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Transcription: [00:14:00]
{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
After having served in Worl- after having enlisted during World War I, served in the army, he comes back at age 51 and re-enlists.

[00:14:07]
And when he tells Hellman this, she's appalled - I mean he's in terrible health. She's appalled, and of course she's gonna lose him, he's gonna be shipped out, and I don't know what the army was thinking.

[00:14:17]
I mean I really don't. Fifty-one, you know.

[00:14:19]
Um, so, and she is angry with him and says, "well, how can you do this?" And he says, "this is the happiest day of my life".

[00:14:26]
And goes off and serves three years quite honorably in the Aleutian Islands,

[00:14:30]
um, you know, in a backwater theater of the war, but nonetheless he serves for three years and gets out.

[00:14:36]
And I think again, that notion that he was going into an organization that somehow it would give him what he'd always wanted - this sense of home, this sense of stability, this sense that people were working,

[00:14:46]
whether it's for a common purpose or just to accomplish a task.

[00:14:50]
Um, he's arrested and charged, he- as part of his activities, he's in charge, he's a trustee of a bail foundation in New York which would be providing bail for political prisoners.

[00:15:03]
Um, he refuses to divulge who had given the money to the bail fund. Again, this notion that he's protecting the little guy.

[00:15:10]
He does 22 months in jail in a Kentucky prison, where again, his notion for a structure that he-

[00:15:16]
he apparently liked being in prison - it was relatively mild, there were moonshiners and car thieves and mostly eighteen to twenty year-old kids.

[00:15:23]
He was like- he was called "Pops", as he had been in the army. He smoked a lot of cigarettes and read a lot.

[00:15:28]
Um, and he liked it. And again, there's this notion of the individual. And there's this curious tension again that runs throughout history- throughout American history--

[00:15:36]
that the problem with being a loner, the problem with being the individual out there on your own riding your horse, or with your trench coat, the problem with being a loner is that you're alone.

[00:15:45]
You've got nothing else, you're relying only on yourself, and that's a tremendous burden for anybody to um, to bear.

[00:15:53]
And it's been a particularly difficult burden for Americans to bear because we're so infused with this individualistic ethos,

[00:15:58]
and how do you survive between