Dad’s Epic First Journey - 1955

In 1955 My Dad was the student body president of the University of Colorado in Boulder. There was a tradition at the time that the governing body of the University along with the Conference on World Affairs, would send the president of the student body to travel anywhere in the world he or she wanted, to study and then report on, student involvement with politics, economics and the like. The Conference on World Affairs (CWA) was founded at CU in 1948 by sociology professor Howard Higman, and it ran uninterrupted every year since until the Covid-19 Pandemic in 2020. CWA was an annual conference hosted by the University, open to the public, featuring panel discussions among experts in international affairs and other areas.

The total annual attendance of all the events at the 62nd Conference on World Affairs (in April, 2010) was estimated to be over 92,000. Numerous distinguished people have served as panelists over the years, including Patch Adams, Margo Adler, Betty Dodson, Buckminster Fuller, Temple Grandin, Werner Herzog, Adam Hochschild, Arianna Huffington, Andy Ihnarko, Molly Ivins, Henry Kissinger, Charles Krauthaummer, Paul Krugman, George McGovern, William Nack, Ralph Nader, Howard Nemerov, Yitzhak Rabin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Seth Shostak, Julia Sweeney, Studs Terkel and Ted Turner.

In 1955 one of the CWA Panelists was Eleanor Roosevelt - who had a storied career after serving as First Lady including being appointed by President Truman as a delegate to the UN General Assembly, where she was the first chairperson on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1946-1953. She also addressed the Democratic National Conventions in 1952 and 1956. She was “The most admired living woman” according to Gallup’s most admired man and woman poll of Americans - every year between 1948 (the poll's inception) to 1961 (the last poll before her death) except 1951” (Incidentally, Eleanor’s granddaughter Chandler was a student at CU at the time, and Dad’s room mate at the time was dating Chandler.)

This being Dad’s graduating year, As President he was selected for the Goodwill trip, and was given a private hour-long meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt which he still remembers vividly today. The purpose of their meeting was to get her advice on where it would be the most productive and informative for him to travel. Without hesitation, she advised he travel to the Middle East. She said: “The Middle East is the region that will determine the course of history, for the next fifty to one hundred years.” She promised Dad she would set up meetings with the Ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon, in Paris. Meetings that indeed took place.

(During their meeting she also discussed how much she hated Joe McCarthy and how she was focused on bringing him down…)

Dad’s trip began in Holland, then Paris and on for three weeks in Cairo and Alexandria Egypt, then to Beirut, Lebanon and Syria. Dad reflects now on the reason he felt mildly unsafe in his Paris meetings with the Ambassadors. There, he was asked to pass “coded verbal messages” to certain people in their countries. He remains convinced today he was acting as an unknowing spy - something he feels he was convinced to do for them out of his own young naivete. In Alexandria he was followed by secret service because they believed his notes were being searched. He was advised by them to “leave a string” on his notes, to see if it was disturbed and it indeed was.

Fortunately Dad remained safe and the trip was without further incident. His trip was fruitful and he was able to visit his brother Bud in Heidelberg, Germany and travel to Salzburg, Austria to attend a conference at the Schlossberg Castle where they hosted up and coming young leaders from all over Europe for US International Relations. In total the trip was 90 days and he came home to write his report for the University. He gave a speech on it at Mackey Auditorium on the Boulder campus that year and presented it at a Minneapolis Convention of the National Student Association.

Dad went on to a successful career in business in partnership with his brother Bud for nearly fifty years.