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.

Mister, we could use a man like WHO again?

All right, dummy up, all ‘o youz!

Here’s the story of the other U.S. presidential campaign scandal from 1972, though this one really was nothing more than third-rate.

And it’s about a transgression not by that bigoted vindictive liar Richard Nixon, who had treasonously sabotaged a peace agreement in 1968 to get in the White House in the first place, then obstructed justice four years later to stay there. Nope, this lapse in integrity was by the progressive George McGovern.

It was so tiny a lapse it is historically irrelevant -- forgotten by all but the most hardcore political history wonks. Which is why I am the person writing about it.

If a burglary and cover-up didn’t prevent President Nixon from trouncing the liberal senator from South Dakota by 22 percentage points in the popular vote, a little identity sleight of hand by a popular actor on behalf of the McGovern campaign didn’t stave off the resounding 1972 landslide loss either.

For context, consider the landscape of McGovern’s race in the autumn of that year: much of his own Democratic party is not with him, the AFL-CIO under the powerful George Meany has declined to endorse him, his central issue the Vietnam War has been wound down (and the Nixon campaign’s 1968 sabotage is still secret).

                                     
The '72 Race on the Airwaves: Each side defines Senator McGovern: He says he will make things fairer for the average American. Nixon says he would leave us defenseless.

As though his problems weren't enough, McGovern had to eat an unprecedented amount of crow days after the Democratic Convention by replacing his vice-presidential running mate Tom Eagleton with Sargent Shriver. As the fall campaign went on, the voters were not terribly concerned about the Watergate break-in, instead fearing McGovern’s perceived “radicalism.”

Now, addressing this r-word label, comes perhaps candidate George McGovern’s last hope: a TV ad featuring the very face of meat-and-potatoes American conservatism.

The ad opens with Carroll O’Connor striking exactly the seated pose of his signature character Archie Bunker when Archie would be in his iconic living room chair, the spot from which he would launch brusque and uninformed conservative salvos weekly to TV audiences.

In this ad for McGovern, O’Connor decries, “the radicalism of the present administration.”

Nothing misleading about that. But O’Connor then says:

 

“Radicalism is what any conservative must try to remove from authority, and that is why I, as a conservative man, am going to vote with confidence for Senator George McGovern.”

 

Calling Nixon radical makes perfect sense; his war on drugs is a radical right purge of minorities, his invasion of Cambodia opened the way for Pol Pot, and his agricultural policies would soon enable corporations to obliterate the small family farm. That’s the stuff of Juan Peron or Mussolini.

Whereas the “radicalism” label is correct, just who is the labeler? Carroll O’Connor is recognized on sight as the snarling bigot Archie, but off the set of the wildly popular and influential CBS show “All in the Family,” he is an eclectic and educated liberal.

O’Connor, who would go on to do TV ads for Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1980 runs in presidential primaries, is not the man who continually lauded “Richard E. Nixon,” in debates with his “pinko” and “Polack” son-in-law Mike. That was Archie Bunker.

It wasn’t O’Connor who tore into his wife’s cousin Maude’s pieties by declaring, “This country was ruined by Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” – or, for that matter, who started each show by harmonizing that, “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!”

All that, as well, was Archie.

So just who is it who is telling the voters he is “a conservative man” in this ad for the most liberal Democrat to run for president?

Deceptive, or at least pandering though it may have been to represent Carroll O’Connor to the voters as Archie Bunker, the normally hyper-ethical Senator McGovern could read his dismal poll numbers during the fall of 1972. After the ad ran, McGovern talked it up, and did nothing to disabuse viewers who weren’t up on the fact that O’Connor was no Archie Bunker.

In a broadcast appearance by the candidate in Los Angeles featuring live phone calls from average voters, McGovern, as reported by the L.A. Times, said:

 

“I want to thank Carroll O’Connor for his endorsement…. Carroll O’Connor is known to most of you as Archie Bunker. The only thing we ask is that all of you who like Archie Bunker vote for George McGovern and Sargent Shriver.”

 

Those who liked Archie Bunker were in large part what demographers would shortly call “Nixon-crats.” These were blue collar working families who celebrated the clichéd social conservatism trumpeted each Saturday evening by the fictional Queens loading dock worker. Archie’s full-voiced pronouncements demonstrated no awareness of how his family’s comfortable life at 704 Houser St. was possible because of FHA mortgage guarantees, the G.I. Bill, minimum wage laws, farm subsidies, and the right to form unions – all given to him by the FDR he calls the ruin of America.

This array of once cherished New Deal reforms, obscure to the voting public by the 1970s, wasn’t working as a rallying call any longer for the Democratic Party. The liberal O’Connor seemed to realize this, never alluding in the ad to the traditional Democrat economic egalitarian ideal, content to fashion himself a conservative.

And George McGovern, for all his idealism and 2 am-acceptance-speech devotion to principle, also was a politician. Playing to that tendency of the American public (or as his endorser might call them, “dingbats”) to confuse TV actors with their characters is the kind of thing to which politicians will resort when they’re down by 22 points.

Brian Arbenz enthusiastically backed George McGovern in 1972, even to the point of welcoming the endorsement of "a conservative man" who appeared to be named Archie. Hey, in elections ya do what ya gotta do. 

WEST'S SLY STORY - The serial imposter who abused trust, hearts and souls in 1990s Cincinnati

He was glib, well dressed and punctual, and he dispensed pharmaceuticals and performed outpatient surgery with the competent air that reassures any hospital patient.
 

Thomas D. West of the Cincinnati suburb of Erlanger, Ky. had everything you could ask for in a doctor.

Except a diploma.

For 14 months in 1990 and ‘91, West, then in his early 30s, impersonated a doctor as he regularly roamed four hospitals in Cincinnati, donning medical scrubs and carrying stethoscopes and fake IDs while performing outpatient procedures, injecting people with medicine, and making false prescriptions.

Sometimes he would arrange to meet up with people at a particular hospital after getting to know them in restaurants and learning of their ailments.
Other times West would enter emergency rooms and patients’ rooms to seek out victims.

The procedures West performed are known to have included two pap smears and the treating of a leg lesion with a medicated cream and an unidentified type of acid.

The game was up in August 1991 when West was arrested for allegedly stealing travelers checks from one of the people receiving his treatments, who was also a police officer. The police investigation that ensued blew the lid off the 32-year-old West’s bogus medical practice.

Though all of West’s “patients” consented to the procedures, his lack of a medical school education changed everything: the pap smears got him charged with two counts of “gross sexual imposition” and the lesion treatment was alleged to be “felonious assault.”

West’s list of charges also included making false prescriptions, practicing medicine without a license, use of a scalpel on one person and of a hypodermic needle on two others, trespassing at one of the hospitals, and – as the original check thievery charge indicates – West was no more scrupulous away from hospitals. He was charged with stealing $11,000 from a girlfriend.

For Cincinnati’s Good Samaritan, Christ, University of Cincinnati, and Jewish hospitals, nationwide news reports that an imposter with no medical training had unfettered access to innocent people’s most personal realms brought the public image catastrophe of CEOs’ nightmares.

Yet, the hospitals seemed to adopt a PR strategy of downplaying this gigantic breach of safety and dignity. The Associated Press reported:

“Spokesmen for University and Good Samaritan hospitals have said they see no reason to change safety procedures. The hospitals use security cameras, require doctors to produce identification on demand and restrict access to drug cabinets.”

Nancy Strassel, spokeswoman for the Greater Cincinnati Hospital Council, also exuded ice water in the veins, telling media the Cincy area’s 34 hospitals were not exceedingly troubled by the revelation of West’s charade.

“Security at hospitals is something that is continually monitored,” she said. “I can't say that there has been one specific thing hospitals looking at this have found they needed to change.”

One absolute change was Thomas West’s residency. He was sentenced to three years in a prison at Lima, Ohio after pleading guilty to 12 charges in October 1991 in return for prosecutors’ agreeing to drop 13 others.

The hospital spokespersons’ statements sounded so understated perhaps because of the prospect of civil litigation by the people West had conned.

Indeed, three years later, the Ohio Court of Claims ruled that one of the four institutions, the then state-owned University Hospital, was 60 percent liable for the damage to three of West’s victims. The exact awards would be determined later.

"We will be arguing for high damages. These people suffered an invasion of the deepest privacy rights," John Metz, a Cincinnati attorney who represented the three victims, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The morning newspaper and its afternoon counterpart the Cincinnati Post quickly began digging into West’s past as soon as news of his 1991 arrest broke. And the deeper reporters probed, the stranger the story of Thomas David West became.

For starters, he had changed his name a few years after he graduated from Holmes High School in Covington, Ky. in 1976 as Thomas Wietholter. (Who am I to judge? I changed my legal name in my 50s -- but read on.)

The Enquirer reported that West/Wietholter had worked as a police dispatcher in nearby Florence, Ky. from age 21 to 25. He resigned for unspecified personal reasons, but his departure followed complaints he had passed himself off in public as a police officer and displayed other bizarre behavior on the job.

The Florence Police Chief told the paper West seemed to undergo an identity change, dressing, styling his hair, talking and walking in the manner of a particular Florence police officer, whom the chief would not identify. The fixation went so far as West buying an automobile like the one owned by the officer of his obsession, the chief said.

Between 1980 and ‘91, West married 

and divorced twice, had no children with either wife, but had two children with a third woman with whom he lived while he was single or separated. The paper said her name was Sandra Murray West, but did not indicate whether she changed her name because of their co-habitation, or the name was pre-existing. (His change from Wietholter to West was between 1978 and ’80, the Post said.)

The couple’s second child was born after West had moved out of the residence he and Sandra West had shared. Even though he had proposed what would have been his third marriage to another woman before the second child was born, Thomas West moved back in with Sandra West and both of their children, and soon moved with them to another Northern Kentucky apartment shortly before he was arrested.

On 1988 records of his second divorce, Thomas West listed his occupation as physician and his age as 38. He was in fact 29 and had never studied medicine, but the Enquirer interviewed several people who recalled West during that period telling them he was a doctor.

On his filing for his first divorce, in 1983, West listed his occupation as psychoanalyst.

Nancy Geppert, the woman West asked to become his third wife, had a long on-and-off association with him. Geppert, a co-worker with West in the mid-1980s in the repossession department of a furniture store, said West told her he was quitting that job to earn a law degree.

The two kept in touch, and she recalls West telling her a few years later he earned his law degree and would soon start pursuing a doctorate in psychology from the University of Cincinnati.

The Enquirer said the university had no record of West enrolling there, or in the UC medical school, where Geppert said West told her he was taking courses. The paper said Cincinnati police investigators found no record of West having any college degree.

Geppert told the Enquirer that West persuaded her to let him use the upstairs of her Cincinnati home as the office of a medical firm he was establishing. He told her it was called Physicians Consultations and Medical One, and though the Enquirer said it was listed in the telephone book, state records did not show West as the owner of any business.

One of several landlords West rented from in the Cincinnati area told the Enquirer West often used the excuse of a doctor’s busy routine to explain being late with the rent.

Joe Fischer, who rented an apartment in Erlanger, Ky. to Thomas West and Sandra Murray West and their children told the Enquirer that long before he evicted the family and sued for back rent and other charges, he figured Thomas West was making up his story of being a doctor.

"I quickly had his number. He had a story for everything… and they were always bizarre," Fischer told the newspaper. "He was either up with a 'patient' all night, had an emergency operation, or had to take his daughter to the hospital…. I learned after a while he was full of bull. I even told him once: 'Just save your breath, Tom, I'm not buying it.'"

The Ohio parole board in late 1993 was buying the idea that West had learned his lesson and paroled him from prison after he served 18 months of his three-year term. They were right, in that he stopped faking it as a doctor.
 
But in not much more time than it took him to drive the 200 miles home from Lima and get resettled in greater Cincinnati, the free man Thomas David West was on the phone asking two private investigators to help him weed out corruption in Kentucky politics as – wait for it -- Thomas D. West attorney at law.

Before heading back to prison for posing
 as a lawyer, a somber appearing Thomas
D. West confers with his real lawyer. 

West told the PIs he was a lawyer with the Cincy-based law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister investigating an unnamed state senator in connection with the construction of a $20 million juvenile detention center in Northern Kentucky.

Though anyone who knows Kentucky politics would know you don’t have to look far to find a legislator worthy of investigating, this example of corruption existed only in the toxically overactive imagination of Thomas David West.

And because three years ago he got caught lying to untrained people such as landlords, restaurant customers and significant others, maybe trying to fool private investigators this time would be safer. Nope, West’s parole was quickly revoked.

He was sent back to the same prison, sentenced to six to 15 more years, his tearful statement to judge John Keefe that, “All I ever wanted to do is help people” contradicted by the harm, insecurity, stress and mistrust West's misdeeds inflicted on Ohio and Kentucky residents.

"You say that,” Keefe replied, “But actions speak louder than words.” Sharper observations came from some of West’s victims and acquaintances.

"I think the system failed the first time," said Roberta Frazer of Cincinnati, one of the people to whom West passed himself off as a doctor. "I think he needs help. I think he needs counseling."

Erlanger, Ky. Police Detective Dave Wood knew West’s family, and worked as a patrolman with West’s brother, officer Ronald Wietholter, in nearby Fort Wright for five years. After West’s 1991 arrest, Wood told the Enquirer: "It just floored me, because I'm such good friends with his brother. His parents are such good people.”

Yet, Wood knew of West’s claim to be a doctor, though he figured it was just harmless fantasizing. "I certainly didn't know he was practicing."

Also after West’s 1991 arrest, the woman in whose home he set up a bogus medical company before proposing marriage to her talked freely to media about being bamboozled.

"I'm very hurt by it. I don't understand why he's done what he has done," Nancy Geppert said. "He used my car, used my house, my money, my emotions.”

                           ____________________

Brian Arbenz contributed news coverage of the Thomas David West story as a reporter and desk editor for Associated Press in the early 1990s. His legal name and byline then was George Morrison, though his new name did not portend any fake professional practices. 

THE JFK ASSASSINATION: AS IT HAPPENED (100+ HOURS OF TELEVISION & RADIO COVERAGE): CBS-TV

THE JFK ASSASSINATION: AS IT HAPPENED (100+ HOURS OF TELEVISION & RADIO COVERAGE): CBS-TV: ========================================= ========================================= MORE CBS AUDIO & VIDEO: ...

The Day Facebook Died

I had decided to let TV sail off without me when the switch to digital came in 2009; I did not buy a new set or converter. The last program I watched was the inauguration of President Obama.

I had believed that over the previous 25 years American television news had abandoned its priorities.

“We really don’t know very much about how this war is being waged,” ABC’s Forrest Sawyer casually told viewers in January 1991 at the start of the U.S. involvement of the Persian Gulf War. It was hardly a protest by Sawyer, but more of a disclaimer followed by weeks of dutiful digesting of Pentagon-supplied factoids and videos. Contrast this compliant tone with what happened eight years earlier when NBC’s Tom Pettit testified before Congress, condemning the Reagan Administration’s iron-fisted blockage of reporter access to the Granada invasion, the same policy that now in the Persian Gulf made PR people -- willing ones at that -- out of Sawyer and others in the one-time journalism profession.

At home, TV is uncritically passing on to us the lies that somebody got rich because McDonald’s coffee was too hot, and that racism is over.

The digital switch, a hassle for most Americans, was a gift to me – a way to get this nightly stress and these feelings of abandonment by the once watchdog profession of news out from in front of me.

Though I didn’t plan it this way, social media came calling in about a year. The same friends who had gotten me acclimated to e-mail in the mid-1990s explained why this thing called Facebook was all the rage.  Like so many other users, I started a profile for reasons of, “what-the-heck, why not?” then after a pause for an illness, I was by late 2010 an up-and-running Facebooker into more threads than my Grandma had kept in her sewing box.

Facebook could be a roller coaster ride. There were those nasty nighttime street fight threads over right wing zealots’ nonsensical claims. There were often nice, but sometimes disappointing reconnections with old childhood chums. There was the chance or two to tell a schoolmate of my crush on them decades ago, and to enjoy the long-deferred hearing of their flattered pleasant reactions.

What I loved most about Facebook, however, were not flashbacks to my past, but stumbling upon people with whom I seemed instantly in synch. It was as though I’d known them for decades.

And forming connections and group ties with them reduced my longtime stress problems, perhaps because their intelligence and moral honesty gave me refuge from a society where birtherism and other corporate money driven disinformation had derailed the national discourse.

And one of those collections of smart, eclectic, outlandish and never fooled people formed as an official Facebook group that was created as “secret,” rather than “private,” meaning that all comments and other interactions are visible only to other members. The group’s existence became known only upon the founder inviting someone to join.

And the founder was the coolest. So were the other most active members.

The group’s theme was of an “underground club” or “salon” of respectful yet daring conversation. Not an “anything goes” free for all; we knew that raunchy self-indulgence is a cover for the patriarchal orthodoxy. We abided by real  freedom.

We were from all over the continent, and some were beyond it. The vast majority would never meet, of course. But a few did – two even got romantically involved, traveling about a thousand miles to meet and surprise us with snuggle pics.

I was just out of a long period of social isolation, and whereas I may not have been skilled enough yet to socialize face-to-face with such confident, experienced people, this group was the best preparation. Such wonderful undeluded cynicism, everybody holding each other up.

At a 2011 book signing,

my comfort meant more

 than book sales. 

A picture of me taken in 2011 (which happens to be my Pluspora pic right now) summarizes my feelings in that period. That easy smile was a long time in coming. The pic shows me at a book signing. (My self-publishing of books was just marginally successful. But who needed professional success, when you were doing so vastly better as a person?)

I was learning not to be ruled by demons. Negativity and perpetual images of doom that had intruded on my perceptions for decades were being evicted from my awareness. I was grasping that although life included potential horrors, it could be good, and because of that potential for good, I was allowed to focus on the positive. Bad didn’t define everything, and there were attractions to people based on good and nurturing.

And god, I loved the club. As said, it facilitated my real-life social development, and one weekend afternoon in 2013 -- a Sunday as I recall – I had driven home from an overnight get-together out of town with some friends (real life ones). I went through the usual routine of settling back in -- coat off, leftovers in fridge, and of course, computer on.

What I immediately saw was the result of events I still cannot fully explain. First, I had an invitation to join a new  secret Facebook group, named funkily in honor of the founder’s favorite childhood TV cartoon. That’s fine, but the person who sent this invite was one of the top posting and most colorful members of that “underground club.” Why would she hastily have formed this group? And why were a few other active members of the club now in it?

I went back into the original group and found that these people had left it. Members still in were un-characteristically straightforward and terse, all talking back and forth in complex and somewhat vague terms about whether some member had gotten a raw deal, or had deserved what he received. Yep, a lot had transpired in my 36-hour absence. Some sort of massive blow up had wiped out the lively verve of the underground club.

It was as though I went to my favorite place, only to find it a smoldering pile of ruins.

Over the next hour or so of puzzled examining of the posts in my old club, and this new place, I steadily pieced together what had ripped everything -- and everyone – apart with such brutal swiftness.

One member, a woman who lived in the southern U.S., had demanded that a male member be expelled for posting something so awful that – well, I still do not know what he actually posted, but I sure do know the topic: rape.

The founder of our underground club, a woman who lived in the northeastern part of the country, had declined to remove him. Like her southern counterpart, the founder was a strong feminist and unafraid to verbally blast patriarchy, racism or anything else hateful.

To know which of them was right required knowing exactly what was posted by the man on the Friday night when our club began what logically should have been another fun and rebellious weekend. His post had been removed, as had some of the immediate reactions.

To this day, I cannot imagine what could have been at the same time horrible enough to one of these indomitable progressives to clearly require expulsion, and yet to the other not warranting such action. At first, I was frustrated that I was so in the dark from having missed the incident itself. Then, after I scrolled back through the weekend's comments and saw one member’s response to whatever that problem post had been, I decided it was better that I had been away.

This member, a woman, had blasted the man in a chant-like string of emphatic verbal attacks, some surrounding the word “rape,” as though she were attacking the term itself, as well as him. It looked to me like a bid to exorcise horrors from her own consciousness. I recognized her comments as the sort of OCD/anxiety fueled rituals from which I had long suffered. I have never been sexually assaulted, but I was accosted as a 13-year-old, and years before that, I was ritualistically mentally abused by a teacher denigrating solely me in front of the rest of the class regularly for my entire 4th grade year.

I have been diagnosed as having both simple and complex PTSD, both in partial remission. That remission process started about four years prior to this “lost weekend” on Facebook. And it has continued since; things are steadily improving. But my innocence about the unmitigated good of social media to me, or the world died that afternoon.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA

Was Dolores really Gretchen? -- The Woman Who Suddenly Spoke German

An Ohio man whose wife was suffering back pain in May 1970 suggested to her that he try to ease her suffering by using hypnotism, a craft he had practiced as a hobbyist for 16 years.

While Carroll Jay had his wife Dolores under hypnosis in their Mount Orab, Ohio home, he asked her a question, then was surprised to hear Dolores answer: “Nein.” Though he spoke no German, Carroll Jay recognized that as “no” in the language. Yet as far as he knew, his wife, who was in her late 40s and had been married to Carroll Jay since she was a teenager, also had never learned German.

Once awake, Dolores Jay confirmed that she indeed had no knowledge of the German language. Three days later, Carroll Jay again hypnotized his wife so he could gain some insight into whether that apparent answer was a fluke, or perhaps just a German-sounding mumble or groan from the back pain.

But instead of reassuring the couple that all was normal in their conventional household 20 miles east of Cincinnati, the second hypnosis session showed that the spoken “Nein,” was just what it sounded like – and the Jays were launched on a bizarre linguistic adventure that defied rational explanation.

This time, the hypnotized Dolores Jay was speaking entire sentences in German, even though for her entire life, she had been an English-only speaker. As Carroll Jay used a German language dictionary and his own wits to try to follow what his hypnotized wife was saying, he was able to determine that she was assuming the persona of someone else. Though details of her many sentences were beyond Carroll Jay’s grasp, he clearly picked up that his wife was identifying herself as “Gretchen.”

Carroll Jay decided to invite a few friends and acquaintances who spoke German to come to the couple’s home to listen in at more hypnotism sessions in mid- and late-1970 and on into 1971, relying on the visitors’ German proficiency and his language dictionary to try to learn more about this “Gretchen.” The German speakers told the Jays that she described herself variously as a 16-year-old, or as young as eight. At whatever age, the same “Gretchen” persona always manifested under hypnosis and kept doing so after the Jays moved to Elkton, Va. in 1973. But wherever she was hypnotized, Dolores Jay always reported after regaining consciousness that she did not recall Gretchen or anything her German speaking voice had produced.

Carroll Jay, an ordained United Methodist minister who had served in churches in Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama and Ohio, had never professed a belief in reincarnation. Though he and Dolores had associated with some people who believed previous lives were real, they had never joined any pro-reincarnation groups or attended any events or lectures on the matter.  Nor had they joined any hypnotism organizations; he practiced the craft primarily to help relieve people’s pain.

Carroll and Dolores Jay continued the hypnotism sessions, and they invited German-speaking researcher Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia to converse with “Gretchen” during several of them. Stevenson wrote: “During the experiments it was possible to influence Gretchen to assume different ages between eight and 16. She did not like to be 16, however, and firmly refused to advance beyond that age. She said she had died at 16, but gave fragmentary and somewhat differing accounts of how she had died.”

In some accounts, Gretchen said she died of illness; other times she vaguely indicated that being imprisoned led to her death. Though Gretchen spoke in German only, she responded to questions put to her in German or English. Stevenson, a psychiatrist and researcher from the UVA Medical School’s Division of Psychiatry, reported these findings in a 1976 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.

Despite these variances, most of the story told by “Gretchen” was consistent in each hypnosis session – and it was elaborate. Stevenson wrote that Gretchen identified her family name as Gottlieb and said she was from the German town of Eberswalde. “Gretchen” said her father was Hermann Gottlieb, the town’s mayor. She said her mother was dead and her closest companion was “Frau Schilder,” her family’s housekeeper.

In keeping with the story of someone who died so young, life was not easy for this person, character, or voice -- Gretchen expressed fear of the “Bundesrat,” and identified the head of her religion as Pope Leo. Stevenson said those statements would place the persona Gretchen in Germany in the 1870s, when the Bundesrat (“federal council”) was the governing body of the states of the North German Confederation. A century before Dolores Jay’s first hypnotism session, Stevenson wrote in the Journal, a power struggle between the secular Bundesrat and the Roman Catholic Church was resulting in persecution of Catholics in Germany.

Stevenson and others fluent in German – including German natives -- attended a few of Dolores Jay’s hypnosis sessions and heard audio tape recordings of others. They also read transcripts typed up from several other recordings.  In all, Stevenson attended or heard recordings of 19 of the sessions where “Gretchen” manifested.

"Xenography" was also part of this mystery. Dolores Jay, as "Gretchen" wrote in (sort of) German while she was hypnotized. Jay's awake handwriting, at bottom, differs.

“Having been convinced that Gretchen could speak German responsively I extended my investigation into the question of whether Dolores Jay might have learned German normally in childhood or later,” Stevenson wrote. “She and her husband both firmly denied any knowledge of German prior to the development of the experiments at which Gretchen emerged and they both signed affidavits to that effect. Dolores Jay stated that she had never studied German in school or otherwise and had never even heard it spoken apart from occasional phrases on radio and television programs. She took a polygraph test for lie detection with results affirming the honesty of denials of previous knowledge of German.”

Hmmmm. What we have here is by no means a failure to communicate. This was a failure to explain communication. The term in parapsychology for what happened when Dolores Jay was under hypnosis is “Xenoglossy.” That means an occurrence of a person speaking, without assistance of any kind, a language which they have not learned.  It is called a paranormal phenomenon, putting it up there with channeling, telepathy and other tabloid news.

Yet, a homemaker from small-town America was experiencing Xenoglossy – with no apparent motive for fakery. The Jays were seeking no financial windfall and fairly limited publicity in a time when sensational stories like Gretchen didn’t instantly “go viral.” The couple gave interviews to only The Washington Post, one newspaper in Virginia and NBC Nightly News, then by the mid-1970s they withdrew from public life.  Carroll Jay said he used those mainstream news media only to counteract accusations from his and other Christian denominations that he pursued the “Gretchen” case as part of cultist or satanic rituals.

Stephenson did exhaustive research into the history and geography of the area where Gretchen’s words indicated she would have been. He wrote that the only Eberswalde he could find was 60 kilometers northeast of Berlin (making it then in East Germany) and that inquires to that city “failed to uncover any evidence of a person corresponding to Gretchen’s statements.”

Stevenson wrote that his research showed Eberswalde had not had any mayor named Gottlieb, though he added that Gretchen’s anxious talk about the Bundesrat matches the mood a Catholic in that region would have had about that ruling body during the 1870s. Only after Pope Leo XIII and Chancellor Bismarck of the German Empire began to reconcile their differences about a decade later did the repression of German Catholics ease, he wrote.

From Eberswalde in the east, researcher Stevenson turned his focus to the north, and the city where Carroll and Dolores Jay grew up and met as teenagers. He traveled to Clarksburg, W. Va., about 100 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pa. and conducted “a searching inquiry into their childhoods with regard to the possibility that she might have learned German then and afterwards forgotten that she had done so.”

Though throughout his career as a psychiatrist and researcher, Stevenson drew criticism for advocating the possibility of the pop-science idea of reincarnation, with the Jay case he employed considerable skepticism.

Stevenson interviewed 19 Jay family members, friends and neighbors in Clarksburg and other Harrison County, W. Va. communities, including Eastview, which he described as the suburb of Clarksburg where Dolores Jay lived almost all her childhood after being born in May 1922. His research indicated there were no German speakers in Eastview during Dolores’ youth, and Stevenson also checked census totals from 1920 and 1930 to figure how many Harrison County residents listed their birthplaces in Germany, Switzerland or Austria. (It was 217 in ’30, the year Dolores turned eight.)

Stevenson wrote that Dolores Jay’s father was of mixed ancestry, but no German. Her mother had two great-great grandparents (who likely would have been born around 1800) who were German, but they died long before Dolores’ birth. A local historian told him of a few German speakers in the 1920s and ‘30s a mile to the west and a few others a mile to the north of Eastview.

“So far as I could learn, there were no German-speaking persons within the ordinary range of a young child, even one less supervised than Dolores Jay appears to have been,” Stevenson wrote. “The German language was not taught in the schools of Harrison County during the period when Dolores Jay (and Carroll Jay) attended them.”

But what of the 16 years during which Carroll Jay used hypnotism as a hobby and to help people reduce pain? In the years after the couple’s four children were grown and moved out, Dolores was Carroll Jay’s only co-resident, which would have given him unfettered access to her mind had he wanted to plant ideas inside it while she was sleeping, or perhaps unknowingly hypnotized. Whereas there is no evidence Carroll Jay did this or anything else dishonest, Ian Stevenson wrote straightforwardly in the Psychical Society Journal of holes in the theory that “Gretchen” was speaking from the past.

“Gretchen’s German grammar,” he wrote, “was much more defective than her vocabulary. She spoke mostly in short phrases consisting of only a few words, and her word order, a feature of much importance in the German language, was quite faulty. She rather often simply omitted words, especially auxiliary verbs. She showed no knowledge of the inverted word order used in German subsidiary clauses. And she seemed to have almost no ability to use the past and future tenses of German verbs.”

To me -- a person who studied German for three years in high school and two in college -- those tendencies by Gretchen say: “first year student.”

On April 23, 1971, the Gretchen case entered the realm of “Xenography,” as on that day she wrote German words on a paper under hypnosis that were strung together in phrases that were about “Gretchen’s dominant theme of religious persecution,” Stevenson wrote. Some were misspelled, but then Gretchen had said early on that she had never learned to read or write.

Were Dolores’ abilities and shortcomings combined with Gretchen’s to produce such mixed results? Dolores could read and write, but knew no German.

Moreover, could the pronunciation errors be explained by the fact that German “Gretchen” spoke her language through the larynx and jaw of American Dolores, who had not developed even an iota of the precise tongue movements and disciplined, firmed-up jaw positioning that do not come naturally to people who don’t grow up speaking German. After five years of devotion to learning the language, I still have that laid-back English speaker’s jaw that Germans can spot instantly.

And “Gretchen” often said she was worried about being overheard by the authorities, Stevenson wrote. Anxiety will mess up anybody’s concentration.

But that is cutting the Gretchen theory a lot of slack – like enough to reach from Virginia to Eberswalde.

“Some of Gretchen’s grammatical errors were those typical of Americans who have learned German imperfectly,” Stevenson conceded. “Her grammar fluctuated in quality, at some times being appreciably better than at others.  It did not, however, show any noticeable improvement during the three years she was exposed to correct German spoken to her by persons from whom she might have learned to improve her own language.

“Gretchen’s pronunciation was excellent at some times, satisfactory or good at most other times. Occasionally she grossly mispronounced a word. Neither I nor my three German colleagues who spoke with Gretchen detected in her accent (or other aspects of her language) features that were geographically localizing, that is suggestive of the dialect of a particular region of Germany or Austria.”

Caveats like those from one of the leading practitioners of parapsychology tell us that whereas you had a good run, and chilled us with awe, it’s auf wiedersehen, Gretchen.


Brian Arbenz of Louisville, Ky. USA believes the Dolores Jay story has a rational explanation, but he confesses to sometimes freaking out over "Gretchen." 

His Career Was Comedy, His Bio a Series of Mysteries

“Hey, whose Grandpa didn’t tell some tales?” asked the headline on a New York Times obituary in February 2006 for television actor Al Lewis, best known for playing the vampire-ish Grandpa on “The Munsters,” the 1960s CBS comedy.
 
It was a lighthearted and deservedly cheery send off for a brilliant character actor, political activist and restauranteur whose contributions to our lives ranged from a million escapist TV laughs to bold radical street activism.
  
The headline was also a colossal understatement. Al Lewis told more than just “some” tales like the embellished fish stories everybody’s grandfather leaves us with. In fact, the same obit story listed him as age uncertain. That’s because the birth year once had been publicly misstated by Lewis, who was born in either 1910 or 1923 as Alexander Meister. Or Albert Meister. In New York City. Or 287 miles from there in Wolcott, a small town in far upstate Wayne County, N.Y.
 
That town near Lake Ontario entered the Al Lewis narrative late in his life when a reporter asked him why no birth certificate in NYC could be located to clear up the matter of the actual year in which he was born. Lewis then explained that his mother had briefly lived in Wolcott to work in a factory.
 
Sealing Al Lewis’ stature as the greatest man of mystery is that no birth record for any A. Meister can be found in Wayne County, said imdb.com, a public figure biography site.
 
Imdb said that days after Al Lewis’ death, one of his three sons announced that Lewis had in fact been born on April 30, 1923, not 1910 as the actor had claimed.
 
“Why the deception?” asked the web site Everything2.com. “It could've been part of his tryouts for ‘The Munsters.’ If he was born in '23, he was actually a year younger than Yvonne DeCarlo, who was supposed to be his daughter. But by claiming to be 13 years older, perhaps he felt he'd seem more grandfatherly to the show's producers.
“At any rate,” Eveyrthing2 continued, “it seems likely that Lewis told a bunch of stories about his youth, either to support his claims about his birthdate or just for the joy of telling stories."
 
Al Lewis’ lifelong penchant for fudging brought anything but joy to historians and journalists, who often had to retract or revamp information they had confidently published about one of the television era’s most beloved and eclectic entertainers.
 
In fact, that New York Times obituary was the second one within days the nation’s newspaper of record published on Al Lewis, the latter correcting the first’s careless inclusion of already discredited information. The Times obituarist Dan Barry wrote that almost every claim Lewis made about his early life - his birth date and place of birth, his wartime adventures in the merchant marine, his education - was unverifiable and possibly false.
 
Among others were that Lewis had faced danger touring the maliciously anti-union Southeast to help John L. Lewis organize workers, rallied outside the White House in support of condemned immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, performed as a clown in a traveling circus, sold hot dogs at Brooklyn Dodgers games at Ebbets Field, and in the mid-1960s hired Charles Manson to babysit his three children (he recalled Manson as trustworthy and caring).
  

Regarding Al Lewis’ educational resume, the imdb.com site added: “Although he claimed to have a Ph.D. in child psychology from Columbia University, the university has no record of it, under his stage name or his real name.”
 
Lewis’ reliability began being questioned in the early 2000s after his wife of two decades, Karen Lewis, found documents while preparing for her ostensibly 93-year-old husband’s hospitalization for an angioplasty which showed he was in fact just 80. That was the first she knew of any age discrepancy, but the Times quoted her as saying the finding didn’t affect her feelings about him.
 
A reporter soon examined the actor’s commonly reported story that he had served as a paralegal in the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, a landmark civil rights case involving nine black Alabama teenagers falsely accused in 1931 of raping two white women.
 
A 1923 birth would have made Lewis eight during the trial (or college age if he were born in 1910). At whatever stage of life, Lewis said he learned of the Scottsboro Boys’ plight after his mother attended a rally for their freedom.
 
His mother, if one trusts the following Al Lewis recollection on the web site Everything2.com, “worked in the garment trades. My mother was an indomitable spirit. My grandfather had no sons. He had six daughters. They lived in Poland or Russia, every five years it would change. My mother being the oldest daughter, they saved their money, and when she was about 16 they sent her to the United States, not knowing a word of English. She went to work in the garment center, worked her back and rear-end off and brought over to the United States her five sisters and two parents. I remember going on picket lines with my mother. My mother wouldn't back down to anyone."
 
Nothing suspicious about that classic early 1900s immigrant working class bio.
 
Also perfectly plausible is the 6-foot-1 Lewis’ description of his playing basketball in his youth in New York City and later serving as a non-hired scout for NBA teams – but was he the very best scout in the game?
 
When Lewis boasted to independent radio station WFMU’s blog that, “you can call Marty Blake, the chief scout for the NBA, he lives outside Atlanta, and ask him who is the most knowledgeable man of roundball you have ever met. Without hesitation, he will tell you, Al Lewis.”
 
So Kliph Nesteroff, the author of WFMU blog entry “The Myths and Politics of Grandpa Munster,” ran that claim past Blake, who concurred: “He (Lewis) knew everything there was to know about basketball from the tips of your toes to the top of your head.”
 
However, Nesteroff also wrote: “Lewis liked to say he worked on the defense committee of Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. If there were any semblance of truth to this, it would have occurred when he was no more than five years old.... Neither was he in Washington, as he claimed, the night the American communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, sentenced to death for treason, were executed.”              
                                             Al "Grandpa" Lewis with Beverly Owen,
                                one of the two actresses who played Marilyn Munster

 
It IS known that Al Lewis, living out his left-wing values, donated his time and most of his earnings from the two-year run of The Munsters to charities, particularly a program helping teenage runaways, who were proliferating in Los Angeles during the late 1960s. But the admiration one feels upon hearing of this altruism quickly turns to skepticism, when Lewis identifies one of those kids he brought under his wing:
 
“That's how I met Charlie Manson. He babysat my three kids…. He sat for four or five hours, he amused the kids, he brought the guitar and he played, no big deal, no sweat."
 
Back in the real world of documented facts, Lewis ran for governor of New York as the Green Party candidate in 1998, opposing Republican incumbent George Pataki. Like a premonition of Bernie Sanders and with an accent to match, Lewis toured the Empire State fervently condemning health insurance companies, polluting industries, U.S. wars, and corporate tax breaks which made the poor overtaxed.

At age 88 (or 75?), he won 52,533 votes in that '98 race, above the 50,000-vote threshold for receiving automatic ballot placement in the subsequent election. Four years later, however, Lewis decided not to make another run, citing long odds of being elected as a Green.
 
He sought to be listed on the 1998 ballot as “Grandpa Al Lewis” to gain momentum from his TV recognition. A state judge turned down the request.
 
Before The Munsters premiered in 1964, Lewis played New York City police officer Leo Schnauser in the comedy “Car 54, Where Are You?” from 1961 to ’63. Real police in his hometown loved the character and Lewis did public appearances on their behalf. Relations 40 years later between police and radical candidate Al Lewis were cooler when the Green gubernatorial hopeful criticized police use of force practices as racist.
 
Everyone, however, loved “Grandpa,” and Lewis’ most memorable TV character was how he was often addressed by political supporters, TV fans and customers at Grampa’s Bella Gente Italian, a Greenwich Village restaurant he founded and where his regular presence was a draw. Lewis would greet customers entering, chatting with them, posing for pictures and signing autographs.
 
One unlikely sounding distinction by Al Lewis that was in fact documented before millions is that he was once censored by Howard Stern. You read right, censored by Howard Stern, America’s chief poddy mouth of the air.
 
Lewis, who discussed political issues with iron fervor, but free of obscenities on his own Saturday radio show in the early 2000s on New York City’s WBAI, once joined Stern in an outdoor rally against the FCC’s frequent fining of Stern and others for regular use of words banned on airwaves. Not realizing that his public address microphone also was tied into a live broadcast of Stern’s show, Grandpa told the crowd: “We're here because we all have a purpose… And that purpose is to say ‘Fuck the FCC! Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em!’ ”
 
An uncharacteristically mortified Stern frantically slapped his hand on the mic to try to keep his fines from piling even higher.
 
"I really thought [he'd] lost his mind," Stern said on the WFMU blog. "As far as I was concerned, my career was over because we're on the radio live.”
 
For once, there was no doubting Al Lewis meant every word he said. 
 
Brian Arbenz, of Louisvile, Ky. USA loved the leftist positions of Al Lewis, and the fun antics of Grandpa on The Munsters.