MARLIN | My Parents' Irish Wedding

Dublin, June 27, 1932. My Mom is sitting down with the bouquet. She is looking happy. My Dad stands
above her looking a bit apprehensive. My uncle Willem van Stockum sits at right; he brought the couple together. Willem was killed in 1944 in France, on duty as a bomber pilot. Dad died 1994, Mom 2006.

Willem with Dog.

My sister Brigid kindly passed on to me an album full of family photos, some of which I have never seen before. 

The photo above is the most special to me. It is the only photo of the wedding of my parents that I have seen that includes my Mom's brother Willem van Stockum, who is also shown at right. A book about World War II in Europe  has an excellent character study of  Willem–Time Bomber.

At the Creation of the U.N., 70 Years Ago

The U.N. Conference, San Francisco, 1945

The conference in San Francisco to create the United Nations convened in San Francisco in April 1945, 75 years ago. 

My Dad was there at the creation, as an employee of the U.S. Budget Bureau, where he had worked before World War II. During the war he worked for the O.S.S.

The conference concluded its work of creating the Charter on June 26, 1945. The U.N. opened in October 1945. Steve Schlesinger noted the anniversary of the Charter; he has devoted much of his life to studying the genesis of the U.N. 

My Dad's job at the San Francisco conference was to assess the reasonableness of the U.N. budget figures and the U.N. contribution. The League of Nations had a rule that no country could contribute more than 25 percent of the League's budget. That rule resurfaced in 1945 but was set aside for the time being. My Dad told me that everyone knew in 1945 that the only country with adequate resources to fund the U.N. was the United States. 

Once the U.N. Charter was completed, my Dad (E. R. "Spike" Marlin) was picked to be the Secretary of the (then-Provisional) International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), with the goal of overseeing the rapid growth of civil aviation after the war through creation of international traffic control rules and assistance to those developing new airports.

He worked for the U.N. for the next 20 years, first as ICAO’s Director of Technical Assistance. By the time he left after 17 years, 1,500 of the 1,700 ICAO employees reported to him. He then was appointed Senior Director of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, following which he went to work for the State Department, recruiting Americans for the U.N. We were both in Washington, D.C. in 1964-69. 

OLGA MARLIN | June 13–Arrives Nairobi, 1960 (Updated Feb. 29, 2016)

L to R: Olga Emily Marlin, Ervin Ross ("Spike") Marlin, Tere Temes
 and Marlene Sousa. Spike, 51, paid a surprise visit to Olga,
26, in July 1960. He was working with the U.N. Office of the
High Commissioner for Refugees.

My sister Olga went to Nairobi in 1960 to help start an interracial school for girls.

As I update this post, that is 56 years ago. It was not so long after the uprising in 1950-1954 of the rebel Mau-Mau, who were fighting for independence from Britain.

The former Belgian Congo was to become independent on June 30 barely two weeks after Olga arrived.

The transition turned out to be accompanied by widespread violence in the Congo, initiated by both incoming and outgoing leaders.

Independence for Kenya was in the offing and seeing the difficult transition in the Congo, some worried European teachers were making plans to leave Kenya, as Olga describes in her memoir (To Africa with a Dream, 2011, 84). Olga stayed and after Kenya became independent she became a Kenyan citizen.

Olga and seven other European women arrived in Nairobi in two waves to create a new school for girls:

• Group 1 (five brave women) left June 12 from Rome to Nairobi– Olga Marlin, Mary Mahoney (former army nurse), Marlene Sousa, Elisa Serrano, Rosario Insausti. 
• Group 2 (three equally brave women), left from Rome one month later, even after all the violence in the Congo–Tere Temes, Margaret Curran, Encarnacion Riera. 
• Helping the groups leave Rome was Mary Rivero, from Spain, in the Central Offices of Opus Dei in Rome. She drove the first group to the airport on June 12, 1960. 
• On the arrival end, Mrs. Agnes Lavelle from Ireland was living in Nairobi and helped get the school started. Mary Kibera is one of the first native-Kenyan members of Opus Dei and also helped get the school started. Later, she headed Kianda School for several years.

In Nairobi, the Founding Eight had very few friends to support their work. They had to rely on earning their own money. Olga had a job at Kenya High School lined up to ensure some income, and some good jobs were anticipated for the well-qualified members of the group, such as nurse Mary Mahoney and secretary Margaret Curran (To Africa, 2011, 64).

When they first arrived at Nairobi airport they were supposed to be met, but nobody was there because their original plan was to arrive on the next plane from Rome one week later, and a telegram changing the arrival time was left over the weekend in a post-office box.

The incoming team rented a house on the Lavington Estate, which had been owned by the St. Austin's Mission, supported by the French Holy Ghost Fathers. It was on Invergara Road (later changed to Vergara Road), near the Invergara Club in the Lavington Estate area.

This is the house that E. R. Marlin–Olga's father and mine–paid a surprise visit to in July 1960. The school founders lived there from June 1960 to June 1961. The two women with her in the photo, Tere Temes and Marlene Sousa, were from Spain and Portugal. When Olga was recuperating from an illness in Spain, she said she saw Tere several times. Marlene Sousa became sick in Nairobi and had to return to Portugal in 1961. (Feb. 29, 2016: Olga is back in Kenya, having recovered surprisingly from her rare illness.)

Dad was visiting Olga for two reasons.

• He was en route to the former Belgian Congo to address the violence and refugees after independence was declared on June 30, as the Senior Director of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. He was the highest-ranking American in the agency, reporting to a Swiss High Commissioner, Ambassador Felix Schnyder, and (starting in 1962) his Deputy, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, as well as with Yul Brynner, who was playing an active role in bringing the UNHCR's activities some visibility.
• He was of course concerned for his daughter about the impact of the violence in the Congo on Kenya–not just the Congolese refugees (To Africa, 78-79), but the prospects for a peaceful transition when Kenya itself would become independent.

Olga spoke about the first location of Kianda School in her address to the convocation of Strathmore University when she was awarded her honorary doctorate:

In pre-Independence Kenya it was unheard of to mix the races [African, European, Indian], and Strathmore met with initial hostility. However, they went ahead, full of faith, and incorporated into their shield the symbol of three hearts — one for each race — and the motto Ut omnes unum sint (“That all may be one” John 17, 11) which continues to grace the university shield today. The residential Strathmore College opened in March 1961 with students from all three races.

We had a similar experience with Kianda College. We had discovered that the most popular post-secondary training for girls was a secretarial course, since it took only one year and was well remunerated. Although only one of us was a secretary, we decided to embark on the course in our rented house at Invergara Road, Lavington. However, when we applied to the Nairobi City Council for registration, we were told that we had to have the written consent of all our neighbours before we could admit a non-European student to that area. As soon as we could we moved to the present location of Kianda.

Tom Mboya, Assassinated 1969.

Kianda College is located on Waiyaki Way (A104) in Nairobi, opposite the Afraliti Guest House, which is west of Nairobi School and east of the Communications Commission of Kenya. Strathmore School is located less than three km. southwest of Kianda College.

That founding year 1960 was a few years before Barack Obama Senior obtained a scholarship to study in the United States from a fund controlled by a fellow Luo, Thomas Joseph Odhiambo ("Tom") Mboya - who was Kenya's first Minister for Economic Planning and Development.

L to R: Olga Marlin, Mama Ngina Kenyatta.

As time went by, Tom and his wife Pamela became strong supporters of Kianda College and Pamela was a great friend of my sister Olga (To Africa, 158). When Tom was assassinated on July 5, 1969 Pamela asked Olga look after their children (To Africa, 160).

Mzee Jomo and Mama Ngina Kenyatta also took an interest in Kianda College. They visited in 1970 and later Daniel arap Moi also visited the school.

Out of the mustard seed planted by the original group of eight women have grown some 40 schools and centers for girls and young women in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, from the first grades through to the university level.

What Happened to the Founding Eight?

Where are the founders of Kianda College today?

Group 1 (June 1960)
Olga Marlin - in Pamplona, Spain for health reasons, to be near the Navarre Clinic.
Mary Mahoney - deceased.
Marlene Sousa - returned to Portugal after recovering from TB in Kenya.
Elisa Serrano - in Spain, after many years in Kenya, for health reasons.
Rosario Insausti - deceased.

Group 2 (July 1960)
Tere Temes - in Spain.
Margaret Curran - deceased.
Encarnacion Riera - in Spain, returned from Kenya after many years for health reasons.

DEATH | Sept. 10–David Grene, Classicist, Friend of Willem van Stockum

Prof. David Grene,
farmer and Greek scholar.

This day in 2002 died David Grene in Chicago, one day short of the first anniversary of 9/11. He was 89.

Grene would have been 100 years old last year. He was born in Dublin on April 13, 1913 and earned his M.A. degree in 1936 at Trinity College, Dublin.

Grene had previously befriended Dutchman Willem J. van Stockum at St. Andrew's College, a preparatory school in Dublin, and thereby became a friend also of Willem's Trinity roommate, my father, New York City-born Ervin R. ("Spike") Marlin.

The van Stockum bookstore, The
Hague. Photo by JT Marlin, c. 2006.

(Willem was named after a van Stockum ancestor, son of well-known publisher, art and book auctioneer, Wilhemus Petrus vS, who is the first buyer of van Gogh art to appear in the van Gogh Letters. That Willem J. van Stockum was a young friend of Vincent van Gogh even before he married a van Gogh relative, Carolien. In 1873-74 letters, when Carolien suffered a serious illness, Vincent expressed great sympathy and he wished Willem a happy August 8 birthday. Vincent's cousin and correspondent Theo van Gogh worked for W.P. van Stockum's corner-bookstore and publisher on the central square of The Hague.)

Grene adopted the United States as his own country as soon as finished his degree at Trinity in 1936. He was a professor of classics at the University of Chicago from 1937 until his death. He co-founded the Committee on Social Thought in 1941, teaching with people like Saul Bellow, Marc Chagall and T. S. Eliot, until his death. The University of Chicago's Committee web site says:

[Key leaders were] the historian John U. Nef, the economist Frank Knight, the anthropologist Robert Redfield, and Robert M. Hutchins, then President of The University. Their premises were... that students should learn ... by acquainting themselves with a select number of classic ancient and modern texts in an inter-disciplinary atmosphere, and should only then concentrate on a specific dissertation topic. Over the years, temporary and permanent members of the Committee have included Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, John Coetzee, Mircea Eliade, T.S. Eliot, François Furet, David Grene, Friederich Hayek, Leszek Kolakowski, Edward Levi, Paul Ricoeur, Charles Rosen, Harold Rosenberg, Edward Shils, Mark Strand, Karl J. Weintraub.

Grene was co-editor with Richmond A. Lattimore of the acclaimed Chicago series on the Ancient Greek Tragedies, having early on become well known for his accessible translations of Herodotus' History; Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes; Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Electra, and Philoctetes; and Euripides' Hippolytus. His memoir,  Of Farming and Classics was published posthumously (Chicago, 2006).

Grene's obituary in The New York Times notes that the writer Saul Bellow suggested Grene must have been "on a first-name basis with Sophocles and Aristophanes". It adds:

Mr. Grene's two residences reflected his seemingly separate lives: for more than 50 years, he spent half his year on a working farm (he did the work) in Ireland and the other half teaching at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought...

Grene said he was attracted to Herodotus by his shrewd advice on farming.

April 9, 2008. My nephew Chris Oakley with jig-punk singer
Gregory Grene in NYC. We spoke about Spike Marlin's letter
about Pic Gwynne, September 25, 1942. Photo by JT Marlin.

Grene is the father of Gregory Grene, lead singer and accordionist for the Irish jig-punk band The Prodigals - "one of the world's greatest Celtic bands".

Gregory and his twin brother Andrew (who in 2008 was a peacekeeping strategist with the UN in Haiti) are the sons of David and his second wife Ethel, a doctor who translated  some poetry from the Dutch and also assembled David Grene's memoirs.

By his first wife, Marjorie Glicksman, a well-known Heidegger scholar, David Grene had two children, Nicky (Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin) and Ruth, a scientist at Virginia Tech.

Wedding photo, Spike Marlin and Hilda van Stockum with Pic Gwynne next
to Hilda. She and Willem vS were then planning to marry. Photo by Willem?

Gregory shares our interest in Willem van Stockum and Pic Gwynne, who was the love of van Stockum's life. They did not marry, a story told quite accurately in Robert Wack's time-travel novel, Time Bomber which was published by Boissevain Books this year.

Spike Marlin wrote in his letter to my Mom on September 25, 1942 that he had met Pic on Dublin's Grafton Street and spoke to her briefly, finding her to have become "schoolmarmish". This is the same impression that Gregory had from his father - that a light went out in the lives of both Pic and Willem when they did not get her father's blessing on Willem's proposal of marriage in about 1933 (Pic Gwynne was at the wedding of Hilda and Spike in 1932 - see photo).  Willem's disappointment in love seems to have contributed to his volunteering for the air force in WWII and his death as a bomber pilot in the week of D-Day, 1944.

On February 18, 2008, my wife Alice Tepper Marlin and I had a wonderful and nostalgic dinner with Gregory and Smitha, with their lovely daughter Andi on hand for the beginning of the evening. David Grene apparently spoke with Gregory many times during his life, with feeling, about Willem van Stockum and especially about Willem's disappointment in not marrying Pic Gwynn, the daughter of the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. Willem's own great-great uncle (i.e., the uncle of Emily Boissevain) had also served as Provost of Trinity. But Provost Gwynn apparently did not favor the marriage and - since Willem and Pic chose not to follow the example of his great-grandparents, and elope - that was the end of it. David said that Willem never got over the disappointment. (See references to Pic in Willem's Letters, December 6, 1934 and January 26, 2005). It was after the shock of having to say goodbye to Pic that David Grene and Willem went together on an extended tour of Spain, perhaps in 1933 or 1934, before Willem went to join his sister in North America.

Gregory Grene found me through the Internet, because I had posted the previously cited transcribed letters of Willem van Stockum. They letters mention David Grene a few times, including in an invented story of a robbery.