My brother and I reportedly spent a lot of time at the hotel unattended, going up and down the elevators, to the consternation of the management. My mother told me she hated the hotel living, complicated by the fact they couldn’t really afford it. She said they also couldn’t afford my father’s fancy Buick, even though by now he had risen to be a partner in the architectural firm of Long and Thorshov, later Thorshov and Cerny.
Father’s extended family. My father’s extended family on Long Island was wealthy, and had always been quite liberal politically. Our branch descended from Quaker stock that had fled the British Civil War in the 1640s, and settled in New York, New Jersey, and later Nantucket Island. By the twentieth century the family prided itself on being fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and supporters of Democratic politics.
The family grouping consisted of five intermarried families: the Mudges, Crarys, Ingersolls, Ingrahams, and the Shotwells. Mudge was a prominent New York attorney who had a private railroad car that regularly carried the gregarious, close-knit group into New York from Long Island. He was the famous lawyer that founded Mudge, Rose, Alexander (and later Mitchell and Nixon). My great-aunt Mary married Henry Ingraham, a lawyer, and their daughter, Polly Bunting, became the President of Radcliff College, and was also on the Atomic Energy Commission. (As an aside, Polly Bunting’s son was one of the students on a three-masted ship that sank in the Atlantic; he miraculously survived. The incident was the basis of the movie “White Squall.”) My great-aunt Mary was a major player in the reorganization of the City colleges of New York, and heavily involved in promoting public education. She had occasional lunches with President Kennedy to discuss national educational issues. Ray Ingersoll was the well thought of (so I’m told) borough president of Brooklyn and had strong ties with the Democratic Party machine of New York, particularly during the era of New York mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia. Even though the Shotwells were not in the same economic strata as others in the grouping, they were still an integral part of the extended family.
I spent many summers during my teens, in Northport, Long Island, and Darien, CT, living alternately with my grandfather and my father. The Crarys and Ingersolls owned a private island off the coast of Northport called Duck Island, and had their large summer homes there. The grounds included a softball diamond, a four-hole golf course, clay tennis courts, and little coves and inlets for their boats; an incredible private preserve. As a young boy, I remember well the annual softball games on Labor Day and Memorial Day, and meeting various dignitaries. Stories floated around that before my time there were many visits from Mayor LaGuardia, and also a singular visit from Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. I personally recall two times quite vividly when I met and talked with the perennial socialist presidential candidate, Norman Thomas about baseball. He sat in a chair during the festivities, elegantly clad in a white suit.
Although politics was a frequent topic, this was not hard-core leftist ideology of the “working man’s” Democratic Party. This was the other end of liberalism, the kind associated with the Kennedys. The politics here at play was the idealistic side of Democratic philosophy, better labeled as “benign liberalism,” whose adherents would fall into the category of “limousine liberals.”
What my father carried from his family as he went off to college was a benign liberal political outlook regarding helping the less fortunate, encouraging the Negroes to rise out of the oppression of the South, and other such endeavors. He gradually became more politically involved after his college years, but never at a level that could be described as socialist or Marxist. His architectural education was imbued with the liberal German Bauhaus International Style, promoting austere housing for the masses, eliminating what was perceived by the new order as the past indulgence in gaudy architectural ornamentation, and introducing modernism to the populace. This new order slowly crept into the architectural curriculums of most major universities, and usurped the old European Beaux Arts approach to design.
In his architectural profession, my father was primarily involved with business promotion, rather than design, and he was very good at it, given his gift of gab and gregarious nature. And it didn’t hurt that the business needs of entertaining played well with his interests in parties, drinking, and affairs with women. Even so, I heard him say, “My ability to get business kept the firm going during the war years.” He also mentioned something to me once about being involved briefly with some OSS (precursor to the CIA) airport facility on one of the Pacific Islands, but I was unable to confirm the story. He was ineligible for the military as polio had severely affected the muscles of his leg.
My father was the life of every party he attended, from his college years to the end of his life. He called everyone he met by their first name and developed friends both in the political and business arenas. For example, he became a close friend of Democratic star, Hubert Humphrey, and other emerging more conservative members of the Democratic-Farmer Labor Party. In later years, when I visited him in Chevy Chase, Maryland, he introduced me to his neighbor, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and he was able to contact other highly placed people in the government, seemingly at will.
My father never ventured politically left of Humphrey, unlike my mother, and was always anti-communist in his basic political framework. It was a great personal loss for him when Humphrey was narrowly defeated by Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign. He mentioned to me that, had Humphrey won, he would have been appointed the National Architect. I’m not sure if that was real or a fantasy, but with his patrician bearing and disarming friendly manner, he was able to present the proper image, despite his ongoing battle with alcohol. He lived his final years on Okracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, and died at age 66 of a heart attack during surgery for throat cancer at Duke University.
By delving into my parents’ pasts, I’ve tried to create a foundation for my own upbringing. I also wished to describe my mother’s general unhappiness and discontent, which played a large part in the choices she made in regard to politics, as well as her choice of her future husband. Further complicating her journey was the burden of raising two young sons, with little help from my father.
* * *
PART II
A HARD LEFT TURN
CHAPTER 2
NEW HUSBAND, ORVILLE E. OLSON
A short time into their marriage, my parent’s relationship began to decline, no doubt abetted by my father’s drinking, affairs, and frequent absences; but also due to the fact that he and my mother had generally incompatible backgrounds and personalities. My father, with his gregarious and refined persona, and my mother, with her generally narcissistic, humorless personality, were simply not meant for each other.
It’s difficult to go back and reconstruct my feelings at that young age, but I do remember having once “run away from home.” I was found by a woman quite a distance away, sitting on her front yard steps. I don’t remember all of the circumstances, but it might offer a glimpse into how unhappy I was at a very young age.
Almost immediately after her marriage was terminated, and possibly before, my mother entered into an ill-fated relationship with Orville E. Olson, whom she had met, accompanied by my father, at friendly poker evenings and political events. She was not a well-educated woman in terms of academics, which may explain why she looked up to and was enamored by Orville’s “bright mind.” He was a dedicated communist ideologue, a good talker, and a world-class manipulator. He spouted communist doctrine and the benefits of the Russian model with ease.
Before my mother and Orville were married, I remember being brought to a political meeting in a large hall. We were put to bed in an adjoining room, and Pete Seeger sang us to sleep. Seeger, who recently died at age 94, was the popular folk singer/minstrel who was also a committed communist. He sang about and espoused leftist ideals throughout his career. One folksong I remember was about the engineer Casey Jones, on the “SP (Southern Pacific) line,” but Seeger changed the final words and had Jones driving the “CP” (
Communist Party) Line.
Orville had been married twice before. His first marriage produced two daughters and ended in divorce in 1937, largely due to his extramarital affairs. The discord culminated in a confrontation at a motel between Orville, his father, and brother, Bernie.
Orville’s short-lived second marriage produced another daughter, born in 1937. He once confided to me that he never considered that relationship a “real marriage,” because of its short duration. However, that notion would have been painful for any daughter to hear.
Orville and infidelity seemed to go hand in hand. During my mother and Orville’s courtship, my mother discovered he was having an affair with “a former girlfriend,” who was a secretary at the Progressive Party Headquarters. Infuriated, my mother abruptly broke off the relationship, sold her home in Minneapolis, and on a whim decided to relocate to Mexico. She purchased a new 1948 Oldsmobile convertible in the beginning of 1949, pulled Peter and me from the University of Minnesota Elementary School, and drove down through the dusty back roads to Mexico City.
Orville came down several months later and begged forgiveness. As suddenly as we had moved south, we returned to Minnesota. The two were married in 1949 and my half-brother, Bjorn, was born in 1950.
Orville’s fourth and last marriage was to a woman I considered to be emotionally challenged. I understood that her family was grateful to Orville for having married her, even though it was, once again, a troubled relationship.
Orville, who loudly espoused the rights of the masses, the struggle of the “haves” against the “have-nots,” and the demand for the government to care for each and every citizen so that “there would be no more want,” took a less generous road with his own family. After the demise of his first marriage, one of his daughters told me, he contributed “about $100 every couple of years.” He also never offered or contributed anything for the post-high school educational costs of any of his children. In my case, he did not like the fact that I was going to study architecture, as it was a “bourgeois” occupation that catered to the rich.
Orville’s early life. Orville was born on November 24, 1908, the eldest son of a hardworking Norwegian Minnesota family. The family home was near the Mississippi River in a Norwegian-Swedish neighborhood. It was a strict Lutheran environment; no dancing, no cards, no liquor. I never saw him dance a step; however, contrary to his upbringing, cards, liquor, and smoking were an important part of his life.
During the twelve years I lived with him, and seeing and conversing with him over the ensuing years, I never remember Orville mentioning his mother or father. I learned about them from his interviews, and talks with his oldest daughters. They recounted that they and their parents lived for a time with Orville’s father, Ole Bernhardt “Ben” Olson (1883—1938) who was fondly known by the grandchildren as “Papa.” Ben Olson had no formal education, was a laborer in early life, and later worked as a clerk in the post office, rising to the position of Minneapolis assistant superintendent of mails. He was a union member whom Orville described as teaching him to “never cross a picket line” (an idea also ingrained in me in my early life). Orville’s mother, Minnie A. Benson Olson, was a quiet homemaker with only an eighth-grade education. She was born in 1888 and died of cancer in 1930.
Early on, Orville became an avid reader, particularly in the areas of history and religion. By age seventeen or eighteen, he was attending a Lutheran seminary while working at odd jobs, including at the post office. During this time, he was preaching the Word and salvation through Jesus Christ at the penitentiary in Stillwater, Minnesota. In his interviews he mentioned he enjoyed hearing the Amens uttered by the prisoners in an Easter sermon, and admitted that he still occasionally thought about that period. He later said in a quizzical statement, “I still wake up at night sometimes, thinking about my belly’s grinding and I’m thinking that I should’ve done such a thing. It’s one of those things that stays with me all these years.” He also stated, “I moved toward socialism partly because of the Bible,” because the socialists were talking about “peace, love, and sharing,” similar to what he had learned in church regarding the teachings of Jesus.
Orville was twenty-one when the Great Depression began. He attended the University of Minnesota for a year or so, but was unable to continue due to lack of money. Believing society should fund public education, he was angry that this benefit was not forthcoming for him. This turn of events fueled not only his evolution toward communism, but also his anti-capitalist rage.
By the age of twenty, he was no longer a believer in Christianity, and in short order substituted his religious ideology with political ideologies, beginning first with Norman Thomas style of socialism and later communism. After joining the Socialist Party, he was issued his red card, which he described as having to keep secret with his job at the post office. The deeper he entered into leftist politics, the more his anti-religious sentiments intensified, to the point where he became an avowed atheist and hater of the Christian religion, with particular disdain directed at the Catholic Church, considered to be the most anti-communist of all the faith traditions.
Interestingly, Orville always had a Bible on his bookshelf, sometimes explaining that it was “good history” and other times proclaiming that it was only there “for reference.” During Orville’s final weeks in a nursing facility in Santa Monica, California, he kept that same Bible on his nightstand. It must have held some deeper meaning as he certainly wasn’t doing historical research then. I visited Orville many times in those last days, and a few times, at his request, I read Bible passages to him, sitting at his bedside. He listened intently, with no comment.
Orville’s political history. In 1982, Orville was interviewed at length about his political history by Johnny Highkin, a son of one of his left-wing, Progressive Party friends from his Minnesota political days and later in California. The recorded interview was for a college political science class that he was taking. The unpublished interviews took place over thirteen sessions, which were transcribed by Highkin. I have studied this transcription in depth, as well as oral transcriptions from the Minnesota Historical Society, which sheds a bright light on Orville’s emerging radical philosophy and the choices and actions they produced.
Describing his political life, Orville stated that he worked for Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration and as an administrator of state relief funds in rural Minnesota during the mid-30s. Later, he was active in the Farmer-Labor Party as a political advisor to Gov. Elmer Benson, and during the administration (1936—38), he served as director of personnel for the Minnesota Highway Department. He referred to the highway department as a patronage job and a front for labor organizing; a good example of creating a legitimate-sounding government entity with ulterior goals. After the Benson defeat in 1938, Orville lost his patronage position, and moved on to various brief assignments including his short stint with the National Youth Administration in Washington, DC.
The following year, 1940, Orville was sent by Gov. Benson on a three-month tour covering thirty-one states in order to assess the leftist political environment of the country for the coming elections. During his travels from the Midwest to the West Coast, he met with many significant leftist leaders in the political field; the labor and maritime unions (NMU); and the progressive farming and agricultural heads. He went to pool halls, listened to political speeches, went to packing houses, spoke with railroad workers, farmers and other individuals. But one of the most impactful events occurred in San Francisco where he witnessed a Labor Day union parade comprised of sailors and longshoremen marching down Market Street in a procession that went for miles. The show of unity and the power of labor choked him up in the retelling to Highkin. After returning to DC, he wrote a report that accurately predicted the outcome of the upcoming interim elections. It was sent to the White House and was read with interest by President Roosevelt.
A second similar trip took place in 1945, when Orville traveled with Elmer Benson, Beanie Baldwin, and others t
o raise money for the 1946 interim elections and the National Citizens Political Action Committee, the precursor to the Progressive Party. The trip by train again covered the Midwest and the West Coast, with meetings with influential leftists, for the purpose of developing future plans for political action. Included on their schedule were visits to the irascible Harry Bridges, outspoken communist leader of the Longshoreman’s Union; Anita Blaine (donor); FDR’s son, James Roosevelt; CIO leaders; Hugh de Lacy (future communist congressman); the heads of the Communication Workers union, and many others.
During the war years, Orville secured work, through his extensive leftist connections in Washington, in the War Shipping Administration under deputy director Admiral Edward McCauley, concentrating his efforts on labor relations. He rose from McCauley’s assistant to the role of director of recruitment for the Merchant Marine. He stated in his interviews that he applied for a commission in the army, but was turned down for “asthma and hay fever.” He also stated that an FBI report regarding his leftist political involvement also prevented him from being accepted. (Earlier, in the same general vein, he claimed an FBI report had prevented him from landing a position with the Social Security Administration.)
He also claimed in his interviews that he turned down a commission offered to him by Admiral McCauley, as a “Lieutenant Commander in the Navy” with the proviso that he retain his job in war shipping. He stated he later regretted the decision as it would have provided him with a pension.
He also stated that at age thirty-six, in the waning months of the war, he asked Admiral McCauley to arrange a position for him as an ordinary seaman on a munitions convoy to Cherbourg and the Isle of Wight, as he had never been on a ship and was “scared to death of water all my life.” This rite of passage took two weeks, and while he was in Cherbourg, he received word of President Roosevelt’s death.
Immersed In Red Page 4