Public squares or piazzas play a central role in Italian life. When I arrived in Florence in 1972 I visited some of the small Tuscan towns on the periphery of Firenze and I was a witness to “fare la passegiata”. Literally translated this means “to make a walk”, but in practice is a public ritual in which the townspeople strut their stuff in the public square. Particularly the young engage in ritualized courtship where unattached young men and women parade around arm and arm observing members of the opposite sex. This was not something I had seen on the commons of the cities and towns of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

What happens in piazza is a reflection of the balance of power in Italian society. Poltica di Piazza has its highs and lows. Benito Mussolini was accustomed to addressing huge crowds from a window in Piazza Venezia in Rome during his glory years. Later Il Duce was strung up by his heels in Piazza Loreto in Milano by the partisans at the end of the war of liberation from fascism.

I was mesmerized by a march of 100,000 Italian workers in Rome in 1972 on May Day marching against the war in Vietnam. Workers in their Sunday best, suits and ties, wearing red carnations and carrying flags with the hammer and sickle emblazoned on a red banner filed through Piazza Navona as part of a coordinated nationwide day of protest. I saw in these marchers a physical affirmation of the possibility of radical socialist thinking among working class people. Maybe if history and traditions dictate workers could be won to visions of radical change.

Three personal experiences in “piazza” left strong impressions on a young and ingénue American.

Comizio in Piazza della Signoria – In the spring of 1972 things had intensified in Vietnam both militarily and on the diplomatic front as the talks in Paris to end the war were underway albeit haltingly. In Florence the sizable American ex pat community decided that it wanted to demonstrate publically against its own government’s criminal war. We connected with an array of extra-parliamentary political forces ranging from Grupo Gramsci to Potere Operaio and enlisted their aid to stage a rally in the main square, Piazza della Signoria where the famous replica of the David statue stands in front of Loggia dei Lanzi and the Gli Uffizi. The planning meetings were a spectacle and for us Americans kind of like being a spectator at a tennis match where we would sit and watch the Italians of all different political stripes debate back and forth the merits of including this group or that in the rally.

“I got to spend a weekend in Torino and met all of the ten Trotskyists in Italy”

Each planning meeting would open with a salute to the “Compagni Americani” and then degenerate into a heated debate over their domestic differences. It was agreed that an American should make one of the speeches in English and I was designated to speak. I found a poster on the walls of the Universita di Firenze and copied down the demands from the poster and incorporated them into my written speech. My time came and I spoke in English from the stage and looked at a Piazza full of Italians sitting in the square with the American contingent huddled in the back of the square as giant water tanks were massed with helmeted caranbinieri to deal with crowd control. I delivered my speech and arrived at my dramatic climax proclaiming the demands I had pulled off the agitational poster: No more guns, no more bombs, troops out now! There was dead silence from the crowd, which I of course attributed to language difficulties so I awaited the translator’s work and figured my punch line would yield explosive cheering and applause. Instead there was again dead silence even after my words were delivered in Italian. I was befuddled but as I was climbing down from the stage two Italian men approached me. They rushed to me and exclaimed, “Compagno de la Quarta Internazionale”! They hugged me and invited me to visit the headquarters in Torino later that month. Evidently I had purloined my punch line from a Trotskyist poster in the university and they had identified me as an American Trotskyist. I got to spend a weekend in Torino and met all of the ten Trotskyists in Italy. I also learned that the level of Italian political sophistication was way beyond anything I had heretofore experienced. Finally I learned that in public speaking it helps to know your audience.

Festa dell’ Unita – Unita was the paper of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It was a daily newspaper replete with sports, culture and coverage of world events and local happenings. Each year in the late spring the Communist Party would hold Feste del’Unita to flex their public muscle in piazza and raise funds. That spring I was invited (my political missteps in La Signoria notwithstanding) along with another American to address a Festa event in Pontasieve, a working class suburb of Firenze. Pontasieve like many of the Tuscan towns was as stronghold of the PCI and like many of the comparable hill towns had a street named Via della Resistenza in honor of the partisan fighters against Mussolini. My American companion was asked to sing and broke out “Where have All the Flowers Gone?” I said a few words about the fight for peace. Then an Italian worker and PCI member addressed the crowd and thanked us for our interventions. He then went on to describe in detail the troop movements of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam and the military victories they were winning over the over the Americans and the ARVN. Again I was astounded at the level of training and political sophistication and the radically different world view of these Italian workers.

Chain Gang a Roma – In June of 1972 I traveled to Rome to visit some friends who lived near the University. It was a warm Roman day and I was wearing what is referred to as a guinea tee shirt. On one side of the shirt I was wearing a large Lenin pin and I was carrying a copy of the daily paper of Lotta Continua. I was walking in the section of the University where the Law Faculty was located which I l quickly discovered later was a home base for fascist student groups. Evidently the day I found myself at the law school, a communist in Salerno in Southern Italy had attacked and killed a fascist in a street protest. This was a national event and so the fascist gangs were out for revenge. As I walked the sidewalk I was approached by a group of ten Italian men carry chains. They spotted me and began to shout derisively, “Ciao Compagno.! I hurriedly crossed street into traffic to cut off a part of the gang, but when I got to the other side of the Viale there were still five of them coming at me. One of them must have been designated for this assignment as he started to twirl a heavy motorcycle chain over his head as he moved on me. My adrenaline was rushing so I marched right at the man held up my arm and managed to block the chain and wrest it away from him. I was left there standing holding the chain as the carabinieri approached us. The fascists started to shout that the Communist had assaulted them and that I should be arrested. I will never forget watching a young Italian father with his wife and baby in a carriage rush at the police and start yelling at them to pursue the fascists and arrest them because he had been a witness to everything that had happened. The police backed off as a crowd started to gather, and the family man harangued them. I was allowed to go on my way.

My experience in the public square, my politica di piazza left me admiring the courage and potential sophistication of the working class. I was ready to go home and see whether we could add some Italian sugo to the American political mix.

Next: Living with the Lumpen and making NECCO Wafers

The media is all-abuzz with the Sterling Scandal. The 80 year old attorney and real estate baron from Los Angeles, Donald Sterling appears to have been captured on tape telling a girl friend that he doesn’t want her hanging out with black people or bringing them to his basketball team’s games. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who for first time in their history may make the second round of the NBA playoffs. He has even explicitly said that he doesn’t want the revered Earvin “Magic: Johnson at his arena with her. Nor does he want her posting images with Blacks.

What to do?

The league as Charles Barkley has said is a “Black League”. 80% of the players are African American. Kobe Bryant says he wouldn’t play for an owner with those racist views. Talk is swirling about the Clipper players boycotting their games with the Warriors in the first round of the playoffs. But unfortunately it looks like “cooler” heads are prevailing. The crisis reveals the innate conservatism of the leaders of most of the sports unions who have been seduced by the myth of attorneys as the best choice for union leader. Too often the sports unions and more broadly many of the entertainment unions choose “smart” attorneys to represent them because the producers or the owners have smart attorneys. What they need instead are organizers and union leaders not attorneys. They need to break out of the innate conservatism of legal training and be willing to take the risks necessary to win. The great Marvin Miller who led the Major baseball players out of servitude in the early 70’s was formerly a leader with the United Steelworkers union.

In the case of the Sterling scandal we have the NBA Players Association seeking counsel and guidance from the Mayor of Sacramento and former NBA and Cal guard Kevin Johnson. KJ is a corporate Democrat. But there is another course of action to be taken rather than playing for the good of the league as Doc Rivers and his LA Clippers have decided to do at this juncture.

Here we go with a daisy chain boycott strategy

The Clippers refuse to play in the next game, Game 5 of the playoffs against the Warriors. What does the league do? Default the game to the Warriors? Default the series to the Warriors? Then the Warriors refuse to play in the next series and you get the idea. The other owners would quickly see to it that the daffy and racist Donald is removed by the league as an owner. This is peak season for their TV revenues and earnings. Instead we will see a “thorough” investigation and maybe fines for Sterling, but he will be allowed to continue as an owner.

This is an industry where the players are the game, and this is a moment where the crisis and public opinion would support such a daisy chain direct action approach to removing Sterling. James Earl Jones said it in the great political baseball movie. “Bingo Long and his Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings, “ WEB Dubois says we have to seize the means of production.” This is one of those situations where strategic workers through their actions can force dramatic change.

Time for action, not civility and docility!

In early May, 1971 200,000 veterans, youth and students converged on Washington DC to “Stop the Government and Stop the War” as the call to action said. Peaceful protests of millions had not changed the minds of the rulers about the Vietnam War so many felt more aggressive actions were needed. On Monday morning, May 3 we organized ourselves into affinity groups and sat down at key intersections in Washington to block morning traffic and keep the government from functioning. While at the ground level all we seemed to be doing was pissing off angry commuters it appears in retrospect that the protest had impact. National Airport was closed as an emergency precaution due to the level of traffic disruption. President Nixon called the Army’s 82nd Airborne in with helicopters and 12,000 of us were arrested-the largest mass arrest in US history.

Several of my comrades from Harvard who had been jailed together in DC decided that we should all live together that summer. We recruited other friends: a total of eight in all to rent an old ramshackle house at the end of a cul-de-sac called Fiske Place in the Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge. We had a vague sense that we would function as a community and at least for the summer share resources and chores like cooking and groceries. The “Commune” was named Lewd Moose from the Seuss story, “Thidwick the Big Hearted Moose”. One of my sister communards thought I was big like Thidwick, generally good hearted, but “lewd” in that I failed to wash my dishes and clean up after meals.

Most of us had gainful employment. My two Harvard friends Buck B and Tom F were working on the assembly line at the General Motors plant in Framingham. My roommate Nucci and I worked at the New England Produce Center in Chelsea. We rode our bicycles every night about 5 miles to work the graveyard shift unloading giant trailers loaded with fruits and vegetables. We were members of the Teamsters union, but never saw a union representative. All we saw was a weekly deduction from our paycheck for union dues. We would unload trucks in from North Carolina loaded with cucumbers, watermelons or frozen crates of corn on the cob. It was hard, hot and sweaty work, but a piece of cake for two ex footballers. Watermelons were the best cargo, because every load would have a “damaged” melon that we would be obligated to take home to the commune. In fact we kept the Fiske Place household stocked with produce all summer!

Nucci and I would arrive back at Fiske Place in time to see some of our cohabitants leaving for their day jobs. Weekends were the only time when we would all hang out together. We took trips to Maine, to the beach and to the North End for the feast of Saint Anthony, but most of the memories I have of that summer are working with Nucci in the back of an icy trailer digging out crates of frozen corn.

The FBI seems to have thought the name Lewd Moose Commune implied a deep level of political commitment. They took us seriously enough to reference Lewd Moose in some of our files, but it was more a gathering of folks who shared some vague cultural and political and personal attachments. Some of us however have remained life long friends, and we even convened a couple of Lewd Moose reunions.
The most vivid memory I have of the summer occurred late one morning after I returned from lumping freight. My lifelong friend Jeff was living with us that summer with his girlfriend M.J.. Jeff’s brother was a big shot in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which dominated Harvard SDS while I was there. PLP was distinguished by its rigidity and workerism. Cadres always had short hair, got married and lived the idealized and imaginary life of the workers they so desperately were trying to rouse to revolution.

Jeff’s’ connection meant that the Party was interested in recruiting our Commune. That morning in July of 1971 we received a visit from two earnest looking PLPers asking for Jeff. Buck B answered the door and without hesitation led the two cadres upstairs to Jeff and M.J.’s bedroom. He opened the door to find them in bed together. The PLPers recoiled at the door, but Buck jumped into bed and gathered his communards in his arms and exclaimed, “Don’t worry we are one big happy family here.” Needless to say that was the last recruitment visit we received from the PLP that summer!

Many of the radicals who helped to form and shape my old union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), were merchant seamen before they worked “along shore”. They had traveled to exotic places around the world and been confronted with different realities and turbulence and revolution. The union owes much of its glorious past to these pioneers whose worldview was expanded by world travel.

Consciousness is often elevated by a radical change in one’s environment.

My life was radically changed by my experience of a year abroad in Florence – Firenze, Italia. Many Americans end up in the Tuscan cradle of the Renaissance because of a professed urge to study art history. I got to Florence because of language and then love.

I had studied Latin since the 7th grade. During my five years of classical study, I had read the Odyssey and the Iliad in Latin and performed in Latin theater. Deciding I wanted to be able to watch Italian movies without subtitles I took a course in Italian as a senior elective in the fall of 1968.

That was the first year Italian was offered at Andover. Taught by Mr. Markey, a French instructor who had never studied Italian, he stayed one lesson ahead of the students. The class was three of my Italian American teammates from football and a 6 foot 2 Brit who later became a Labor Member of Parliament. On the last night of class the Professor invited us all to ride into the North End, the traditional Italian neighborhood of Boston for an Italian meal. He dined us and maybe wined us at a white tablecloth Italian restaurant on Parmenter Street off Hanover, the main street of the district. Quite a sight; the diminutive Mr. Markey escorted by 4 hulking footballers and a big Brit.

That summer, 1969, I returned volunteering at the North End Neighborhood Center where I was hired to tutor young Italian kids in English. Soon the kids discovered that I was trying to learn Italian and spent the rest of the summer tormenting me with their rapid fire Neapolitan dialect. One day in June we chaperoned the children to Scusset beach just north of Cape Cod on the South Shore of Massachusetts. On the beach I met another tutor in the program, Marinella, an Italian from Firenze. We talked all the way home on the bus. She tolerated and teased me about my Italian. She had a warm smile and a seductive laugh. I was smitten, and I insisted on walking her home to the family she was living with on Beacon Hill. With that began my almost two year courtship of La Biava, la Fiorentina.

Marinella had witnessed the devastating flood in Florence in 1966 and the whole situation had so depressed her that her mother and her older brother decided it would be best if she got out of Italy and went to the USA as a nanny. She started out in Evanston, Illinois caring for young children of a family there, and then moved to Boston to live with a wealthy old Brahmin family on Beacon Hill. We were a couple by the time I began my freshman year that fall at Harvard University. It was my relationship with her that would lead me to live in Italy in 1971-72.

“Many of my teammates were ethnic Italian and Irish working class kids from the greater Boston area…”

But first a little of my experience at Harvard. I was assigned to live in Strauss Hall right on the edge of the Harvard Yard in Harvard Square. I took Italian and a lot of courses in Political science, which I thought, might become my major and kind of befitted the turbulent times. I remember taking a course with Carl Friedrich, a Professor and German national who had written the post war constitution of West Germany. I would sit in the front row of a giant hall to listen to his lectures; inevitably falling asleep only to awake in an embarrassed start, feeling like the whole lecture hall was looking at me. The fatigue was not just the product of his boring lectures, which consisted of him reading chapters from his book. I was tired because I was playing football and worn out from practice and the endless meetings and film study sessions.

Football was an intense experience even at a non-powerhouse like Harvard. It was also the place along with the hockey team where Harvard sought to infuse the ruling class with some new blood, some toughness from the other side of the tracks. Many of my teammates were ethnic Italian and Irish working class kids from the greater Boston area who were there to play football or hockey. Many of them had brothers and friends who were in Vietnam. Some of them were not real enthused by my anti-war attitudes and politics. Long bus rides to games were often punctuated with intense and emotional discussion over the war and the protest against it sweeping across college campuses. I managed to hold my own in those discussions because I had held my own on the gridiron. I remember being charged by multiple teammates in the “bull in the ring” drill during practice. I fended off the charges of my line mates and emerged standing bleeding profusely because the bridge of my nose had been broken. One of my teammates slapped me on the helmet and said, “Not bad Prep”. The “bull in the ring” drill has since been banned from all levels of football.

The war even bled onto the field. I’ll never forget the head football coach telling us in my sophomore year that if anti-war protestors invaded the field during a game, we were to dutifully retreat to our dressing room under the stadium.

I participated in most of the public protest on campus against the war and Harvard’s complicity in it. Shrill rhetoric about the leading roll of workers in revolutionary struggle was never much substantiated by actual blue-collar participation except for the occasional presence of a few Harvard custodians. There was no lack of debate about the issues however, and there were plenty of “bull in the ring” intellectual encounters in which my clever and intelligent classmates would spar over the issues of the day and spread their oral genius. I was never much for these discussions because they reminded me of prep school sparring that was predicated on wit and clever remarks, not grounding in real experience.

The most dramatic moment in my time at Harvard occurred in the spring of 1970. The US began to bomb the dykes in North Vietnam and protests escalated throughout the country culminating on May 4, 1970 when the National Guard gunned down four students at Kent State. Eleven days later at a Mississippi black college, Jackson State, two protesting students were killed without much of the national anguish over the four at Kent State.

But prior to Kent and Jackson a major protest was called for the Boston Common on April 15th. I went to the protest on the MTA Red Line from Cambridge to Park Street station. I stayed for the whole rally. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies (Youth International Party) gave a stirring speech in which he pointed at the John Hancock building, then the second tallest building in Boston and shouted, “See that hypodermic needle, John Hancock was a revolutionary not a fucking insurance salesman.”

After the rally I climbed up over Beacon Hill on my way to Marinella’s. Four or five hours later I decided to ride the MTA to my dorm in Harvard Square. As we approached the square the train stopped unexpectedly several times. Finally the train pulled into the station and the few of us still on, got off. I rode up the clackety old wooden escalator and emerged into a darkened eerie square with fires burning everywhere. The Cambridge Trust and the Harvard Bank’s windows were both smashed in and trashcans burned throughout the square. I looked north along Massachusetts Avenue and saw Cambridge riot police massing to charge down into the square to clear the area. A group of Weathermen had marched back from the Common along Massachusetts Avenue and smashed store windows, trashed banks and gutted two police cars with fire.

“…“impaled” on the Yard fence.”

Well the Weathermen were no longer in the square but I was, and I was all alone. My roommates and friends were inside the Yard and the giant metal gates had been shut and chained. They yelled for me to climb over the fence. The fence was over ten feet tall and the wrought iron bars were capped with metal spikes. I started to scale the fence and got one leg over the spike when my back foot slipped. I was wearing dress shoes with slippery soles. The knee of my right leg became caught on the tip of the fence. Fortunately my friends were able to raise me up and over the fence to safety just before the Cambridge cops swarmed into the area. They would have most certainly pulled me backwards and done severe damage to my knee.

My adrenaline was rushing so I felt very little pain in my leg, but then I examined the tear in my pants and discovered a gaping wound. My knee had been impaled on the Harvard Yard fence!

Friends escorted me thru police lines to the student infirmary where med students took turns looking at my wound, which was deep enough to offer them an opportunity to study human anatomy up close. Finally they stitched me up and sent me back to the Yard.

Among all the news radio reports of the Harvard Square riots one story emerged of the Harvard freshman that had been “impaled” on the Yard fence. Harvard’s attorney at the time was a law school professor named Archibald Cox, who had been Solicitor General for four years under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He would later be one of the casualties of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973 when he was dismissed by President Nixon from his post as Special Prosecutor during the Watergate scandal.

At a press conference later that evening Cox was asked by the media about the impaled freshman. All imagined a human body run through front to back by the sharpened spikes of the yard fence. Cox calmly faced his questioners and demonstrated his acute legal mind and attention to detail by saying,” Let’s find out where he was impaled.”

Needless to say I remember very little of academics from my two years in Cambridge. I was absorbed by my relationship with Marinella, who was my first serious girlfriend and love. I would visit Italy with her in the summer after my freshman year. She stayed in Italy at the end of the summer, and I returned to the USA alone. Our relationship continued in unsatisfactory fashion via snail mail letters and strained phone calls at odd hours because of the time difference. I decided that if we were going to make it I would need to move to Firenze. I applied and was accepted into a junior year abroad program with the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers. The program was attractive because rather than isolating American students in a Villa with each other, the Rutgers program inserted its students directly into the Universita di Firenze.

Soon after my acceptance however my relationship with Marinella fell apart, but I decided to push on to Firenze anyway. In the fall of 1971 I set out for Italy

In the next installment I describe my year in Italy; on strike at the University, giving an anti-war speech in the Piazza della Signoria, playing rugby and being attacked by a fascist gang in Rome.

Correction: After the Forum posted Olney Odyssey #1, Jeff Crosby, the retired President of IUE local 201 in Lynn Massachusetts, wrote in to say that Al Coulthard Sr. played a key leadership role in the early days of Local 201, but he noted that as far as he has discovered in his research, Coulthardt was a socialist not a communist. Thanks to Brother Crosby for the correction and thanks to him for his years of service to the working class.

“External causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change” On Contradiction, Mao Tse Tung 1937

Some baby boomers were propelled down the road to working class radicalism by the clash between the values that the “greatest generation” nurtured in us and the external social realities of racism and war.  Each of our journeys is unique and yet each is the same.

My father, Peter B. Olney Jr., was one of those young men who in 1943, fresh out of high school, enlisted. He was a medic and while he saw much, he said little but for one story. He told me of an incident when the driver of a flatbed truck popped the clutch lurching the truck forward and throwing the soldier standing on the fantail to the ground. That soldier was Black and the white driver roared with laughter. My Dad rushed the cab, grabbed the driver by the neck and punched him in the face. “Don’t you ever f…ing do that again,” he said. I will never forget that story and what it taught me.

Through sports my father taught us a lot about values. As manager he enraged Little League parents when he insisted on playing all the team members even if it meant losing a close one. He made sure the football was equally distributed to all ages in the family touch football games.  My youngest cousin, Sarah, would always be dramatically escorted into the end zone by a phalanx of the biggest males that warded off any members of the opposing team. My Dad would vex and perplex other fathers who were obsessed with winning even in family touch football.

At home honesty and integrity were taught by example and never compromised. My mother, Elinor Bowman Olney is the same as my Dad, although she could be tougher.  I remember her actually threatening to wash out my mouth with soap for uttering some cuss words. She is a no-nonsense New Englander who revels in telling me on the phone every time it snows and ices over in Massachusetts that, “We will survive, we are a hearty people and used to it”. She also has a great sense of irony and humor. I think it was three Christmases in a row in the early Seventies that she received a Mao Tse Tung calendar from me and each year with a twinkle in her eye she exclaimed that, “How did you know I needed this calendar. What a wonderful surprise.”

“She had marched with Martin Luther King in Selma and with King and Walter Reuther in Washington, DC in August of 1963”

Values in the home led us to challenge hypocrisy in the world and to seek big answers. These were the bases of change fostered at a very young age, but ironically it was my Grandmother’s choice of Sunday school that sent me on my path to the working class.

Until 1963 when I went off to a summer camp for two weeks in Ferry Beach, Maine, my connection with my grandmother, Anne Stewart Bowman was very traditional. Sundays and holidays were a time to visit the Bowman house at 87 Cedar Street in Malden, Massachusetts. Grandmother always put out a fine traditional meal topped off with a homemade baked pie. The house was big. It was great to roam around in with a wooden standup bowling alley in the back room that my sister Anne, my brother Steve and I entertained ourselves on…. and fought over. The Malden house had a tell tale aroma to it that followed Grandmother and Grandfather all over the world so that when I visited them in 1972 on Via Sistina in Rome I could close my eyes and imagine with my nose that I was back in their Malden house and a child again. Grandfather enjoyed listening to his vast classical and opera LP collection and took particular relish in playing my sister, brother and I the first Beatles album before we even knew who the British mop heads were.

But during those two weeks in ’63 at Ferry Beach at the mouth of the Saco River I experienced something that was to happen to me many times in the more than thirty years after. I was introduced to a woman named Alice Harrison who was a friend of my grandmother’s and the Director of Youth Programs for the Unitarian Universalist Association on Beacon Street in Boston. Alice puzzled over my last name and she asked if I was Elinor’s son. I said yes. She then exclaimed, “Why you are Anne Bowman’s grandson.”

Those summers in the mid sixties at Ferry Beach were discovery days filled with the fervor of the civil rights movement as Unitarian Universalist (U-U) ministers returned from the the South to tell us of their adventures and spur us on to activism. One of those ministers, James Reeb (here and here), was murdered by a white racist mob in 1965 in Alabama.  I discovered that my grandmother knew Reeb and all of these activists. She had marched with Martin Luther King in Selma and with King and Walter Reuther in Washington, DC in August of 1963. In later years I loved listening to her recount her stories of marching and protesting for civil rights and justice. But her mentoring always included the stern admonishment to “Be sure and get your degree.”

In 1995 just before my grandmother passed away I attended a service at the U-U church in San Francisco. I was browsing in their study after church and I came across a book entitled, The Larger Faith, a Short History of American Universalism by Charles Howe. I rushed quickly to the chapter on the 1961 merger between the Universalists and the Unitarians and there found a reference to my grandmother: “Anne Bowman, who had been elected secretary of the new association, had done such an excellent job that in 1965 she won the denomination’s highest honor, its Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Unitarian Universalism.”

“My grandmother’s simple and practical decision to enroll her children in a Universalist Sunday school, her skills as a nutritionist and her basic sense of fair play created the environment within which I found my life’s path.”

How did the daughter of a Scots Irish immigrant to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania become a top leader of America’s most liberal and socially active church denomination? Anne Stewart grew up in a strict Presbyterian household in Beaver Falls.  Her father, David Stewart, was the superintendent of the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill. If suitors came calling for Anne or her sisters, the first question from her father to the young man would be, “What parish were you raised in?” Needless to say the local Catholic parish was the wrong answer and entrance was denied.

My grandmother studied nutrition at Carnegie Institute of Technology and graduated and then met my grandfather J. Russell Bowman at a summer session at Edinboro State College, where he was a teacher and she the campus nutritionist. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he received his doctorate in English at Harvard and then relocated to the working class suburb of Malden during the depression. Grandfather became an English teacher at Malden High School, and grandmother a homemaker raising her children, the oldest of whom was my mother born in 1927. In 1934 it was time to find a Sunday school for the children and there was no room at the Presbyterian Church so grandmother made a practical decision to enroll my mother and my uncles in the nearby Universalist Church. She became active in the women’s federation as she cooked the meals for the Sunday Socials and rose to a national leadership position before the merger of the U-U in 1961 when she became the national secretary of the association’s board of directors.

My grandfather Bowman, the descendant of Pennsylvania Deutsch immigrants, grew up in Lebanon PA. He was a brilliant man who did not suffer fools and ideologues. He had a particular distrust of the Catholic Church, partly because a priest in Malden had launched an attack on his “Good Reading and Discussion Group”. This was a great books discussion group that he led from 1948 to 1965 when he retired. During the height of the McCarthy period in the early fifties this priest questioned whether the readings were sufficiently patriotic and loyal. In 1965 my grandmother was honored at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Boston at the Unitarian Universalist Association Annual Banquet. She received “the annual award” on the occasion of her retirement for her service to the church. The theme of the evening was the newly emerging “ecumenical” movement and many other leaders of other faiths were honored also.  But his eminence, Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston paid eloquent tribute to my grandmother. My grandfather Russell had to sit thru the Catholic tribute to his wife and stew over his stew.

My grandmother’s simple and practical decision to enroll her children in a Universalist Sunday school, her skills as a nutritionist and her basic sense of fair play created the environment within which I found my life’s path. As I wrote when she passed in 1995, “Anne Stewart Bowman was a mover and shaker and a delicious pie maker!” Thank you grandma.

In Olney Odyssey #3 I will recount my two years at Harvard playing, football, protesting the war and studying Italian.