I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

240 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
disposed of their collections years ago, cardboard box by cardboard box, when they ran out
of garage space, and their nonideological husbands and children finally prevailed.
Back then, someone had already coined a phrase to describe women like her: little old
lady in tennis shoes. But she wasn’t that old, and she didn’t wear tennis shoes. In fact, in
all my days, I only saw one ideological little old lady in tennis shoes: Madalyn Murray
O’Hair, who stood in front of the humanities departments’ building at the University of
California, Riverside, to lecture to maybe 20 students. That was over a decade after I read
my first issue of The Freeman. By then, I was writing for The Freeman.
My main academic interest in 1958 was anti-Communism. In 1956, the lady had taken
me to hear the anti-Communist Australian physician Fred Schwarz, when I was 14, in one
of his first speaking tours in the United States. Shortly thereafter, I sent Schwarz’s Christian
Anti-Communism Crusade $100 ($650 in today’s money), which were big bucks for me.
I had been working in a record store after school for $1 an hour for only a few months.
My parents were conservative Republicans. My father was in the FBI. He monitored
“the swoopers”—the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite splinter group. Once in a while,
he would put on his Sherman Williams Paint (SWP) cap for effect. But he wouldn’t wear
it while surveilling the Trotskyites.
Sometimes, dad would be called in to monitor “the real stuff”: the local Communist
Party. He told me that one night, after a CP rally, the local leader of the Party, Dorothy
Healey, got into her car, looked behind her at my dad’s car, and waved her arm to follow.
Then she pulled into traffic and drove away. He, of course, followed her. (I was disappointed
that she didn’t put this incident in her 1990 autobiography, Dorothy Healey Remembers.)
To give you some idea of how conservative dad was, when the U.S. Government suggested
that employees drive with their lights on out of respect to the anniversary of Martin
Luther King’s assassination, dad drove home that evening with his lights off, risking a ticket
and a collision. Yet he was one of the four Los Angeles FBI agents who discovered evidence
that identified James Earl Ray as King’s assassin, for which he was happy to take credit. He
did his work as a professional.
In the summer of 1958, I went to Boys State, a week-long program in state government
sponsored by the American Legion—Bill Clinton attended in Arkansas a few years later—
and that experience matured me more in one week than anything ever has. It was there
that I gained my confidence to speak in public. I was elected to a state-level office. Ironically,
the office was Superintendent of Public Instruction. That success gave me the confidence
to run for student body president the next semester. I won. I did it with a comedy speech
that poked fun at the system.
Another Boys State attendee that year was Dwight Chapin. He later served as Nixon’s
appointments secretary. He went to jail because he was the in-house contact man for Bob
Segretti, of dirty tricks fame. In March, 1970, I contacted Chapin for a job. He agreed to
help me get one. It did not work out.
I remember in the fall of 1958, when I was researching a 15-page, double-spaced term
paper on Communism for a high school civics class, that the lady handed me my first copy
of The Freeman. We got into a discussion about civil government. She was opposed to taxfunded
education. I was amazed. She also did not trust the FBI, which she said was a national