My friend the child prodigy Marxist in Appalachia who never told me his real name

Before we had the Internet there was shortwave radio listening. It was the way for United States residents to hear alternatives to the State Department spin on world conflicts, as well as domestic issue commentaries not sponsored by U.S. corporations.

Shortwave stations in the 1970s and early ‘80s, when my listening was at its height, were almost all operated by governments, and they broadcast in the languages of listener nations. Some governments slanted programming in their ideological interest, but the wide mix of perspectives – a forerunner to today’s podcasts and audio streams -- enabled listeners to make up our own minds.

I started shortwave listening in 1977, and Radio Havana Cuba soon won me with dazzling music programs and persuasive stories of the revolution’s great social policy successes.

Radio Netherlands and Japan’s NHK had particularly friendly informal programing. Radio Canada International was fresh and clever. Deutsche Welle (Voice of West Germany), Radio Stockholm Sweden, and Swiss Radio International were polished and eclectic. And the BBC was, well, the BBC -- and in the ‘70s and early ‘80s it was available to Americans only over shortwave.

But holding court as the grandest of them all was Radio Moscow, and their best show was the twice weekly “Moscow Mailbag,” featuring answers to questions from listeners, in our case to their English language service to North America.

For years, Radio Moscow announcers would read the full street addresses of those of us who mailed in questions, which would range from, “Do you eat pizza in the USSR?” to queries about human rights, the SALT treaty, Soviet housing shortages, and “Do the movements for Women’s Liberation and equal rights for homosexuals exist in the USSR?” (that was from me in 1978, and to summarize, the answer was: absolutely yes on Women’s Liberation, and absolutely no on gay rights.)

So, from what place in America would you think came this question I heard on Moscow Mailbag in 1979: “Is there any bourgeois thinking left in the USSR?”

Try Hazard, Kentucky. Someone deep in the flag waving, pickup truck driving, churchgoing mountains asked such an objectively conscious question right out of a manifesto you wouldn’t find in libraries for a hundred miles around Hazard.

When the Mailbag show was repeated two hours later, I jotted down his address and immediately U.S. mailed a letter to Robert Thomas of Hazard, Ky. which outlined my interest in the ideological realm of his question. I was surprised to get a hand-written reply about a week later.

I eagerly opened it, half expecting that Mr. Thomas was a prankster, a government agent fishing for leftists, or a holdover anti-poverty worker who had moved there in the 60s from New York or Chicago, though I held out hope that somehow this person was a born-and-raised Eastern Kentuckian.

Well he was. Robert was passionately interested in socialism, and the “great Soviet people,” he penned.
Oh, and he was 14. That was six years younger than I, a person who had expected I’d be corresponding with one of my elders, like a veteran of the 1930s coal strikes.

More letters ensued in which Robert said he had taught himself French, was fascinated with Beatles music and attended a prestigious boarding school near Hazard. He sometimes went with his family on shopping trips to cities including Louisville. When in the city, they had crossed the Ohio River to Clarksville, Ind., Robert added, for visits to the Green Tree Mall, which was 10 minutes from my home in New Albany, Ind.

On a Saturday, a surprise phone call came from a pay phone at that shopping venue, and minutes later, the Green Tree Mall -- where I had worked my first job, played my first video game, and bought my first necktie – became the place I met my first other young radical.

Young, as in pulling two crumpled dollar bills out of his blue jean pocket to pay for the soft drink he insisted on buying me.

Two socialists amid the bourgeois bounty, Robert Thomas and I met here,
in Clarksville, Indiana's Green Tree Mall in 1979.

Robert was eager to please, and reassuringly impetuous, like a 14-year-old should be. When exchanging left wing socialist observations with me, he was relaxed and knowledgeable.

Who Robert’s family was and how they felt about his championing the proletarian revolution was unknown to me. A girl about his age walked toward us from the middle of the mall and summoned him back to the Thomas party by calling “Hey Larry, we’ve got to go.”

The instant I asked about the name Larry, I realized I should have let it go; leftists who don’t yet know who they are dealing with would be wise to use aliases. And his name had to go out to the whole of North America over Radio Moscow.

He seemed off guard and uncomfortable during the moment it took him to explain, “that’s my middle name.” His letters began coming from “Robert L. Thomas,” with the conspicuous middle initial added seemingly to give credence to that explanation. But I totally understood his need for a boundary between us. I may have been his closest ideological friend between the Appalachians and the Rockies, but back home, he’s a Marxist in Hazard, Kentucky, for goodness sake.

Other than that awkward instant, Robert seemed happy and confident in the mall, and eager to communicate more.

Telephone conversations in the coming months revealed him to be every bit the classic 14-year-old – excitable and capricious, with flights of fancy for new passions each time we talked. His Beatles interest became all-consuming – when I asked him in a letter what he thought were the biggest news stories of the soon-to end-1970s, no. 1 on his list was the Fab Four’s breakup.

Robert and I were no ideology’s rubberstamps. After explaining in a letter his great enthusiasm for the Marxist economic methods, he added: “Unfortunately, socialism isn’t perfect,” mentioning such disparate matters as Stalinist cruelties and booby traps set for U.S. soldiers by the Vietcong.

And as for the stereotype that during the me-generation period, a 14-year-old who listens to shortwave and knows socialist ideology must be an isolated nerd, forget it. Robert told me of his girlfriends, dalliances, and age typical hormone-driven wishes.

Pornography entered his life, and he said his mother stringently objected to that. During a phone call, I explained that my understanding of Marxism (another of Robert’s tendencies his mother disliked) placed porn into the category of exploitation.

“Tell her pornography is bourgeois self-indulgence and your Marxist beliefs are the best thing you have going for you to fight the porn,” I said. I didn’t think Robert would give that any consideration, but he immediately lit up, exclaiming: “Hey, that’s right!”

Turning away from the phone he shouted: “Mom, pornography is bourgeois self-indulgence and my Marxist beliefs are the best thing I have going for me to fight the porn!”

You’re welcome, Mrs. Thomas.

In subsequent letters and phone calls, Robert talked up Hazard as an educated and elegant town that had been maligned as a backwater. He also said he had a ham radio system and he showed vast knowledge of the amateur radio technology. Ham lets a user broadcast, not just listen, and Robert began prodding me to buy and learn such a system, so we could talk without tying up our families’ lines or running phone bills up.

A very Robert-like young
person using a Ham radio.

I was just a listener to shortwave, not a broadcaster. Though ham operators did seem to me to have an intriguing mix of public access and privacy, I was not up for that much intricacy. Finding and tuning in a distant and unconventional station elated me in just the right way.

This was pre-internet so sending a missal was more involved -- and receiving one was a special occasion. Opening a hand-addressed envelope from someone whose observations you value brought a feeling of anticipation so percolating that you had to be careful not to tear the letter itself.

And over time, the relatively elaborate effort involved in letter writing made that habit vulnerable to life’s distractions, and my contacts with Robert would ebb and flow. I recall a letter in which my friend seemed less enthusiastic, then contact between us waned for five or six months.

Then, in mid or late 1981, Robert wrote again. I sensed that this letter would be different, perhaps because of the long disconnect.

Robert’s penchant for jumping from passion to passion was evident again.

“I have become a born-again Christian,” he wrote. That alone did not portend any shift to the right. This was a time of Liberation Theology and anti-nuke nuns, when Bob Dylan and Noel Paul Stookey had called themselves born-again Christians. Of course, it was also a time of Rolex-wearing hucksters making tax-free millions on their TV ministries.

In a phone call, Robert still seemed free thinking, though more sedate. He neither denounced nor praised his radical left views. In a subsequent letter, which I believe was the last I received from him, Robert told me he would attend Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.

Perhaps out of respect for Robert’s situation, or because it would have been awkward, I neglected ever to ask Robert the pertinent question, what is your actual name? Sounds silly that I never knew with certainty what it was; I mean we weren’t secret agents. But given his place and his views, guarding his real ID may have been called for.

In online searches in the decades hence, all I have found is that Thomas clearly was not his last name. Combinations, including that name that his relative uttered in the Green Tree Mall, have not connected with anyone at Moody, his boarding school, or the city of Hazard, Ky.

I do not know if Robert, Larry or whoever, went on to denounce “satanic Marxism” along with pornography, promiscuity and booze as the evils cleansed by his born-againness, or whether he is still a leftist who sees Karl Marx’s philosophy as being in line with the prophets of the old testament condemning greed.

Or maybe he went on to recycle 2-litres, buy home video, donate sweaters to the shelters, have a beer now and then, vote for Gore and keep the doctrinal zeal under control.

Wherever you are my anonymous friend, I’m sure a visit with you, in a mall or elsewhere, still is unforgettable.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA. For this true story, the name Robert Thomas, and the middle name Larry, are changed from the name his real life friend used over shortwave radio, in letters and in person.