BIRTH | Dorothy Thompson, 1893

Dorothy Thompson,
Time Cover, June 1939

July 9, 2020—This day in 1893 was born journalist Dorothy Celene Thompson,   in Lancaster, New York. Time magazine poll ranked her as one of the two most important woman in the United States, along with Eleanor Roosevelt. She married novelist Sinclair Lewis.

A foreign correspondent for the New York Evening Post in the 1920s, she later became its bureau chief in Berlin. She so angered Adolf Hitler with her reporting on the Nazis, that he personally expelled her. 

Her syndicated column, On the Record, appeared three times a week in as many as 170 papers, and she also had a popular radio show that was listened to by overseas troops during World War II. She died in 1961.

In early 1944 she wrote a column on, and devoted a radio show to, the idea that soldiers fighting for the Allies needed a vision of the postwar world to motivate them. 

My uncle Willem van Stockum, then a volunteer bomber pilot at the 10 Squadron RAF base in Melbourne, Yorkshire, responded to his sister, Hilda van Stockum. He said that visions of the future do not motivate soldiers. 

What motivates soldiers, Willem said, is outrage at tyranny. 

His letter to my mother on this subject was published as an article, "A Soldier's Creed," in The Horn Book in its Christmas 1944 issue under the authorship of "A Bomber Pilot." It has been widely referenced and quoted. 

Willem van Stockum was shot down over France in June 1944 on his sixth mission, during the week of D-Day, attacking Nazi supply lines before and after the Normandy invasion. He is buried with his crew and that of another plane shot down on the same mission, in France. A book on his life was written by Robert P. Wack, Time Bomber (Boissevain Books, 2014).

Willem van Stockum, RAF. 

I didn’t join the war to improve the Universe; in fact, I am sick and tired of the eternal sermons on the better world we are going to build when this war is over. I hate the disloyalty to the past twenty years. Apparently people think that life in those twenty years, which cover most of my conscious existence, was so terrible that no-one can be expected to fight for it. We must attempt to dazzle people with some brilliant schemes leading, probably, to some horrible Utopia, before we can ask them to fight.
I detest that point of view. I hate the idea of people throwing their lives away for slum-clearance projects or forty-hour weeks or security and exchange commissions. It is a grotesque and horrible thought. There are so many better ways of achieving this than diving into enemy guns. Lives are precious things and are of a different order and entail a different scale of values than social systems, political theories, or art.
“Why are we not given a cause?” some people ask. I do not understand this question. It seems so plain to me. There are millions and millions of people who are shot, persecuted and tortured daily in Europe. The assault on so many of our fellow human beings makes some of us tingle with anger and gives us an urge to do something about it. That, and that alone, makes some of us feel strongly about the war. All the rest is vapid rationalization. All this talk about philosophy, the degeneration of art and literature, the poisoning of Nazi youth, which the Nazi system entails, and which we all rightly condemn, is still not the reason why we fight and why we are willing to risk our lives.
Here, let us say, is a soldier. He asks himself, “Why should I die?” You would tell him: “To preserve our civilization.” When the soldier replies: “To Hell with your civilization; I never thought it so hot,” you take him up wrongly when you sit down and say to yourself: “Well, after all, maybe it wasn’t so hot,” and then brightly tap him on the shoulder and say: “Well, I’ve thought of a better idea. I know this civilization wasn’t so hot, but you go and die anyway and we’ll fix up a really good one after the war.” I say you take him up wrong because his remark: “To Hell with your civilization” doesn’t really mean that he is not seriously concerned about our civilization. He is simply revolted by the idea of dying for ANY civilization. Civilization simply isn’t the kind of thing you ever want to die for. It is something to enjoy and something to help build up because it’s fun, and that is that, and that is all.
When a man jumps into the fire to save his wife he doesn’t justify himself by saying that his wife was so civilized that it was worth the risk! There is only one reason why a man will throw himself into mortal combat and that is because there is nothing else to do and doing nothing is more intolerable than the fear of death. I could stand idly by and see every painting by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo thrown into a bonfire and feel no more than a deep regret, but throw one small, insignificant Polish urchin on the same bonfire and, by God, I’d pull him out or else. I fight quite simply for that and I cannot see what other reasons there are. At least, I can see there are reasons, but they are not the reasons that motivate me.
During the first two years of the war when I was an instructor at an American University in close contact with American youth and in close contact with the vital isolationist question in the States, I often felt that there was much insincerity, conscious or unconscious, on our, the Interventionist, side of the argument. We had strong views on the danger of isolationism for the United States. We thought, rightly, that for the sake of self-interest and self-preservation the United States should take every step to ensure the defeat of the Nazi criminals. But however sound our arguments, our own motives and intensity of feeling did not spring from those arguments but from an intense passion for common righteousness and decency.
Suppose it could have been proved to us at that time that the participation of the United States in the stamping out of organized murder, rape and torture in Europe could only take place at great cost to the United States, while not doing so would in no way impair her security. Would we not still have prayed that our country might do something? And would we not have been proud to see her do something?
There is an appalling timidity and false shame among intellectuals. The common man in the last war went to fight quite simply as a crusader. I am not talking about politics now, I am not either asserting or denying that England declared war from purely generous and noble considerations, but I am asserting that the common man went and fought with the rape of Belgium foremost in his mind and saw himself as an avenger of wrong.
After the war the common man went quietly back to his home. The intellectuals, however, upon coming back, ashamed of their one lapse of finding themselves in agreement with every Tom, Dick and Harry, must turn around and deride the things they were ready to give their lives for. As they were the only vocal group, the opinion became firmly established that the last war was a grave mistake and that anyone who got killed in it was a sucker.
And now, in this war, these intellectuals are hoist with their own petard. They lack the nerve and honesty to represent the American doughboy to himself for what he is. They do not give him the one picture in his mind which would stimulate his imagination and which would make him see beyond the fatigues, the mud, the boredom and the fear. The picture is there for anyone to paint who has a gift for words. It is a simple picture and a true picture and no one who has ever sat as a small child and listened with awe to a fairy story can fail to understand. The intellectuals, however, have made fun of the picture and so they won t use It.
But some day an American doughboy in an American tank will come lurching into some small Polish, Czech or French village and it may fall to his lot to shoot the torturers and open the gates of the village jail. And then he will understand.
There is a lot of talk among our intellectuals about our youth. Our youth is supposed to want a change, a new order, a revolution or what not. But it is my conviction that that is emphatically NOT what our youth wants. Have you ever been in a picture house on a Saturday afternoon, when it is filled with children and some old Western movie is ending in a race of time between the hero and the villain? Have you seen the rapt attention, the glowing faces, the clenched fists? What our young men really want is to be able to give that same concentrated attention and emotional participation, this time to reality, and this time as heroes and not as spectators, that they were able to give to unsubstantial shadows, before long words and cliches had killed their imaginations. Killed them so dead that they can no longer see even reality itself imaginatively.
It is up to the intellectuals to rekindle the thing they have tried to destroy. It is as simple as St. George and the Dragon. Why not have the courage to point out that St. George fought the dragon because he wanted to liberate a captive and not because he wanted to lead a better life afterwards? Some day, sometime, my picture of an American doughboy in a Polish village will become true. Wouldn’t it be better for him then to have the cross of St. George on his banner than a long rigmarole about a better world?
As long as our intellectuals and leaders do not have the courage to risk being thought sentimental and out-of-date and are not willing to stress that nations as well as individuals are entitled to their acts of heroism and chivalry, they will never be able to give our youth what it needs.
It is true that every fairy story ends with the words: “and they lived happily ever after.” How irritating a child would be, though, if it interrupted its mother at every sentence to ask: “But, Mummy, will they live happily ever afterwards?” It simply isn’t the point of the fairy story and it isn’t the point of this war.
Presumably we won’t live happily ever after this war. But just as a fairy story helps to increase a child’s awareness and wonder at the world, so this war may make us more aware of one another. Perhaps we shall learn, and perhaps some things will be better organized. I hope so. I believe so. But only if we engage in this war with our hearts as well as our minds.
For goodness’ sake let us stop this empty political theorizing according to which a man would have to have a University degree in social science before he could see what he was fighting for. It is all so simple, really, that a child can understand it.

KENYA | Olga Marlin: A Dream that Made History

Prof. John Odhiambo, Vice-Chancellor of Strathmore University and
 Olga E. Marlin, on the award to her of the D.Litt. degree, 2011, the
first woman to be so honored. Photo by John Tepper Marlin.

She left the comfort of Europe to empower African women. The impact is continental, writes Lilian Aluanga, Sunday Standard, Nairobi, Oct. 22, 2005.

(The full story of Olga Marlin's life is in her memoir, To Africa with a Dream, first published by Scepter in 2002 and then in a new edition in 2011 with photos, by Boissevain Books, New York, N.Y.)

She enjoys eating nyama choma and ugali, knows Kenya better than many post-Uhuru citizens and has witnessed the country’s transition from colonialism to Independence under Jomo Kenyatta, to Daniel Moi and on to Mwai Kibaki.

Most importantly though, she has made her contribution — though quietly away from the media glare — to the making of modern Kenya.

At 27, an age when many women in her birthplace would be thinking of starting families and living in dainty cottages with picket fences, she chose to give up the comfort of Europe and accompanied a group of eight women who were coming to live in Africa.

She landed in Kenya. The country changed her. She embraced it as home, became a citizen, and set out to do her best to make her new home, then trapped in racial discrimination, a better place.

Meet Olga Marlin, a founder member of the Kianda Foundation — the pioneer in setting up a multi-racial secretarial school at the height of the liberation struggle in Kenya.

Olga made the journey from Ireland in 1960 not out of a sense of adventure, but because of a deep conviction that God wanted her to do something for Him with her life.

Now in her 70’s — and still every inch as elegant, charming and poised as she was in her late 20’s — Olga remains modest, though happy, about her role in helping lay a foundation for thousands of African women who are now top executives in various organisations both locally and internationally.

To Olga, the eldest child in a family of six, African women were in a vicious circle those days: "They needed education for freedom and freedom to be educated."

And her efforts paid off, judging from the list of some of Kianda’s former students. From Health Minister Charity Ngilu to Evelyn Mungai-Eldon, founder of the Evelyn College of Design; from Pamela Mboya, the late Tom Mboya’s wife, to Honourable Victoria Sebagarika, an MP in Uganda; from Christina Kenyatta-Pratt to Gaone Masire-Moyo, the successful daughter of Botswana’s ex-president Ketumile Masire; from Zipporah Mayanja, a top Ugandan diplomat in Belgium to Hannah Rubia, the wife of Saba Saba hero Charles Rubia. It is a long list of strong African women, who no matter the direction they took, they excelled.

Olga (far right) and other members of staff show President Jomo Kenyatta a photo album of the college when the late leader visited the college in 1970. 

To date, Kianda, a household name in secretarial studies, has seen hundreds of thousands of girls pass through its doors, a far cry from its humble beginnings in a tiny cottage along Nairobi’s Waiyaki Way with only 17 students.

Born in New York City 1934 to Ervin Ross Marlin and Hilda Gerarda van Stockum, Olga remembers travelling a lot as a child thanks to her father’s status as an employee of the United Nations.

She attended primary school in Washington, before the family moved to Montreal Canada in 1947, where she completed her secondary school before joining the Trinity College in Dublin for a Masters in Modern Languages.

"My father had always wanted me to go to Trinity College because that was where he studied and also met my mum," she says. Although the family moved back to Canada, Marlin chose to stay on in Ireland, where her life would forever be changed when she met members of Opus Dei (Work of God), a personal prelature of the Catholic Church.

"Never in my whole life did I think I would meet a saint," she says in reference to the founder of Opus Dei, Saint Josemaria Escriva. Olga laughs as she continues, "When I was 10 years old, I used to tell people that I would like to get married and have 10 children.

"My attitude towards life was totally changed and I felt that God wanted me to serve him in some way," she says.

Therefore, when Olga was selected as part of a group of eight women whom St Josemaria chose to send to Kenya, she was only too happy to comply even though she knew it wouldn’t be easy.

But nothing had quite prepared her for the shocking reality on the ground. She arrived in Kenya when residential areas were segregated, as were clubs, schools, restaurants, and even the public transport system.

Social interactions between the races was taboo, and Olga and her group soon realised that they would have a difficult time selling the idea of a multi-racial school that would see white students learning side by side with their Asian and African peers.

Initially the idea was to set up a finishing school which would give African women a chance to acquire secretarial skills in courses that would help them get better jobs and uplift their living standards. At the time, Olga says, people thought they were mad to even come up with such an idea, but a female member of the Kenyatta family whom the group met soon after their arrival, gave them the courage to move on.

Retired President Moi is introduced to a member of staff at the college in 1981

"You have arrived at a very good time to open a school for girls. Our women need education to become self-reliant, respect themselves and make themselves respected. This can only happen when they are financially independent. Your school should provide them with the necessary skills," the Kenyatta family member said.

After a brief teaching stint at Kenya High School, then a whites-only school, Olga moved on to carry out their vision. 

By 1961, after months of giving music lessons and coaching students in various subjects to raise money, the group was ready to start.

But there was a problem. One of the students was Goan and the city council would hear nothing of registering Kianda, first located in Valley Arcade — a white residential area — and two with a non-European student on board.

They would first have to seek the approval of the residents, the council said. 

Her proposal to the residents was flatly rejected and Marlin was crushed. "It was simply one of the worst moments of my life," she says.

She then knew that they would have to move out of the area if their mission to give African girls a chance to study was to be fulfilled.

One of her students offered to help. Her father, Paddy Rouche, owned an estate agency in Nairobi’s Westlands and had just identified a parcel of land along Waiyaki Way (Kianda School’s present location), which was on the border of a reserve on which the Japanese embassy also stood.

At this time, the government also decided to declare some plots in the area multi-racial and Kianda (Kikuyu for valley) finally found a home which would be led by Olga until 1980.

It would be the first of several educational institutions put up by the Kianda Foundation in its quest to uplift the educational standards and general welfare of women in Kenya.

Registered in 1961 in Nairobi, its development has over the years given rise to a primary and secondary schools as well as the Kibondeni Catering School and the Kimlea Girls Technical Training College in Kiambu. 

Mama Ngina Kenyatta is shown around the college on a visit in the 70s

The latter has saved hundreds of girls from the degrading and exploitative child labour rampant on the coffee plantations in the district.

Although Marlin now had a place to put up the classrooms, a more difficult task awaited her — convincing African parents to allow their daughters to enrol for secretarial courses at the college.

"Most of them were hesitant to allow their daughters to be trained as secretaries and feared that they would become wayward and get lost in Nairobi," she says.

Eventually, they got their first African student — Evelyn Mungai-Eldon — who set the pace for her peers and was an articulate, hardworking student able to hold her own even though she was obviously different.

Says Olga, "She used to walk to school everyday and was bright and very competitive in class." 

Evelyn did well in her studies and landed a job with the East African Community on completion of her one-year training.

Kianda increasingly became popular, especially with large organisations in the region due its high quality training. It attracted students and teachers from as far as Greece, Mexico, Spain, US, Ireland, France, Egypt, Ethiopia, Botswana, Uganda, and Tanzania.

At Independence, the school lost some of its white students, who in fear of reprisals from Africans, chose to go back home. But the numbers picked up again as the demand for secretaries grew in a newly independent Kenya and the wider east African region.

So impressed with Kianda College were companies that they proposed the start of a bonding programme with the college. Under this programme, the organisations agreed to pay a year’s fees for the girls, inclusive of boarding and pocket money, so long as the girls signed an agreement to work with the companies upon graduation. Bursaries were sourced for girls from poor backgrounds without corporate sponsorship. 

Long before the country gained independence, Olga had forged deep friendships with the wives to some of the men who were later to hold high positions in government. Most of them had gone through Kianda and Olga made up her mind to ask them for help.

Tom and Pamela Mboya (right) on a visit to the college in an undated picture

While some of her colleague went overseas to raise funds from well-wishers, Olga sought out her old students. One of them was Pamela, who married Tom Mboya. Another was Hannah, the wife of Nairobi’s first African Mayor, Charles Rubia.

She recalls a visit to Rubia’s office at the time: "He was very gracious and understood my dilemma and the need to empower these girls. I will never forget what he said to me: ‘Olga, we knew each other when you were nobody and we were nowhere. I will help you’."

She remembers Tom Mboya as a robust trade unionist whom she was humbled to meet. 

"I was introduced to Tom by Jemima Gecaga (a sister to Dr Njoroge Mungai)." Her ties to the Mboya’s would later see him sponsor several students to Kianda before his tragic death through an assassin’s bullet.

Just before he died in 1969, Mboya sent the current Kisumu Mayor Prisca Ouma to meet Olga.

She was the last student he was to send to the college.

TIME BOMBER | Robert Wack Speaks in Westminster, Md.

Dr. Robert Wack, Washington, DC pediatrician,
author of Time Bomber (Boissevain Books, 2014)

The Westminster Fallfest weekend, sponsored by the Carroll County (Maryland) Public Library, was a big success, at least based on the modest expectations of Boissevain Books author Robert P. Wack.

We previously reported that Wack spoke at the Westminster library.  He said the speaking event was attended by about 15 people and generated some excellent discussion. The Carroll County Public Library  is continuing to promote the book and they bought several copies.

At the two-day Westminster Fallfest weekend, Wack reports selling 34 copies.

Wack's Banner of the
Book's Cover.

He says that about half were sold to strangers, who were persuaded by the banner (see right), the author's pitch, and their perusal of the cover.

He also talked to several people who said they were going to download the Kindle version from Amazon.

Going forward, Wack has two more events scheduled this fall - appearances before book clubs in October and November. 

Nowadays, books are sold, not bought... and they are sold one copy at a time.

Meanwhile, Richard Peacocke of Ottawa, Canada had some nice words to say about Time Bomber. He posted a 5-star rating on the Amazon listing of the book and had the following to say about the book, which he writes that he tried to post but may not have succeeded:

[Time Bomber is a] [g]ripping narrative of warfare and moral choice, underpinned by a far-reaching mathematical theory about space and time. 

Highlights for me are the authentic scenes in the RAF squadron and gripping episodes in the fields of Normandy. The book weaves together the history of several places and time periods, with inspiration drawn from the real-life Dr. Willem van Stockum. 

There is a great deal of action, but while there is bravery and cowardice, there is little or no glory. The character studies and human experience in wartime ring true. 

All the way through the reader has an uneasy feeling that something unknown and mysterious is occurring. This is based on a soaring mathematical theory, the intricacy of which is touched on, but not laboured over. The theory is based on Dr. van Stockum’s work and allows the protagonist to bridge fiction and reality. 

I couldn’t put the book down.

"Time Bomber", Time-Travel Novel Featured in Baltimore Library Mag

Robert P. Wack with his new
book, Time Bomber (Boissevain
Books, 2014).

Dr. Robert Wack, author of Time Bomber (Boissevain Books, 2014), is featured in the current issue of Currents, magazine published by the Carroll County (Maryland) Public Library.

He was inspired to write Time Bomber as he was reading a book at the Westminster (the main city in Carroll County) Public Library called How to Build a Time Machine, by Paul Davies. The book describes the pioneering work of Dr. Willem J. van Stockum in translating Einstein's equations for the Special Theory of Relativity into hypothetical time-like curves that might make possible time travel.

The name "van Stockum dust" has been given to his interpretation of the equations that generate rotating cylinders of matter.

Carroll County is outside Baltimore. It was the birthplace of Francis Scott Key, who wrote The Star Spangled Banner.

The Carroll County Public Library has six branches, in Eldersburg, Finksburg, Mount Airy, North Carroll, Taneytown, and Westminster.

Dr. Wack is Director of Pediatric Services at Frederick Memorial Healthcare Systems. He is a graduate of Notre Dame and the Georgetown University Medical School. After graduation he served with the U.S. Army Medical Corps on Germany and Hawaii.

Boissevain Books LLC is based in New York City. It has published eight titles and has four more in the pipeline.

WILLEM VAN STOCKUM | Sci Fi Bio: "Time Bomber"

The cover of Time Bomber.

May 19, 2014–The print edition of a time-travel novel by Robert P. Wack has just been published, titled Time Bomber.  (An earlier edition was available, only as an eBook, under a different name and cover.)

Time Bomber is based on the life and research of a real person, Dr. Willem Jacob van Stockum, son of Captain Bram van Stockum and Olga Emily Boissevain.

Dr. van Stockum, a brilliant University of Maryland mathematics professor who had previously worked with Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, becomes frustrated with American indifference about the war in Europe before Pearl Harbor. He abandons his promising academic career to join, first, the Royal Canadian Air Force and then a bomber pilot in Britain's Royal Air Force. Van Stockum flies RAF missions over Nazi-occupied France, behind the Normandy lines, before and after D-Day. On June 10, 1944, his plane is shot down.

All this is factual.

In the novel, van Stockum is not killed when his plane is shot down. Instead, he is rescued by stranded American paratroopers. While they fight for survival in the French countryside, they meet up with ruthless French Resistance fighters and two strangers who are not what they appear to be.

Willem’s pioneering academic work on time travel and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity pose intriguing “what if?” questions – which earned him a chapter in a book on time-travel theoreticians – compelling him to face the implications of his academic work and the consequences of choices in a universe of infinite possibilities. These questions can be posed and answered only in a sci-fi context, which is what attracted Wack to the subject.

The paperback book, nearly 400 pages, is published by Boissevain Books and can be purchased from Amazon USA for less than $12.50 plus shipping. The book can be purchased from Amazon UK for £8.19, with Free Delivery in the UK on orders that exceed £10.