at Columbia, the obstetrician allowed me to do a little historical research as part of the bill payment. We lived on Amsterdam at 116th Street over an Austrian restaurant and often had little animalitos visiting us from the restaurant below.

Nancy and I didn't have a lot of income. It was time for me to bite the bullet and get a job. So I got my first full-time job right there on campus in undergraduate Columbia College Admissions and Scholarships. Nancy would subsequently also take a job at Columbia in graduate admissions. We made some good friends there.

Working in admissions was another steep learning experience for me. The job was an eye-opener. I was sent around the country to recruit from schools, including some great prep schools and minority schools. I remember one trip to visit private schools in New England where I stayed at the Commander Hotel in Cambridge. I visited Deerfield, an old English-type school. In the style of Goodbye Mr. Chips, it had one of those ancient headmasters of the sort who seems to go on forever.

Dave Dudley was the head of the admissions office at that time. He was concerned to bring more diversity into the student body and I was sent as a sort of visiting guidance counselor to Arkansas to visit the black high school in Little Rock, Hall High School. Although Little Rock was the center of integration at the time, that didn’t close down the black high school. About half a dozen young men (no women in those days) had been selected to hear me. It was neat to be able to say, “This isn't about money, this is about making the most of your talents. There is more money available for good students than you could probably imagine. Your challenge is to grasp the opportunity and do a good job.”

To be going into schools and representing the concept of education not simply as a way to make money but as something important for life was very satisfying to me. It was outstanding to be able to present opportunities, especially to poor kids doing good work. I was with Columbia for a couple of years doing that and I particularly enjoyed interviewing young students about why they thought they should come to Columbia. Alumnae do that a lot and develop a proficiency at making notes and putting some sort or rating recommendation to the scholarship boards, which then use the College Scholarships Service. Columbia had about a quarter of a million dollars to use for students receiving scholarships on the basis of need rather than academic credentials. The interesting thing at that time was that the undergraduate admissions office was more impressed by the numbers of high-quality students who were not being admitted because of places that were being saved for athletes whom coaches had recruited. That is a tension for admissions and scholarship administrators even today. The great athletic reputations of schools like Princeton are nurtured by talented arrivals. The alternative to a talented arrival that you have recruited might be an undiscovered walk-on, someone you haven't recruited who becomes an asset to the school.

It so happened that at this time, three staff members at Columbia decided that the university needed a Quaker meeting. Then, if you wanted to go to a Quaker meeting in New York City you had to go down to the Gramercy Park area, to the Fifteenth Street Meeting House. For people who didn't want to go that far, there was an informal little Quaker gathering up in the tower of Riverside Church on a Sunday afternoon around 3 o'clock. The three men were Victor Paschkis, Bob Smith and John Alexander. Victor Paschkis became a dear friend. Bob Smith later became headmaster of the Sidwell Friends School, which is now the school in Washington for Presidents’ children.

It was Professor Paschkis, an Austrian American with a Catholic/Jewish background, I believe, who said to me, “Why don't you write your letter?” This is the way in which you go from being an attender to being a member of a Quaker Meeting. Your letter states what it is that you understand and why you feel you are led to become a member. Membership includes willingness to accept responsibilities such as serving on committees, more serious attendance, financial support as it is needed, and, most of all, that you agree with and will seek to live the Quaker testimonies: peace, equality, simplicity and community and integrity.

The four elders of the new Quaker meeting were all from Vienna. One was a music therapist, one was a psychologist, one was in the business school, and Professor Paschkis was in the School of Engineering. Elders are the senior people who would teach the ways Quakers work and act. The prominent Quaker Douglas Steere called the Morningside Heights meeting a “Threshing Meeting,” because it had so little tradition and so much “newness.”

You learn some wonderful things in joining a group. It isn’t that Quakers have dismissed professional ministry, although that is partly the case, since we don't have a paid minister. Instead we all accept responsibility for what is and can be said in a meeting. The searching within oneself for something worthy of breaking the silence can be rather hard for some people and easier for others who accept the responsibility with enthusiasm, but it is more of an authentic message than is sometimes the resort to a pro forma repeating of religious stories and concepts by the larger Protestant denominations.

It is somewhat of a misconception that a Quaker meeting is held in total silence. It is silent unless there is something to be said, something that you have thought about, that rises within you. One should go to a meeting with a little idea of contributing to the ministry. If you have thought of something beforehand that seems to matter, you might decide during the silent meeting to forget it, or you might decide to go ahead and share it. It may take on a different shape than what you first thought. This is a spiritual kind of practice, and it makes us extremely democratic. You are not relying on something out there. You are looking within yourself. Sharing the silence is a mystical experience. For those new to a Friends meeting, the old joke is that a new person will after a while say, “When does it start?” when in fact, it's almost over!

Another life-long friendship that has continued since my days at Columbia is with Joe Molder, who was at that time coach of tennis and soccer. Joe also worked part-time in the Admissions office. He went on from Columbia to head Westover, a fine women's secondary school in Connecticut and a pioneering environment for women. The girls who graduate from that school have all had calculus! A goodly number go into engineering

Joe Molder led me to discover the benefits of exercise when he deigned to play squash with me. If he was gracious enough to play with me and further my game, I decided that the least I could do was to stop panting while hustling around the squash court. That’s when I started jogging and I am indebted to Joe Moulder to this day. Now that I am approaching my eighties, my knees are a bit of a challenge ‑ with calcium deposits and wear and tear ‑ and I no longer run, but I walk a great deal. As the result of our friendship, Joe and his wife later became foster parents who would care for our children if anything should happen to Nancy and myself.

This period of our life was to come to an end when Nancy and I went to a program in New Jersey at Hudson Guild Farm in Andover, New Jersey. Hudson Guild Farm was founded by progressive thinkers the likes of Jane Addams in the belief that each human life has intrinsic value; that change and growth are ever present; and that there is a deep connection between the well being of individuals and the prosperity of the community.

Viva America Latina

I don't recall how we got over to New Jersey to Hudson Guild Farm but we got a ride back to New York City with a woman from England. Betty Richardson wasn’t at that time a Quaker although she was comfortable with Quakers. She asked Nancy and I if we would be interested in working in Latin America for a couple of years. Well, with our background ‑ Nancy having worked at the U.N. and my mother having been a missionary in China ‑ the idea was immediately appealing to us. We filled out some papers and had an interview at which it became clear that we were signing up for three years rather than the two we thought it would be. Nancy and I just kind of looked at each other and shrugged. Laura was two and a half then and she became quite a hit in each of the four countries we lived in (Costa Rica and Chile briefly, Peru for three years, and a summer in Mexico).

The organization we were to work for was Church World Service⁴, the relief and rehabilitation agency of the National Council of Churches. The Catholic counterpart is Caritas. The goal was to help, particularly in response to a natural disaster, a flood or a terramoto, a landslide, that destroys villages. This was at the time when Senator McGovern had created a “Food for Peace Program.” There was so much food in the United States, so much production and not enough sales, that wheat was literally being piled up on no-longer-used roads in the mid-West. When superhighways are built, the old weaving roads are abandoned and they were being piled high with wheat. The silos were already all filled. Wheat was even being converted into a quasi-rice called “bulgar” (made by boiling the wheat to produce a rice substitute) that fit into the Latin American diet more agreeably than milled wheat for making bread.

Our mission was to respond, ultimately in Peru. We would be the first representatives of Church World Service there, where landslides in the Andes had destroyed a number of villages. Once the food and bales of recycled clothing would arrive, our job would be to see them through customs with the approval of the Peruvian government, which had only to pay for the ocean freight. The thinking for doing food distribution through churches versus government to government was that it would avoid corruption. First, Nancy and I went down to Costa Rica for three months to improve our Spanish. We lived in an apartment in San José and we had a young woman come and live with us so that Nancy would be able to take as much language study as myself. Bella (pronounced Bay Yah) and her family became almost a part of our family. This was indeed a good experience. We met a family of Methodists who had already been serving in Peru and were also there to improve their Spanish. The Watlingtons were a little bit older than us and had four children. They became life-long friends.

In Peru, our work was done through the Evangelical Council of Churches and its committee, the Commision de Ayuda Social, The Committee for Social Aid. The council office was behind a bookstore which sold church literature. Dr. Money, longtime head of the Council, helped us with getting our supplies and ourselves through customs.

For some reason I was in the Methodist High School there, a creation of the Methodist Church, when some family planning literature came into my hands. It was just sitting there in a box up on a shelf, multiple copies of a small leaflet describing methods of contraception. This set us thinking. There are tremendous slums in Lima, with no sanitation. The people would have to go to the river to take care of their basic needs against a backdrop of wealthy homes, suburbs, homes with walls around them that had great shards of glass stuck along the top. It seemed interesting to us that the wealthy citizens of a country where the Catholic Church was the established church, and who could afford to have six children, would have two children because, in spite of what the Church tells them, people will take control when it is natural and almost second nature, you might say. The well-to-do have access to doctors in obstetrics and gynecology, but in the slums where families are barely able to feed two children in a space the size of my kitchen, there is a dread for the next pregnancy. A miscarriage can be a blessing. We befriended one small family in those circumstances who attempted to use contraception. The husband was a coffin maker. He built coffins just outside of the two small rooms they lived in. Nancy and I had a meal with them. They had only two chairs and they stood while we ate. Another memorable encounter I had was with a woman, a responsible parent, who had tried one kind of contraception that had failed. When I visited her and asked her how things were, she broke into tears. She was pregnant and she dreaded what was ahead. The next time I saw her for an update, her face was different, all smiles. She had lost the pregnancy.

As the Comission de Ayuda Social, we decided to write our own pamphlet with the help of a progressive doctor, Jorge Sarmiento, a chest surgeon, whose wife Jerry was an American missionary. His son Jorge is now a professor at Princeton University and his daughter-in-law Lucia works on the third floor of the Princeton Public Library where I now repair books. I would write the pamphlet and Dr. Sarmiento would put it into good Spanish.

We started first of all with the idea of “responsible parenthood.” I never used the phrase “birth control.” As a guest in the country tackling something so intimate, I was more comfortable with the phrase “la paternidad responsible,” a phrase that is positive and respectful and acknowledges that people are being responsible.

There are always progressives in countries and you often find them where you least expect them. The Time Magazine of Peru is Caretas⁵. The magazine came across our leaflet and published it for national distribution with two small omissions where the leaflet had established the differences between the Catholic position on contraception and the Protestant position on contraception. We took their lead and in subsequent printings of the leaflet, we too left those parts out.

We would print about ten thousand of these leaflets and when someone came to my office, say from the Adventists or the Christian Missionary Alliance up in the Andes or elsewhere, I would promote the leaflet and its ideas. The receptivity varied. Some people were working on behalf of their faith and only interested in saving souls rather than in social programs, which they considered distractions. Sometimes people come to a new religious position because they have been helped with medical care or food. Those whose goals are purely religious are not entirely un-attracted to the goals of social aid. At first, I would ask visitors how many leaflets they could use and they would politely respond and take fifty or a hundred. In time, I learned to take a different approach. We started charging a very small amount for the pamphlets, so that they would be a valued resource for the field rather than something sitting in a box in someone's office. That was a pretty good instinct and that's what we did with all our leaflets.

When we came to producing our next leaflet, which was about methods of contraception, I connected with a man named Dr. Clarence Gamble⁶, who would later found what would be called The Pathfinder Fund. Dr. Gamble had worked with the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger in the United States and had spent his inheritance, from the company that bears his family name, getting a medical education from Harvard and getting involved in public health issues, giving advantages to people living in South Carolina and Georgia in Planned Parenthood. He had two women working for him overseas, doing pioneering field work, either starting up organizations that could become family planning associations and then run by The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) or subsidized by Dr. Gamble in clever ways.

I became a protégé of this dedicated man. If I said that we wanted to publish 5,000 leaflets at a cost of $103, I would get a check from him for $103 by return mail. He had me attend an International Planned Parenthood conference in Puerto Rico, where I met some wonderful people and a life time friend in a Canadian, another pioneer in this field, Rupert Buchanan. Dr. Gamble would be in my life for the next decade and a half, and to this day I am still in touch with his family. He had a dynamic influence on me. He was then doing a study on the use and effectiveness of inter-uterine devices. Through the study, local doctors could participate and submit reports for each of their cases, following a guide looking for contraindications. This was medical training for doctors all over the world. There was eventually an epidemiologist using this study. The device was being made in Hong Kong for 2 cents a piece. It's a device made of plastic with a memory. Part of my job became to find doctors to take part in this study and it wasn't all that difficult because for the doctors, this was a way to expand their knowledge and practice. As I would often say, why shouldn't every woman, every family, have access to the simplest medical progress, which is contraception.

Although condoms were available, and as a matter of fact when my mother came to visit us she brought some in her suitcase among her underclothes, the issue of condoms was fraught with problems at this time. Even in the United States, there was difficulty in advertising that particular form of birth control. Trojan condoms, for example, were usually only advertised in men's rooms along the highway or in bars. Given that I was working with multiple Christian denominations, some of which were not interested even in talking about human sexuality, we didn't promote condoms, the primary use of which was for males to avoid venereal disease; family planning was a secondary aspect. The military distributed them because they didn't want guys to contract a venereal disease and have to be treated. There was also the issue of Latin American machismo. Men would not like to be inconvenienced by the use of a condom. It wouldn't be as pleasurable for them. Neither would they like their wives to know too much about contraception because then they might dally in the sphere of male privilege. That's an interesting aspect of this whole subject that came up later when I was traveling from country to country. But at this time, I was spending 95 percent of my time on family planning and only five percent on foods.

Working with the committee we decided that the best way to use surplus food was in a way that people would graduate from needing it rather than become dependent on it. That meant using it in schools, for example, making it possible for school children to have better nutrition as opposed to family feeding, which is simply holding out a bowl and seeing hungry children smile for the donor or donor organization. Another good use is in improving hospital diets. A third is food for work. If a village was unconnected to a highway so that they couldn't get their produce to market easily, we could provide food for the men who would work to build or improve a connecting road. Two highlights of my time there was when I was able to get hold of a tractor for a mission farm and the time when a business man, believing in the work we were doing, provided our group with a Volkswagen van at cost.

It was a wonderful three years. But for all that I achieved in those years, I still look back and wish that I had been just a little bit more mature because I could have done it better. But that's okay. I tell my kids that it's okay to have regrets because if you don't look back with a little bit of regret that means you haven't grown. After our three year commitment was up, I had to go back for another six months, until my successor came.

Coming out of Peru, Nancy and I led a work camp in Mexico in a village of about four hundred. This was the frosting on our Latin American cake. We had about a dozen and a half students working in the camp with the Mexican Friends Service Committee. Work Camps are a Quaker tradition. In Mexico City there is Casa de los Amigos, where kids en route to these work camps would sleep and have orientation. The program was a well-set up one. I remember one young woman from Radcliffe thinking that we would make a big change in this village, whereas in fact we were changed, because we learned more than we ever could as tourists. We built a soccer field and taught in the village school. These young American students connected with families in their homes. Nancy was washing clothes in the river. We had two little kids by this time: our little towheaded Laura and then Tom, who was born in Peru in 1963. We lived in an adobe house with water coming down the inside of the walls. That was a really challenging experience. One of the young men in that group, who was a leader in many ways, because he had a lot of skills, subsequently went on to work with the Peace Corps in India and then in the Ukraine. Tom Delamarter now lives in Montenegro with his Scottish wife and is still our friend, especially when he’s back in Brooklyn.

After we came back to the United States, Nancy and I were entitled to a month’s leave for every year of service so we stayed for three months at Pendle Hill, the Quaker retreat and study center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. We met a lot of good people there, many of them in some sort of transition, shifting gears after, for instance, a marital break-up or a change in job. It's only a couple of hours from Princeton and Nancy and I still go there. There we studied and took courses. I wrote a paper on the world population explosion.

After that we moved back to New York, to Morningside Heights. Our friend Victor Paschkis found us an apartment that cost us about $12,000 to own in a cooperative building which, if we had to leave, we had to leave without taking appreciation on the property. We lived on the ninth floor on the edge of Harlem, where both Nancy and I did Planned Parenthood volunteer work. Laura went to school right across the street, to P.S. 165. She was in a great and diverse class, about half black and half Jewish. She had a tremendous teacher and her best friend was a young Jewish girl from Israel who lived in our project. I could walk over to 475 Riverside Drive and we eventually had a car, which we parked there. I worked there in the Protestant Center for a couple of years but I felt that it was too much of a bureaucracy. Still, I had the privilege of going to the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches to speak on the concept of responsible parenthood and putting the case for responsible parenthood and its relevance as a Protestant undertaking.

This was in 1965. I was 35 and I was giving a talk before some four hundred people in a hall somewhere in the mid-West. Just as when I visited Hall High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, I felt that this was something worthwhile. I was convinced on the issue and had a commitment to it. If someone had said, “Couldn't you let someone else do this?” I would have answered, “Yes, if someone else will do it, but if no-one else is willing to do it, then I suggest that it is needed and that we Quakers or whoever should be doing it.” That's the activism of Quakers, not to talk so much or pray so much but to live what you say you believe.

Quakers don't have a creed. As a Quaker, you don't have to believe this, that or the other. You can define your spiritual outreach as you are led to do. There's no repeating any such thing as the Nicene Creed, for example. Instead we have testimonies that we work on. A testimony might be, for example, that you don’t believe in killing people with the goal of spreading democracy; that engaging in wars and training young men to be killers is something that needs to be changed. This is the Quaker peace testimony from the 17th century. A testimony is a long-standing commitment of the denomination.

Quakers have a saying: “There is that of God in every person,” even in someone you may not be able to stand. Human life is a gift and a treasure and not to be eliminated because you have a gun and someone else doesn't. When you think of “that of God in every person,” you move on to equality, which leads you to ask “why doesn't everyone have the privileges I have?” I've quit jobs right and left and it has never occurred to me that I wouldn't have enough to offer to get employment. Yet some people in this world are lucky if they can copy what their parents had, which was next to nothing. When you meet people, as I have, who live on a dollar a day, and you see how little they have, they wear a T-shirt and a pair of pants until they don't stay on them anymore, meaning they must get another T-shirt from someone, a relative perhaps, or find some pants to cover up their body from somewhere, that is so basic, some clothing, a little shelter, the question of equality arises. I asked someone once, “How do you handle this?” He replied, “We have learned to endure.” That's not an ambitious request of life. That's where equality comes in.

An example of this is our living in this duplex here in Princeton by selling a house we bought for forty thousand dollars in Newtown, living in it for thirty years and then getting six times what we paid for it. If someone had bought a home in Trenton for the same amount, they might only get thirty-seven thousand for it after thirty years. How can a person in Trenton improve the education of their children with no wealth accumulation? Why do I have that advantage? Because I don’t suffer from “American Apartheid.”

My several years in Peru were succeeded by our returning to New York City. Dr. Gamble made a proposal to Church World Service that he would contribute $25,000 if they would match it, if they would let me start an office in Church World Service headquarters at 475 Riverside Drive. The plan was to do work in family planning medicine and education in concert with other denominations. That was a nice opportunity and I worked there for a couple of years.

One of the most interesting trips I took for Church World Service was to three- or four-day conferences in Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, one after the other. My task was to talk about Family Planning. When I walked into the first meeting in Jamaica, I immediately noticed the whiteness of my hands. For the conference, representatives from the surrounding island countries had assembled. My role as a teacher came to the fore and I thought quickly about what I would like to put to each of those country representatives. I asked each to respond to just three or four questions about what was going on in their respective homelands. This led to a maximum structured sharing. Finally we arrived at a point at which I could enter constructively into the conversation. Besides I could see people thinking, “Isn't it about time he said something!” It was wonderful. I did that on two successive summers with the same three countries and I felt very good about what came of it.

After a couple of years of working with Church World Service and The Pathfinder Fund, about the time when Dr. Gamble died and Dr. Kessel, who had worked in India, became head of the Fund, I became Associate Director. I was now working full time for an organization dedicated to family planning with a multi-million dollar budget thanks to USAID support.

With the Pathfinder Fund, I traveled from Liberia to Egypt to Kenya, and all around Latin America and Central America. I went to Hong Kong where I remember having a wonderful meal with people from the Hong Kong Family Planning Association, before I went on to India and visited Nagpur, which is the center of Protestantism in India. Later on I spent a month working on a project in Iran.

This ended when the founder of Massachusetts Planned Parenthood was ready to retire after several decades of work. I was on the board of this statewide family planning organization and became its Executive Director. Connecticut and Massachusetts were the last two states to legalize contraception so those Planned Parenthoods began as statewide organizations. The Catholic imprint was on those particular states. I did that for a year or so. But after working at desk jobs for a number of years, I was eager to get down to the grassroots level again. That is where the real work is. I like to talk to the ultimate users or at least to the local administrator.

When I was head of Planned Parenthood in Massachusetts, I had the feeling that I shouldn't have had that job because I had been merely a convenient selection ‑ I was known and they liked the way I worked, I supposed. At that time, women were at the fore in talking about and pushing Planned Parenthood issues. This was true all across the country and there was a woman in the Massachusetts organization whom I felt had been passed over for the job. There were certainly some good results from my work in the state, but when I heard that a group of Peace Corps volunteers were working with officials in Cuba to participate in what was going to be a great harvest of sugar cane, I said to myself;, “Strong, if you don't participate in this, you are going to regret it for the rest of your life.” My departure from the Massachusetts job was rather precipitous. One board member commented: “He's going to Cuba, has he had a nervous breakdown?” This was a typical response because the average citizen knows little about the southern hemisphere.

Before I knew it, I was sitting on a plane out of Mexico City with a bunch of other people in this very first Brigada Venceremos; Venceremos meaning, of course, “We shall overcome.”

I don't recall exactly how I came to hear about the opportunity to go to Cuba. Among progressive thinkers, there is always a lot of peace activism and Nancy was involved in that. But as soon as I got wind of it, I put up my hundred bucks and got ready to go. To get to Cuba, we had to go through Mexico, where we were to catch an Air Cubana plane from Mexico City. In Mexico City, we were lined up against a wall. Our photographs were taken and our passport numbers noted. This information was transmitted to Washington via the Mexican police, which cooperated with the U.S. authorities.

The purpose of our group of some 216 individuals was not demonstration. It was more of a work camp. At this time (1969), not only had the United States broken relations with Cuba, it had invaded Cuba. The Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961 was a total fiasco. It was no secret that Adlai Stevenson⁷ had had to lie in the United Nations about it, marring his wonderful reputation up to that point. We were expressing solidarity with the Cuban people. My personal motivation was to stop listening to the propaganda and go find out for myself the situation in Cuba.

The trouble was that Senator James Eastland, the Senator for Mississippi, put an article on the front page of The New York Times that said a group of young Americans was going to Cuba to get guerrilla training. There was some slight basis for his concern because some of the group were members of the Students for a Democratic Society⁸ (SDS) and there were individuals who were Weathermen. I don't remember too many Quakers or Mennonites among us but there were a lot of wonderful individuals. I remember a taxi driver from Massachusetts and a printer who made me a wonderful leather-crafted gift, an enclosure for a wine bottle. The group was an interesting mixture with some diversity. We had some children of Cuban refugees who were not accepting their parents constant whining about the changes in Cuba and wanted to see for themselves. We were a great variety of people motivated by solidarity and wanting to see what the Cuban Revolution had wrought. The Revolution appealed to most of them from a heroic standpoint. Of course, there were the talkers and leaders from the SDS who rose up in leadership of the group. But when we got to Cuba, it was made clear by the Cubans that the job at hand was cutting sugarcane. Those who stayed up all night “talking revolution” weren't ready to go in the morning. For the Cubans right then and there, a revolutionary was a hard worker. Cubans had shifted the basis of their society and had work to do. This was going to be a harvest of ten million arrobas, or ten million tons of sugarcane. The usual crop was half that amount, and certainly no more than six or seven million arrobas. So this was a massive mobilization, just as Cuba had mobilized to eliminate illiteracy, which we saw when we visited a museum and saw the notebooks of the literacy volunteers.

When we got there it was a privilege to work at this. The cooks at our farm camp were displaced hotel employees who made fine food for us. Some of our group didn't want to eat fish but they sure ate fish when they were hungry and it was nicely prepared. At the end of each meal, you could have a cigar if you wanted it, and a newspaper: Granma or Juventud Rebelde. At the four corners of the work camp were men in uniform with weapons. Cuba is an island with an enormous undefended coastline where a speedboat could land and easily drop off a couple of assassins. If you could knock off a couple of these crazy young American idealists, the United States would have an excuse for coming to “save” them, even though we didn't want to be saved, as happened later with the medical students in Grenada.

A number of young Cubans joined us, greatly enriching this two-month experience. I made great friends with Elsa Pentoja and a black Cuban welder who was so inexperienced in cutting sugarcane that he nipped his leg with the blade. Our small subgroup was chosen to cut with some professional cane-cutters. These were the darkest skinned Cubans known as millionaires because of the amount of cane they could cut. These blackest men were doing what in Cuba amounted to “untouchable labor.” It is work that lasts for three months only and then they have nine months of tiempo muerto (dead time). These men had seen their own kids in the fields searching for chunks of sugar cane to suck on, the gleanings. Now these same men have seen their children become doctors and engineers and go off to work in other countries because Cuba has so many doctors that they can trade doctors for oil with Venezuela. So when anyone talks of returning Cuba to capitalism, there is no way that will happen. Cuba is over 60 percent Afro-Cuban and even the revolution hasn't been able to eliminate the differences between white or lighter Cubans and darker Cubans. (The millionaire Cubans use a shorter machete which has a heavier weight and is a more effective cutting tool.)

My group was also joined by ten Vietnamese, five from the North and five from the South, working side by side with us. They were soldiers, also there to show solidarity because Vietnam and Cuba had defied the “Colosso del Norte,” the Colossus of the north. I have a rain-hat that a Vietnamese soldier gave me. We of course were against the war in Vietnam and here I was cutting sugarcane with them.

Talk about radical social change! Even people who would favor it would find it inconvenient if it happened. Take Elsa Pantoja, whose husband expected her to be a typical kitchen woman doing the things the family needed. But when the path to education opened so that any Cuban could go as far as their talents would take them, there was a disconnect in their marriage. She became a journalist and a cane cutter! And the marriage was over.

We lived in barracks and slept in double-decker bunks. We enjoyed meriendas, snacks, in the fields, sometimes rather surprising pastries that the cooks would whip up. We had liquid yoghurt. After lunch we took a siesta, when you would smoke your cigar if you were game enough to sit there acting like some Chicago pol, followed by an orange to wash it down. Our toilet facilities were squatting over cement openings. That takes trained legs I can tell you. We had pirope, a sugar cane drink that eventually grows on you, sort of.

Saturday nights we enjoyed “cultural activities” in a sort of a rec hall where we had log seating and could watch films. I remember seeing The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, with Tom Courteney. It's a film about non-conformity and reminds me of The Winslow Boy. Fidel Castro came at Christmas, both on Christmas Day and night. Unlike an American politician who would be photographed for the press with a machete in his hand, Castro cut sugarcane for half a day. He liked exercise. After that he talked. What this man, a trained lawyer, knows about the United States is extraordinary.

There have been several attempts to get over the disconnect between our two countries. There was an emissary from John F. Kennedy, but the President was assassinated before there could be further progress. My experience of the Third World is that in general people there know a lot more than you would expect about the United States and its pluses and minuses as compared to what we know about their countries.

We returned from Cuba on a converted cattle ship via Halifax, Canada. By that time I'd had enough of being away from my kids after a two month absence. Other members of the group were full of revolutionary spirit. They took a bus to the U.S. border and had their machetes and other materials confiscated when they went through customs. Instead, I took a plane and went through customs in Boston. There were newspapermen covering the arrival of the group and knowing there were some at the airport, I wanted to play it cool and not say too much. At customs when I was asked where I was coming from and what I'd been doing there, I told him Canada, visiting with friends, and he waved me right through. As a result, I still have my machete in the basement but I long since passed my literature on. Later, in the Thursday, February 19, 1970 issue of The Boston Globe, staff writer Michael Kenney wrote an article about my experience. “No Hippie, He Went to Cuba” was the title. Here’s an excerpt:

Bill Strong is 39 and clean-shaven. He lives in a suburban-builder’s colonial in Newton with his wife and two young children. But for the last two months he was in Cuba, cutting sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade. Perhaps he should be 19, bearded and submerging back into the campus radical underground. …

For Strong’s two children, Laura 10 and Tom 6, it was another trip of the kind they were accustomed to their father taking. Strong’s neighbors, conditioned by his seeking of their signatures for McCarthy and a variety of liberal and anti-war causes, responded mostly with curiosity. ...

From a camp in Aguacate, about 50 miles east of Havana, Strong’s group, machete-armed, went out into the fields daily for six weeks and chopped down the ripe, two-inch sugar stalks from 7 a.m. to 11 and, after the midday rest, from 3 p.m. to 6. “The fatigue was real, and the sweat was real,” he said. “On my best day, I cut 460 arrobas.” By way of comparison, Castro cut 600 arrobas on Christmas Day, when he worked in the same fields as Strong’s brigade.

This was 1969 and I was 39 years old. Most of the group were much younger, although there was one grandfather and his grandchild with us. Because of my age or perhaps because of the way I conducted myself, with some Spanish, some people thought I might be a U.S. government plant.

I had given up my highest paying job at that time, as head of Massachusetts Planned Parenthood, to go to Cuba. I wanted to see for myself what it was like there. It was a turning point for me in terms of my Latin American life. When I came back, I had the privilege of reporting on my trip at the Newtown, Massachusetts Reform Democratic Group. I shared the platform with the Dean of the Boston College Law School who was running for Congress against the Vietnam War. This was a wonderful opportunity to talk to people who were hungry for information about Cuba from one of their own, so to speak, who had been there. After that I gave a series of talks in colleges and churches.

The talks were mostly in New England. Those who had been to Cuba were unusual. A number of churches and colleges invited me to speak and offered to cover my travel expenses, at least, sometimes a little more. They were usually pleased with what I had to offer. It was an exciting opportunity for me, and for them too, I believe. Later that year, I turned to family planning consulting work, working through my contacts with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). One of those was World Education, which supported literacy efforts in India. I worked for them as a consultant for Latin America, focusing on Central America, which is where I met Victor Brenes, the Costa Rican Minister of Education.

At the Unitarian Church on Boston Green, I talked to a singles group where two women were young Cuban émigrés. My talk about the progress in Cuba and the social benefits of the Cuban Revolution had them writhing in their seats. What was I to do? Well, I motioned to them to come up to the platform, which was just one step up from the audience, and have their turn to speak. I sat down. The truth of the matter was that although they were Cuban and had grown up there, they had never been out of Havana! They had never seen any rural Cuba or its people and had no way of knowing what the conditions were like for anyone other than those serving in a Havana coffee shop. Remember, even Batista, who was a slightly darker skinned Cuban, was not allowed to belong to the Havana Yacht Club. In a nutshell, they made fools of themselves.

The Revolution was a challenge to so many. In Venezuela, doctors feared the influx of those Cuban doctors, twenty thousand of them who served the underserved or rather the un-served. The reaction was that the Cuban doctors were taking their business, but in fact there was no intrusion because the Cuban doctors were getting to people who had not been seeing any doctors.

Speaking on this topic, I went to Goddard College and other schools. I even went to Washington. There was a man in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade⁹ who had been working at Church World Service in public relations. He thought that when I came back from Cuba I would face a sort of McCarthyism and be blacklisted, as had been his experience after the Lincoln Brigade had fought against Franco and its members had been blacklisted. Some of them had hard times getting a job and he feared that for me. But in fact, I went to Washington myself to work through the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the oldest religious lobby in Washington working for peace, justice and equality. They gave me appointments with the Representative in the House from Miami, Dante Fascell, who knew he wouldn't be there forever, because eventually the Cuban minority would want to have their own Representative. I traveled with him in the little cart that takes Representatives from their office to the floor of the House and he was fascinated by what I had to say. My old Congressman from the Reform Democrats during the days when I was a Ward Captain on the upper West side, was also interested. I even met with arch-conservative Senator Eastland in his office.

I remember Senator Eastland sitting back in his chair saying to me, “Strong, do you know what I have in that desk drawer down there?” “No, Sir,” said I. “I have pictures showing your return from Cuba. Do you recall airplanes flying over your converted cattle-boat from Cuba?” The end result of all this was that I told him, “Senator, if you want to know what was going on below decks, I'll tell you, we played a lot of chess games and drank a lot of Bulgarian wine.” What on earth were photographs of a ship going to reveal? They thought that because I had come to Washington voluntarily maybe I had “changed my mind” and was feeling that it was a bad thing to have defied the country in some way and gone to Cuba. The “guerrilla training”was a concoction.

When I got back to Boston and continued to talk about my experiences in Cuba, I received a call from a man named Sourwine, who asked me to come down to Washington to testify before the Senate Internal Security Committee. Sourwine was the lawyer for the committee and a former communist. I immediately asked if my transportation expenses would be paid since I had just been to Washington, where I had spoken with Senator Eastland and others. Needless to say, I didn't go. Then I got a call from the F.B.I. I received a phone call, but for some of the others, the younger students, they received a knock on the door followed by a foot in the door and then some rather intimidating questioning. I remember one young man whose father taught political science at one of the Boston Universities. He and his girlfriend had been in the Venceremos Brigade and had acquired some weapons for “their revolution.” But I was called on the phone to see if I would talk to them. I asked them what they had in mind, told them that I had returned from Cuba some sixty days earlier and had turned to other things, besides which I had already been to Washington and had already talked a great deal about the experience, so I felt that should just about cover it. The agent simply said thank you and I had the feeling that he was just checking me off a list.

If the F.B.I. had been smarter, they could have gotten a lot more information out of me. I'm sure I have a file somewhere in Washington. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I've seen notes on Quaker activities but there is nothing of value. It's just silly.

Around this time, the book The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer was published, The Costa Rican Minister of Education, Victor Brenes paid me what I took to be a great compliment. He said that I was “a different kind of American,” meaning, I believe, that I didn't come with dollar signs on my forehead and I didn't act with arrogance as if I was the bearer of resources that they didn't have or had some amazing answer to all their problems. Instead I was grateful for their time and tried not to take too much of it. I offered collaboration. I had seen Americans hire away good people for projects that they had a personal stake in or wanted to put their originating stamp on. Such people do more harm than good, it seems to me.

Even to this day, we Americans are known for our arrogance. We don't know much about other cultures. If anyone called me a missionary, however, I would shudder a little bit. I wasn't that. I wasn't there as a Christian. I was there as someone who was trying to do something constructive, to listen and respond modestly.

For myself, I was happiest when I would leave the capital city of a country and go to some remote area so that I could learn and return to the city with some knowledge to share with the person who had given me his time, who hadn't been able to make the journey I had gone to San Pedro Sula in Honduras, for example, where I saw how things were working in terms of public health and family planning and what the potential was for helping people.

The reason the Protestant churches were given the opportunity to work with the distribution of food, say in Peru, where they are a minority, was because our government knew that the food would be distributed responsibly. It was safer than going government to government where there is always the potential for corruption, take this food but with strings attached. Powdered milk in the Sierras in Peru isn't exactly a godsend. Powdered milk needs healthy water and there isn't a lot of that about in many of these remote places, and especially to Indians in the mountains who are only allowed to use the water in certain hours after sundown, as determined by the controlling mestizos. Powdered milk might end up being sold to make ice-cream or, in an even more absurd story that I know is true, used to make lines on a soccer field.

The Peace Corps is a great thing in terms of trying to understand other cultures. It doesn't work for everyone because you need get up and go. In all my talks I would always encourage young people to experience life overseas. For me, this work was a privilege.

If there has been an ongoing principal in my life it has been to look for cost effectiveness. In saving money for college, I learned how to maximize my effectiveness in using and gaining resources. I applied this to helping other cultures, thinking of the best use of resources and of things that would be effective in making a difference in peoples' lives, such as basic family planning. When I got into economic history, I learned how economic resources are used. The people who harvested cotton, for example, didn't get much out of it but they sure didn't cost much, just board, barely room. Slaves bred and supplied more slaves.

Nancy and I picked cotton in Nicaragua in 1985. It's harder than cutting sugar cane. In cutting sugar cane you have an extension on your arm, but in picking cotton you have to bend all the way down to the ground. And then you have to drag the cotton with you in a bag on a rope around your waist, whereas with cutting sugarcane someone else comes along and gathers it afterwards for loading. Picking cotton is back breaking work. I feel privileged to have known cane and cotton harvesting through my own sweat.

The idea of my later work with World Education was to introduce family planning content into literacy programs, to address an issue that was not being talked about and needed to be, since family planning was something that needed to reach the poor and not just be something for the privileged of society. I made a commitment of seven days a month to World Education. I traveled to El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras. I may even have gone on down to Ecuador too. I worked with a man named Fanning in New York City, who produced comic books. We worked on the content of those. My commitment to World Education allowed me to do other things and I could be a more responsible parent myself. At this time, we were living in Boston, where we lived for a total of six years.

During this time, I had an assignment to manage the first international conference, held at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel in New York City, on the development of vacuum aspiration abortions. This technology was an enormous step forward in replacing D and C (dilation and curettage) operations, which were far more difficult and dangerous. An aspirator had been developed that could even operate without electricity, which is a boon for the Third World where there are so many bad abortions taking place. There was a non-profit down in North Carolina that pioneered ‑ not abortion itself ‑‑ but the quality of abortions, help for botched abortions. That conference brought me wonderful experience in the office of the head of the National Planned Parenthood organization, Dr. Alan Guttmacher. I remember sitting in his office with representatives of the American Public Health Association, The Pathfinder Fund, and Pre-Term (I was on the board of Pre-Term in its early years), an abortion service in Washington D.C. that was pioneered by a man I knew well, Harry Levin.

When I was asked to organize the conference, I was offered the sum of $400 a day. I thought this was a ridiculous amount and suggested that $200 would be quite enough. It was my pleasure to bring that conference in under budget. I achieved this by doing a number of things myself rather than hire others to do them. One exception to this was the published proceedings of the conference. Many who came to the conference from Egypt and other countries around the world had AID (Agency for International Development) money from the United States. That in itself was an eye-opener in terms of the U.S. government's role in these sorts of issues. The conference participants visited a variety of hospitals in the greater New York area to observe the use of this new effective and safe method.

I worked freelance on a number of projects. The Pathfinder Fund sent me to Iran for a month to work up a family planning project, which it hoped USAID would fund. That was an interesting project given the history of U.S. relations with that country. I worked with the Women's Organization of Iran that was led by Princess Ashraf Palahvi¹⁰, the twin sister of the Shah of Iran. Iran under the Shah was quite a progressive country. Muslim countries are thought of as being repressive to women, but not in Iran, which had, for example, women paratroopers. I had a good experience working with this women's group. We planned to send women family planning educators into villages. They would travel on motorcycles and be able to reach out of the way places which the family planning message wasn't reaching. Unfortunately there was some disconnect between Pathfinder and AID and the project never did get funding, even though I spent thirty days working there. I was paid $100 per diem at that time. I worked seven days a week. My day of rest wasn't the Muslim day of rest and vice versa, so I just kept going. I had my own Hermes typewriter and that's how I'd spend my Saturdays, typing up the project proposal. I lived in a small hotel frequented by U. N. workers. All the Farsi language I had amounted to being able to tell the taxi driver to go straight ahead!

The most amazing thing for me personally about this trip was that it took place during the 500th anniversary year of the Persian Empire. The Shah went all out to celebrate. He had food shipped in from Paris. All the hotels were packed. For some reason I needed to go to Abadan, among several different cities I visited. There was no hotel accommodation available there because of the celebrations but I was able to stay at the home of the husband of one of my Iranian women colleagues. Her husband was head of the largest oil refinery in the country and, indeed, in the world. It was one of the refineries run by the British and later nationalized by Iran. Their home stood on the banks of the Tigris River. I'll never forget traveling back to this house on one occasion when the taxi driver fell asleep at the wheel. The road was about three feet higher than the desert sands next to it on either side and off we went into the sand. I ended up on the floor of the taxi and eventually tumbled out of it unharmed, as did the driver, who had the nerve to demand that I pay my fare. On the contrary, I felt he owed me! I left him, flagged down a car and got to my host’s house. As soon as I walked into the house, one of the men who worked there was immediately up on his feet with a little hand brush dusting me off and within minutes I was in the pool behind the house recovering nicely from the excitement of my latest outing.

Redirection

In 1972, Nancy and I moved to Newtown, Pennsylvania because my mother and sister were living in Mercer County and both were in poor health. My sister Georgia worked at Princeton University with the physicist John Wheeler. She lived in Hibben and suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. She was able to continue working only because of the electric typewriter. My mother, who had first lived on Parkside Avenue in Trenton and now had a house in West Trenton, had diverticulitis. Nancy and I wanted to be closer to both of them. In some ways, we were ready to move from Massachusetts. Nancy considered several small towns very thoroughly using Depression era guides to towns and villages. We eventually settled on Newtown and it was a good choice. Laura attended George School to finish her secondary education as a day student. Tom got into the humanities program at Council Rock High School.

Nancy got employment quite quickly at the George School where she worked for six years. Subsequently she worked for the Bucks County Housing group. I on the other hand was a bit of a fish out of water. I had always wanted to try my hand in the profit-making world and so I went to an employment agency which suggested work in a bank. I became Assistant Comptroller at the Broad Street National Bank in Trenton.

I commuted easily to Trenton. One of the enjoyable aspects of my job was to help fellow employees get health benefits reimbursements to which they were entitled. Because of this, I was immediately able to connect with my colleagues in a vital way. I remember helping one fellow work through some problems relating to his heart condition. He was grateful for my help and I was fulfilled in doing my job. At the same time, I got involved with payroll and soon came to know the salaries of everyone at the bank. As an officer of the bank, I would go to officers’ luncheons. With my egalitarian Quaker habits, I would sit where there was an empty seat even if that meant sitting next to the President of the bank. I had confidence and could carry on a conversation and very soon I was given a chance to move from the Comptroller's office to the Trust department, which is the best part of a bank.

The Trust department has multi-generation clients unlike tellers who will see a client for just two minutes. My job was to look at how the bank had managed the various trust accounts. I discovered that the bank hadn't been managing them very well at all. We were not doing a good fiduciary job for our clients, whose accounts had indeed grown but not by the amounts they should have given the rates at that time. The problem was that decisions were made on the basis of trust advice from another bank. The other thing I remember from that time was the estate of two elderly women who had died and an employee who had a claim against their estate. This employee had carried one, or both, of these elderly women to their cars and ferried them to and from medical appointments and he felt that he was being treated unfairly after all his efforts. The estate was planning to give him a few hundred dollars. He was upset and he got a lawyer who happened to be a handicapped woman. The estate also had a lawyer, a Harvard graduate. My role as an Assistant Trust Officer was to take a position in the middle of this and to try to create a little peace as an alternative to the winner-takes-all mentality of a lawyer conflict. I invited the claimant to come to the bank and talk. We sat in the board room, the nicest, quietest place in the bank. I offered him a high four figure settlement. Then I went to the heirs of the estate and suggested a figure of $10,000. The response was positive and immediate. That was Quakerly. Solve the problem. Don't exacerbate the problem. The bank was therefore able to close the estate and everyone was happy, except, of course, for the bank's lawyer who disapproved of what he regarded as my “interference.” Lawyers have little incentive to resolve such disputes, which can drag on and on as a result.

Some months later when I was leaving the bank after having put in what I called my four “desert” years, I received a letter of gratitude from the heir (who as it turned out was a graduate of George School) for closing the estate. She included a check to me for $500 as a gift.

While I was working at the bank, I renewed my interest in squash. Sometimes when things were slow, I played squash in my lunch hour and participated in tournaments at the YMCA and later at the Trenton Club. In fact I won the B Championships once in each place, a throwback to my over-competitive Columbia years when I played with Joe Molder.

When tellers at the bank had trouble communicating with someone in Spanish, I was invariably called in to translate. This happened so often that I spoke to the number two man at the bank and suggested that he hire a Spanish-speaking teller. The response was lackluster, to say the least. So, I went over to the Mercer Street Friends Center and spoke to a Cuban-American woman there. The very next day, they sent over a suitable applicant and she was hired.

Wanting to solve a problem as opposed to living with a problem has always been my attitude. Does that sound like activism? In some quarters it does. Funnily enough, after I had decided to leave the bank and was saying my farewells, one woman responded by telling me that she had missed out on “getting to know the bank's liberal.” I barely knew the woman and hadn't once mentioned my experiences in Cuba while at the bank, but evidently I didn't need to in order to acquire the label of a liberal. My time there was interesting, including the training I and several other new officers had in learning to spot union activity in the bank. Enough said. Working with the bank, I learned a lot about how boards work, how perks such as loans go to board members for example.

During my first two summers with the bank, I was sent to Northwestern University for American Banking Association training. I found this interesting and I was happy to live for a time in a suburb of Chicago, in Evanston, Illinois, which is where my father was born. I was supposed to go back for a third summer in order to get some credential or other, but when the third summer came around, I was no longer with the bank. I had been asked to join the board of Planned Parenthood of Bucks County and I got involved again with the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., where I had stayed all those years before. That Church had an organization called World Peacemakers and I would go down there to help them from time to time.

But a big change was coming for me.

Quakers have an open ministry so everyone is responsible for possibly breaking the silence. Messages come from those who are led to share something that they feel has a spiritual value. Sometimes it isn't easy to break the silence. The silence isn't doing nothing. Quite the contrary, it is doing a lot. One time at the Newtown Quaker Meeting I was led to break the silence. At this time, I was appalled that we were creating nuclear submarines that are not only driven by nuclear power but carry nuclear warheads. The power of one of these submarines is equivalent to fifty Hiroshimas and I felt compelled to ask, “What can we do out of our commitment to our peace testimony?” Later I thought about the question and about who might have had heard that particular message. It occurred to me that I for one had heard it. This is all perfectly logical when you consider that Quakerism is a doing religion.

At this time, a friend of the meeting, Lorraine Cleveland was refusing to pay war taxes. Lorraine was a great mentor who year after year would write a letter against the use of taxes for weapons and war. I ended up being the first staff person for the War Tax Concerns Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. I commuted to Philadelphia from Newtown five days a week and it was fun. We organized a conference that drew 107 people from eight states. The keynote speaker Bruce Crisman was a Mennonite who had been a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He posed the question: “Why do I have to support with my taxes that which I was allowed not to support with my body?” This is a challenging question for Quakers that goes all the way back to the time of John Woolman and Henry Thoreau for that matter. Thoreau spent a night in jail over this during the Mexican American War. (I heard that he would have stayed longer had Emerson not bailed him out.) John Woolman was the great gentle Quaker abolitionist who was a pioneer in persuading Friends to release all of their slaves, which they had done by the time of the Declaration of Independence. It felt right for me to be involved in this effort. I became what is known as a released Friend, which meant that I had the support of the Meeting in following this leading. Some people even sent funds to a Meeting account for living expenses for the Strongs. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) very neatly managed to provide health benefits for me and my family as an unsalaried worker. If, like me, you are a bit of a fitness nut, you don't need much health insurance. Back in Massachusetts when I was working there I had catastrophic health insurance which is great coverage for automobile accidents and the like.

During my time on the War Tax Concerns Committee I was interviewed on the radio (a tricky thing) and on television with a priest and an Episcopal lay person. Out of this movement had come the Peace Tax Campaign that would allow individuals reluctant to pay their war taxes to redirect their contribution, just like a young man doing alternative service. This is quite a challenge for the IRS and the government for which money is the lifeblood. Right now fifty-one percent of the budget is used for current and past wars. The Peace Tax Campaign has been going for a while but back then its leadership was failing and I got on the board because of my commitment to the issue. I was asked to become the staff person for that organization and so I ended up commuting half of the week to Philadelphia and the other half of the week by train to Washington, D.C. Nancy came down and helped put out the organization's newsletter. Tom came down and slept on the floor with me and lent a hand. We kept the office alive and started doing some fundraising, which provided some strength and stability until along came a wonderful Mennonite woman who took over. Marian Franz had been working as a lobbyist for the Mennonite Central Committee. She led the Peace Tax Campaign for the next two decades. The same movement is now in a lot of other countries. It's a messy issue and one that can divide families. I spoke in public about the issue many times. I remember one occasion when a man at Radnor Friends Meeting came up to me after my presentation and thanked me for not making him feel guilty about it.

Although Quakers have a peace testimony, at any one time there is just a small percentage of Quakers, perhaps some ten percent, who are actively doing something as best they can to work for peace. Since there are only about 100,000 Quakers in the country, that’s about ten thousand people. Nancy and I are both on the Peace and Social Concerns Committee of our Princeton Meeting. In my case I work to bring about change in the School of Americas. Nancy works on the problem of torture. These are strong concerns in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and in the Friends United Meeting in the mid-West. The Philadelphia Meeting has, on staff, a wonderful young woman, Priscilla Adams, who owes the government about $60,000. She has refused to contribute to war year after year. I'd guess that about a tenth of the ten percent working for peace are actively engaged in war tax refusal. Even though the IRS was able to go into Lorraine Cleveland's bank account and take the money out, she still made her witness. Nancy and I have used Charitable Gift Annuities to reuce our war taxes but it is impossible to get down to zero on this.

Working at a series of things that sometimes paid and sometimes didn't, turned out to be good preparation for the years after 65, the supposed years of “retirement.” That’s a term I don’t like to use. I prefer the word “redirection.”

During my years in Newtown, I got into book repairing, which I never for a moment thought would blossom as it has. I've been doing this work now for twenty years and no longer think of myself as an amateur but as a professional. I am not a book binder but a book repairer or restorer.

All those years in Newtown I continued the habit of running I had begun in New York City in my days with Coach Joe Molder. When I ran in Costa Rica, the children would cry out “Marat’on, Marat’on!” They were not used to seeing an older man running through the streets in sneakers and shorts. In 1984, my Newtown neighbors up the street, one of whom was a Vietnam veteran, decided to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the town by creating a 10 kilometer run, some 6.2 miles. The runners were going to go right past my door, so what was I going to do? Wave as I watched them go by? Rather than sit on the porch in a rocking chair, I decided to take part. After that race, I ran in about 17 others, 10Ks and 5Ks, until 2002 when knee wear stopped me. The park where I trained and tried to improve my times, Tyler Park, is behind the Bucks County Community College, and that is the place where I started my craft as a professional book repairer.

It all came about because I had a small back problem. One day I was up in the mezzanine level of the library in the 900 section, my favorite field, history, when I observed that the books were accumulating on the shelving carts. It occurred to me that reaching up high and down low would loosen up my back and so I became the library's “mystery shelver.” They caught me doing this one day. It just so happened that this was around the time when the library was thinking of instituting a volunteer program. So, I became one of their first volunteers. One of the activities that volunteers got involved in was tutoring. There was also a need for books to be repaired. Well, there was no shortage of volunteer tutors so, with my love of books and seeing the need, book repair was my choice. I was immediately reminded of a great friend whom I'd met all those years ago when I came home from college and decided to embark on reading the 100 best books. Arthur Rushmore¹¹ designed books for Harper & Brothers and had his own printing press, The Golden Hind Press, in Madison, New Jersey. He set the type for all of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems. So I began repairing books, learning technique by examining books that had already been repaired. Repairing a book requires meticulousness. If you are using tape it has to be just the right fit. If the tape is too long or too short the result might be another tear.

I found out that the National Endowment for the Humanities was running a two-day program for book repairers at Johns Hopkins University and I went down to Baltimore at my own expense and learned some important things. After that I commuted for a year on Wednesdays to Princeton, to the University to work in the conservation department in Firestone Library. They have some really fantastic staff there and I got to do an increasing amount of volunteer work. That came to an end when the Local union wanted full-time job positions at the library as opposed to volunteers and “work-study” students. And I still agree with this.

Firestone Library occasionally offers interesting programs on this subject, one of which Nancy and I attended in Chancellor Green with a paper specialist from the Library of Congress who demonstrated ways to maintain books. Over the years at Bucks County Community College, I repaired over ten thousand books. I worked a lot during the hot summer, enjoying the library's air conditioning. This is work that librarians are often conscripted to do, especially for small repairs that seem too minor to send out for professional repair. But librarians don't, as a rule, have the tools or the supplies for this work: the weights to hold a book open, the proper glue or tape, or the experience. Having grown into the work, I found myself presenting the basics of book repair in a workshop for the South Eastern Pennsylvania Librarian's Association at Camini College. They offered me a fee and a three-hour slot. Twice as many people turned up as was expected because this was information that librarians were eager to get hold of. They very kindly doubled my fee as a result. I had been recommended to them by a woman who worked in a college library in Doylestown. It was a neat experience. As I walked around the room, I saw that people had brought damaged books from their libraries. We discussed each book and how best to go about restoring it. I also gave a couple of continuing education classes at Bucks County Community College. I found that there always seems to be a problem with continuity. It’s not possible to take three people off the street and set them up as book repairers because their interest may stem from wanting to repair their own three books and after that they aren't interested.

During my time at Bucks County Library, I had some helpers whom I trained. One woman, Diana Grodin, who later became the librarian at the Trenton Times, was my best helper. She was also a Quaker from Yardley Meeting and had taught French at George School. We enjoyed wonderful conversations while we worked. Another student was an Asian American who simply wanted language experience. If someone is going to be a good book repairer, you can always tell. Right now, I need one for the Princeton Public Library, because the quantity of books is ever growing as they attract more people and, in particular, more children.

Our daughter Laura engineered our move to Princeton. She lives two streets over and she heard that this duplex was going to be sold. The owner was a divorcee, newly remarried, who was going to move to upstate New Jersey. We were the first people to see it and we jumped at the chance. The first people who looked at our house in Newtown took it. We had no brokers on either end. You can easily continue a balanced life in Princeton. Living here we can reduce our car mileage, we can walk everywhere. I continue my craft, using my hands daily.

Even though I had been a serious volunteer in Bucks County, it took a little while to find my niche here in Princeton. Lucia Acosta, the Columbian-American wife of Jorge Sarmiento, whom we had known as a boy in high school in Peru and who is now a full professor at Princeton University smoothed the way for me. To date (December 2009) I have repaired some 2,000 plus books. Sometimes a book really needs to go to a bindery, but sending a children’s book out to be re-bound is increasingly rare. When there are multiple copies, the damaged book can be tossed. If not, it might be replaced. When I spoke to the head of the children's department recently, she told me that each book that is repaired saves the library $15. So to date, my contribution to the Princeton Public Library is about $30,000. Now I have a website and, with the publicity from a superb article in the local free newspaper Town Topics, I have people coming to my home with family treasures for repair: bibles and mementos, dictionaries, cookbooks, a picture frame embossed with the English Royal Insignia, aviators’ logbooks, favorite books such as a Princeton University 20th reunion album, and a leather-bound wedding album, for which I received a bottle of Champagne as well as a fee!

One of the most important things about living, short or long, is balance. You have to keep your mind engaged. A liberal artist has an advantage there, being interested in so many things. Recently someone asked me “What was your profession.” Well, I'm not sure I had a profession, I had leadings. I wanted to do things that no-one else wanted to do, or that weren't being done well enough, according to some good standards. But, if I have to be labeled, I'll be a “liberal artist,” someone who, because of the breadth of his education thinks he can do everything and, if he does that a lot, and keeps getting away with it, he keeps right on doing it. Balance is a major part of that, just as it is in the physical world, in not depending on curative medicine but in the practice of preventive medicine. Fifty percent of people over 65 get no regular exercise. The sedentary life leads to diabetes, heart problems, obesity.

For me it has always been important to avoid becoming trapped by what people around you are telling you they live for. I have always admired people who can sustain a job for 30 or 40 years but on the other hand, I know people who climb a ladder for 20 or 30 years and pay for it with their health and then wonder where their lives went. As parents, Nancy and I have tried not to overwork our kids' decisions. Our son Tom also went to Guatemala and traveled around learning Spanish. He volunteered in a finca del nino, a farm for orphan kids (orphaned by Guatemala’s years of war) where he taught math in Spanish for six months, with kids climbing all over him. They had group houses there for the kids with a woman who was kind of a mother/caretaker. Tom was the only guy around. Nancy and I went there and I remember being frisked by a military guy at the Guatemala/Mexican border for some crazy reason. To get to the finca we had to cross a little river, and even before we got down to the water, there were locals offering to take us across. The next day, one of the teachers didn't show up and Tom said, “Okay Dad, you can teach that class.” There I was on a cement platform under a thatched roof expounding on some such math or history, using my Spanish to beat the band! There was nothing but the sound of my voice. Eventually the kids started to need to get their pencils sharpened and began disappearing to the bathroom, so I decided that doing calisthenics was probably a good idea. I finally sent one of them to get Tom to come and rescue his Dad.

Nancy and I recently celebrated our fiftieth anniversary for which the kids put together a delightful book! Laura must have written a hundred letters and people we've known over the years wrote nice things about us, including Betsy Crofts from the Meeting in Newtown and others. An additional volume of photographs of the celebration in Spain was put together by our daughter-in-law Pura. Tom and Pura live in Barcelona and for the celebration they rented a house in the ancient town of Peratallada. The name means carved stone and everything there is carved, from the pavements to the walls, to the arches over the narrow streets. It was wonderful. We ate meals together and mucked around together. The house, which was owned by an Englishman, had a small pool for the four grandkids to enjoy. We spent a week there and went to the shore and to other places. They concocted a little play for the children: Bill and Nancy going through their marriage. At the conclusion of the week, Tom and the two boys and Nancy and I went up into the Pyrenees to what had been some sort of religious institution which is now a hotel. It was reached by a one-track railroad and there was a little oompah band greeting visitors off the train. That was the frosting on the cake for Nancy and me. We did some hiking and it was wonderful to see Tom interact with the two boys. He helped them enjoy hours of climbing by pointing out what was growing on the mountainsides and showing them the tracks of small insects and so on. The boys just followed the leader.

Both our kids are great parents. They have both been around the world. One time they met up in Vietnam. Like two anglos they were followed by the local kids. Laura had taught English as a Second Language in Mexico and then in Japan, where she met her husband, and then in Paris. So she has had jobs in three continents. Laura owned a little property in Thailand and Tom and Pura went there once. Before that Tom had visited India. It was Christmas time when he got there and he wanted to be in a part of the country which celebrated Christmas, so he went to Goa, once a Portuguese colony. There he found he could sleep on the beach in some kind of simple lean-to that cost a buck a day. His food cost a buck a day. If you contrast this with people living on not just thousands but hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's crazy. The disparity really underlines the Quaker testimony of simplicity. People don't need stuff. “People need fulfillment!”

Nancy and I are now deeply into Princeton Quaker meeting and we contribute to Trenton looking to foster equality through Isles and Planned Parenthood. I maintain my interest in Latin America through involvement with the issue of the School of Americas, which is ugly foreign policy by the United States. In Latin America it's known as the School of Assassins and its presence has reverberations throughout all the Latin countries. Chile has just reduced the number of soldiers it sends to the School of Assassins, becoming the seventh country to do so. With changes in Congress, we can get legislation to defund that school this year or next. I am also involved with Pastors for Peace, which goes to Cuba without permission every year. We had a benefit for them right here in the backyard of our home in Princeton. I continue to be involved in walking and in activism. There are lectures at the University to attend and audit. I am particularly interested in social and gender studies. Back when I was in college, I had no women professors. I appreciate Princeton University for the degree to which its leadership today is comprised of women: President Tilghman, the head of the chapel, the woman who headed the engineering school and the woman treasurer who lives across the street from us.

But even as I appreciate the University, I believe there are people pursuing careers there who are almost surprised when somebody actually does something with what they have studied. You can study poverty until you are blue in the face. You can study the prison system endlessly. Sometimes all that academics get out of their study are better questions to study. Walter Lippman¹² said this so clearly. You can't write a whole book of terrific indictments and then offer only a few feeble solutions on the last page.

Nancy and I picked cotton in Nicaragua and I cut sugarcane in Cuba. Those were experiences rather larger than the regular tourist visit to a country. It is possible to travel, learn by doing and avoid falling into the typical tourist traps by traveling with groups such as Global Exchange, Witness for Peace or the Venceremos Brigade.

At the start of my eighties, I'm preparing for my nineties and looking beyond to the inevitable part of life which is death. Death is nothing but the ultimate adventure. Nancy and I continue to support each other and continue in health and the wealth that comes from fulfilling lives and the riches of a great family. Nancy is the person who has enabled me to live the life I have lived.

I have been extremely fortunate in so many ways. And now, with the assistance of Linda Arntzenius, my wish to emulate my beloved Grandfather’s memoir is done. Mil gracias. To be continued.

Chapter Notes (source: Wikipedia)

1. The Moody Bible Institute (MBI) in Chicago was founded by evangelist and businessman Dwight Lyman Moody in 1886. In early 1886, D.L. Moody established the Chicago Evangelization Society, for the “education and training of Christian workers, including teachers, ministers, missionaries and musicians who may completely and effectively proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.” In 1926, the Institute expanded its reach beyond education and publishing by sponsoring the first non-commercial Christian radio station in America, WMBI. Over time, MBI’s radio outreach grew to the Moody Broadcasting Network (MBN) which now owns and operates 35 commercial-free stations and provides programming via satellite to more than 700 outlets.

2. William Strong (1808 - 1895) was a justice on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. Born in Connecticut, he later moved to Pennsylvania. His cousin was U.S. Representative Theron Rudd Strong of New York. Strong attended the Munson Academy in Massachusetts and later graduated from Yale University before starting legal practice in Reading, Pa. In 1846, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as an abolitionist Democrat. He served two terms in the House, and was the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Elections during his second term. He did not seek reelection in 1850, but returned to private practice. Strong was appointed to the Supreme Court of Pa. in 1857 as a Democrat, but switched to the Republican Party soon after taking the bench. He resigned from the court in 1868 to return to a lucrative private practice in Philadelphia. When Justice Robert C. Grier retired from the U.S. Supreme Court, Strong was suggested as a possible replacement. However, President Ulysses S. Grant was heavily lobbied to nominate former Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Stanton was nominated, and confirmed by the Senate but he died just four days later without having served on the Court. Grant then nominated Strong, who was confirmed. Justice Strong wrote the opinion for an early equal protection case in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1879). He served on the Supreme Court until December 14, 1880, when he retired despite still being in good health, partly to set an example to several infirm justices who refused to give up their seats. Strong resumed the practice of law and pursued religious causes until his death, at Lake Minnewasa in 1895. He was interred in Charles Evans Cemetery in Reading, Pennsylvania.

3. Carmine DeSapio (1908 – 2004), politician from New York City, was the last head of the Tammany Hall political machine that was active in New York politics for 150 years, and dominated them for 80 years. Born in lower Manhattan, DeSapio, whose father was an Italian immigrant, started his career in the Tammany Hall organization as an errand boy and messenger for precinct captains. He was first elected a district captain in 1939, but was rejected by the leadership in the struggle between Irish and Italian interests for control of the organization. In 1943 he was accepted as district leader for lower Greenwich Village. In 1949, he became the youngest Boss in the history of Tammany Hall, gaining notoriety from alleged involvement with organized crime, even though he fought to distance the organization from the unsavory days of Boss Tweed. In 1953 he earned new respect for the continuing power of Tammany Hall when he led the defeat of incumbent mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri in the Democratic Party primary by Robert F. Wagner, Jr., and Wagner's victory in the general election. Then in 1954, he brokered W. Averell Harriman’s victory as Governor of New York. He served in Harriman's cabinet as Secretary of State of New York. His leadership ended in 1961 as a result of efforts by Eleanor Roosevelt who felt DeSapio had derailed her son's (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.) political ambitions by persuading him to abandon his run for governor of New York in 1954. DeSapio reached a low point in 1969 when he was convicted of conspiracy and bribery. He served two years in federal prison (1971-1973).

4. Church World Service (CWS) is the relief, development and refugee assistance ministry of the thirty-five Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican denominations that make up the National Council of Churches USA. Founded in 1946, CWS works in partnership with indigenous organizations in more than eighty countries worldwide to meet human needs and foster self-reliance. The organization raises money through CROP Walks.

5. Caretas is a weekly newsmagazine published in Lima, Peru, renowned for its investigative journalism. It was founded in 1950 by Doris Gibson and Francisco Igartua.

6. Clarence J. Gamble was the heir of the Procter and Gamble soap company fortune. He was an advocate of birth control, and founded Pathfinder International.

7. Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (1900 – 1965) was a politician, noted for his intellectual demeanor, eloquent oratory, and promotion of liberal causes in the Democratic Party. He was the fifth U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, in office 1961-65. He served one term as governor of Illinois, and received the Democratic Party's nomination for president in 1952 and 1956; both times he was defeated by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. He sought the Democrat presidential nomination for a third time in 1960 but was defeated by Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachussetts. After his election, President Kennedy appointed Stevenson as the Ambassador to the United Nations, he served from 1961 to 1965. In April 1961, Stevenson suffered the greatest humiliation of his career. After an attack against defending Cuban forces at the Bay of Pigs, Stevenson unwittingly disputed allegations that the attack was financed and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, claiming instead that the anti-Communist forces were supported by wealthy Cuban émigrés. When Stevenson learned that he had been misled by the White House, and even supplied with CIA-forged photographs, he considered resigning the ambassadorship, but was convinced not to do so. Actor Peter Sellers claimed that his portrayal of President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove was modeled on Stevenson.

8. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left in opposition to the Vietnam War. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969. In the spring of 1968, National SDS activists led an effort on the campuses called “Ten Days of Resistance” and local chapters cooperated with the Student Mobilization Committee in rallies, marches, sit-ins and teach-ins, which culminated in a one-day strike on April 26. About a million students stayed away from classes that day, the largest student strike in the history of the United States. It was largely ignored by the New York City-based national media, which were intensely focused on the student shutdown of Columbia University in New York, led by an inter-racial alliance of Columbia SDS chapter activists and Student Afro Society activists. As a result of the mass media publicity given to Columbia SDS activists such as Columbia SDS chairperson Mark Rudd during the Columbia Student Revolt, the organization was put on the map politically and “SDS” became a household name in the United States for a few years. Membership in SDS chapters around the United States increased dramatically during the 1968-69 academic year.

9. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was a group of volunteers from the United States who served in the Spanish Civil War in the International Brigades. They fought for Spanish Republican forces against Franco and the Spanish Nationalists. The Lincoln Brigade was made up of volunteers from all walks of American life, and from all classes. Many of the people who volunteered were official members of the Communist Party USA or affiliated with other socialist or anarchist organizations, such as the Uruguayan Hugo Fernández Artucio. Members of the Industrial Workers of the World (“Wobblies”) were also represented. It is sometimes thought to be the first American military unit to be commanded by a black officer, Oliver Law. The ALB archives are located at NYU and dedicated staff publish the quarterly, Volunteer, preserving the legacy of these heroic anti-fascist men and women.

10. Princess Ashraf ul-Mulk, the twin sister of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah of Iran currently lives in Paris, where she was exiled by Mossadegh for her part in a coup that brought her brother to power in 1953. Born in 1919, she was a strong supporter of women's rights during her brother's reign. In 1953, she played a role in Operation Ajax as she was the one who changed Mohammad Reza Shah's mind in giving the consent to CIA and SIS to start the operation, which her brother had originally opposed. In early 1953, she met with CIA agents who asked her to talk to her brother since she was the only one who was able to change his mind. Some Iranians view her as a traitor to Iran. Others regard her as a patriot. In 1975, she was heavily involved with the International Women's Year, addressing the United Nations. In her memoirs she wrote: “Two decades ago French journalists named me “La Panthère Noire” (The Black Panther), I must admit that I rather like this name, and that in some respect it suits me. Like the panther, my nature is turbulent, rebellious, self-confident. Often, it is only through strenuous effort that I maintain my reserve and my composure in public. But in truth, I sometimes wish I were armed with the panther’s claws so that I might attack the enemies of my country.” She was chair of the activist Women’s Organization of Iran.

11. Arthur W. Rushmore (1883 - 1955) designed books for Harper & Brothers and had his own printing press, The Golden Hind Press, in Madison, New Jersey. Rushmore and the firm of Harper & Brothers were in fruitful collaboration for a period of some forty-five years. He made his debut as designer in 1911, when he created a new cover for Harper's Magazine, the first change in its cover design in thirty years. He founded the Golden Hind Press in 1927, an independent endeavor in fine printing bearing his own imprint. Rushmore used the Golden Hind as a laboratory for his ideas on typography, title page design, page layout and illustration, hand-setting nearly one hundred works for Harper & Brothers, including many of the limited editions of the poems and plays of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The press issued approximately 200 books. Of this number 90 bear the Harper imprint, 50 the Golden Hind imprint, and the remainder a variety of notable publishers. The press was located in Madison, New Jersey at 59 Fairview Avenue in a large 19th century farm house, which was also was the Rushmore family home. The operation of the press was largely a family venture with Arthur as printer, his wife Edna Keeler Rushmore as compositor, daughters Elaine as proof reader and Delight as designer of many of the German paste paper covers used in the binding of Harper and Golden Hind Press books. Rushmore was a board member of the Madison Public Library for many years. That library houses his papers and has a Rushmore Room with his handmade publications and photographs of him and his work.

12. Walter Lippmann (1889 - 1974) was an influential American award-winning writer, journalist, and political commentator. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and 1962 for his syndicated newspaper column, “Today and Tomorrow.” As a journalist, media critic and philosopher, he tried to reconcile the tensions between liberty and democracy in a complex and modern world, as in his 1920 book Liberty and the News. He was a founding editor of The New Republic magazine and was an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson during WW I. Though a journalist himself, Lippmann held no assumption of news and truth being synonymous. For him the “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman used one of Lippmann's catchphrases, the “Manufacture of Consent” for the title of their book, which contains sections critical of Lippmann's views about the media: Manufacturing Consent.