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The Sun Interview
Next To Godliness
The Story Behind Dr. Bronner's Soap — An Interview With Ralph Bronner
By Gail Grenier Sweet • January 2001
Corporations come and go. Some fail to grow fast enough and die. Others spread like giant blobs in bad science-fiction movies. But the company that makes Dr. Bronner's Soap is different. Certainly, the $7 million business could expand. Corporations in Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Japan have offered to import the all-natural, inexpensive soap known for its thick lather. Big chain stores have asked to sell it, using their private labels. But the answer is always no. The family behind Dr. Bronner's wants to stay small and honor the message on its label, which includes words from many of the world's great religions and philosophers.
Staying small and honoring the message means remaining family owned and family run. It means making and packaging a pure castile soap in factories where no harm is done to the environment. It means keeping the same employees for twenty years or longer with out-of-the-ordinary pay, benefits, and profit sharing. The company's founder, Dr. Emanuel Bronner, also believed in sharing profits with what he called "Spaceship Earth," borrowing Buckminster Fuller's term. The company once donated a thousand-acre rain forest worth more than $1 million to the Boys and Girls Clubs. Over the years, it has funded an orphanage in China, a chemistry lab in a Mexican school, freshwater wells in Ghana, homes for special children, college scholarships in foreign affairs, and homeless shelters.
Retaining family control of the company also guarantees continued use of a label that might look out of place on chain-store shelves. That famous label, the hallmark of a soap favored by back-to-the-land pioneers and fashion models alike, contains the "Moral ABC" of Dr. Emanuel Bronner. While you lather, you can read thousands of tiny words, scattered with exclamation points and run-on sentences: "When half-truth is gone & we are dust, the full-truth we print, protect & teach alone lives on! Full-truth is God, it must! Help teach the whole Human race, the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith."
Twenty years ago, I noticed a strange listing in the white pages for Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, where I live, two thousand miles from the California home of Dr. Bronner's Soap. Instead of a family name, the listing read, "All-One-God-Faith," followed by a street address (my street) and a phone number. I learned the address was that of Ralph Bronner, son of Dr. Emanuel Bronner, soap inventor, and I heard tales about Ralph loading boxes of soap into his white van (marked "All-One-God-Faith") and driving thousands of miles to give the goods away wherever a flood or other calamity created a need.
Last summer, I finally met Ralph Bronner, the man behind the mysterious phone-book listing. He told me about the company's soap-bottling factory in Escondido, California, and he pushed some soap into my hand. Ralph and a photocopy machine are the entire publicity department. The company spends its money on expensive peppermint and hemp oils rather than on marketing. Ralph told me that, in his three hundred thousand miles of traveling, he hasn't found a health-food store in America that doesn't carry his family's product. Yet they use no salespeople and no advertising — just word of mouth and more than fifty articles in such publications as Parenting, Backpacker, Vogue, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal, and others.
Shortly after I met Ralph, I traveled to California to visit my brother and his family, who live only a mile away from the soap factory, and got to see the operation firsthand. I missed my chance to meet Dr. Bronner himself, however; he had died in 1997 at the age of eighty-nine.
The low-tech Bronner factory in Escondido was a world apart from the smelly factories I saw when I was growing up in Milwaukee. Surrounded by eucalyptus trees, the building emits no noise. There's no smoke and no odor except for the occasional whiff of peppermint, almond, eucalyptus, lemon, aloe vera, rose, or lavender. The day's work orders are scribbled on a chalkboard. Liquid soap is stored in elevated vats and gravity-fed into tubes handled by four women who fill bottles in a room below. With fifteen employees, the company produces 1.5 million bottles a year, as well as bar soap, all packed by hand, with no machinery.
David Bronner, Ralph's nephew and the company president, showed me around and told me about his grandfather. Dr. Emanuel Bronner was an eccentric who railed loudly and publicly against such "evils" as fluoridated water, communism, false religions, and poor health practices. Though he lost both parents in the Holocaust, he was a believer in the unity of the human family. Some saw his preaching about "uniting Spaceship Earth" as ranting, and he was once committed to an insane asylum in Elgin, Illinois. He escaped after three tries and fled to California, "where he fit right in," the family likes to joke.
When I returned to Menomonee Falls, I had questions for Ralph Bronner, the company vice-president. Ralph is sixty-four years old, retired from thirty-two years of teaching junior high school in Milwaukee's inner city. He now spends his days pursuing his love of folk music, practicing philanthropy, and promoting his father's philosophy and soap. He runs a coffee house and sings for day-care centers and children's groups. "Music, soap, and my life are so intertwined that they could never be separated," he says.
Talking with Ralph gave me a taste of what it might have been like to meet the eccentric Dr. Bronner himself. What other company vice-president would take six cases of soap and a guitar on the train to Mardi Gras and lead the passengers in singing Steve Goodman's famous song "City of New Orleans"?
The interview began as we walked into Ralph's cluttered office.
Bronner: My wife would die if she saw this. It reminds me of my father's office after he escaped from the insane asylum.
Sweet: Tell me what it was like being the son of Dr. Emanuel Bronner.
Bronner: I was just out of college when I first went out to LA to help him with the business in 1957. He was in an old tenement building. The room he rented — he called it a cave — was packed from floor to ceiling with thousands of documents he had written to world leaders: the President, the Russians, the United Nations. There's a letter he wrote to Roosevelt in 1943 in which he complains that the White House hasn't answered any of his telegrams for the past ten and a half years. He got off the boat from Germany in 1929, and by 1932 he was writing to the President.
I was the prodigal son returning. I typed the labels. (No word processors back then.) I thought we were wasting our time. I told Dad, "Nobody's going to read this stuff." There were more than three thousand words, in type smaller than a phone book. It was stupidity. And when I made a mistake in those days, we didn't even have white-out. We retyped it. Finally, I went into teaching so I could become independent. In 1961, I brought my wife, Gisela, to California with me for the first time, and within half an hour, she was packing soap. Dad never wasted time on pleasantries.
I keep scrapbooks. If you glance at them, you'll get an idea of what goes on in this den. Some of it is business, with distributors and so on, but a lot of it is personal correspondence. Here's a letter from a man who says the soap makes him feel like someone put a York Peppermint Pattie in his underwear. Here's another from a man who thanks us for giving his life purpose: "My dear friend Dr. Bronner. [It always floors me how many people who had never met my father thought of him as a close friend.] My life was empty until one day, while washing the daily grime from my skin and anticipating my demise, I noticed the words on the wrapper of a bottle of soap. I read them, and instantly there was purpose to my existence. Your words of eternal wisdom returned faith to an old man's black heart. For this I cannot thank you enough." And he signed it, "My eternal gratitude."
My favorite quote from the label, and one of Dad's favorites, is "God must have loved the common people of the earth, he made so many of them." That's Abraham Lincoln. I have no friends in the corporate world of briefcases and ties. They only want to buy us out, tell us how to double our sales, or get something out of us. My friends are the people stocking the shelves, cutting the carrots in the food pantries, and shopping in stores all over America. Three times a year, we go to a national convention. That's the only marketing we do. The other booths have slick Madison Avenue salesmen grabbing you and handing you brochures. We're just crowded into our little booth with a picture of Dad on the wall. And people hug us and tell us how wonderful our soaps are.
I would be in jail if I put on the label the claims that people make for our soap: Gets rid of warts. Cures eye infections. One woman showed me her teeth. "Don't they look beautiful?" she said. It turned out she brushes with the almond soap. A dentist she hadn't been to in two years wanted to know what she was using, because she had no plaque and no cavities. "Doesn't it foam?" I asked her. "Of course," she said. "My kids like to watch me brush so they can see Mom foam."
An animal-rescue operation wrote to tell us that an application of Dr. Bronner's gets rid of fleas and ticks. We mention that, but we don't push it, because if I say it's good for fleas and ticks, people won't believe it's also a wonderful body soap.
In Charleston, South Carolina, a shark fisherman saw the sign on my car: dr. bronner's magic soap. He stopped me and said our soap was the best he'd ever used for getting the fish smell off his hands. A farmer from Willard, Wisconsin, bought a case because he said it was the best for removing the smell of cow shit. This is the same soap Martha Stewart says is great for mosquitoes and Parenting magazine raves about for your skin. It's also the same soap that's number one among models, whose skin is their career. We don't push it on them; they call us. A photographer who'd been photographing models for eighteen years once said to me, "You wouldn't believe how often I saw your soap in the dressing rooms."
Last year, every one of our fifteen workers got from six to twenty-two thousand dollars as a profit-sharing bonus. . . . They looked on Dr. Bronner, my father, as a sort of father, too. We are all one family, and we try to carry on what he started. Reporters can't believe 2 million bottles are packed by hand, but you saw it. Four to five people, not working fast, pack them with no machines. Corporate America wants us to believe that you have to have machinery and pollution if you want products; that we can't make money if we share profits with workers. We are proving them wrong and loving it.
Sweet: During the thirty-two years you taught school, were you still as involved with the company?
Bronner: Yes and no. My father, thankfully, slowed down over the years, but at his peak, I'd get four or five phone calls a week, some an hour long, about "Ralph, we're changing Number Six," or "Number Thirteen" — which is how he referred to statements on the label. With faxes back and forth, I was never completely away from the business. I'd go out there for about two weeks at a time, which was all I could stand.
About ten years ago, I started taking "soap trips," traveling at random, meeting the people who are selling our soaps, and telling them our story. On one trip through rural Minnesota, a woman told me, "My husband would love to meet you. He's out plowing the north forty." So I drove into the fields to find him. Seeing the tractor, I got out and waved to him. From a distance, I said, "I'm Dr. Bronner's son." As he walked toward me, he recited from memory a quote on the label, the one about "God's perfect pilot." That choked me up: a farmer in a field in Minnesota, who didn't even know I was coming, had memorized part of the label.
For a typical soap trip, I might take thirty-nine cases and about four hundred copies of articles. When we leave, we usually don't know where we are going to stay that night. I sometimes go on the spur of the moment. I used to take a disabled friend along. One time, we were heading to Kansas City, and on the way we decided to go to Omaha. It makes no difference; I have no appointments.
I have met people so incredibly giving that your and my and most people's efforts pale in comparison. One of them is Rosemary Landry. Seven years ago, someone wrote to me and asked, "Could you send this remarkable lady some soap? She has adopted many handicapped kids." That's all he said. We drove five hundred miles out of our way to meet her. In the last twenty years, she has adopted thirty-nine children who were rejected by other families because of Down syndrome, elephantiasis, schizophrenia, tumors, and so on. She takes care of nine to fifteen kids, ranging in age from three to twenty-three. She gets no recognition, no support, and yet she feels God has blessed her. We've become good friends. The kids call me "Dr. Soapy." I play the guitar for them, and we have fun together.
A lot of people think I'm a salesman, that these are sales trips, but we already have more business than we can handle. Our soap is everywhere. When my wife and I were in Hawaii for our fortieth wedding anniversary, we went to a crater, and there was a shack selling cold drinks at the bottom. Inside were six backpackers from all over America. All six loved our soap. Two of them had it in their backpacks. I had to autograph Dad's picture for them. This happens everywhere.
Sweet: So the purpose of your trips is . . .
Bronner: To tell the story. Of course, people can't believe this. They all think I'm a salesman. They can't believe Dr. Bronner is my father and I'm the vice-president. I'll give you a good example. We were near Mount Shasta, and I walked into a health-food store and said, "I am Dr. Bronner's son." The owner said, "Why are you visiting me? I'm already selling your soap." But I told her our story anyway, and by the time I left, she had tears in her eyes and was hugging both Gisela and me. She'd had no idea that our profits were helping to dig wells in Ghana and to raise Rosemary Landry's kids, or how we shared with our workers.
Sweet: How much do you share with your workers?
Bronner: Last year, every one of our fifteen workers got from six to twenty-two thousand dollars as a profit-sharing bonus. They all have optical and dental as well as medical coverage, and a pension plan. Four times a year, we have safety meetings, which can be boring, but afterward we take all of our employees and their spouses, sweethearts, and kids out for a big party. We'll have an eight-hundred-dollar bill. But they looked on Dr. Bronner, my father, as a sort of father, too. We are all one family, and we try to carry on what he started.
Reporters can't believe 2 million bottles are packed by hand, but you saw it. Four to five people, not working fast, pack them with no machines. Corporate America wants us to believe that you have to have machinery and pollution if you want products; that we can't make money if we share profits with workers. We are proving them wrong and loving it. The business is still run out of a California bedroom that Dad converted into an office. The two secretaries can look out the window and see our cats and orange trees.
Sweet: How do you decide which causes to help?
Bronner: It's usually a call from someone who loves the soap. A woman I've never met named Adaku Nzeribe called five years ago. She'd just come from Nigeria and was depressed by the sight of Nigerian street women being forced into unwanted marriages, prostitution, and homelessness. She wanted to get some soap for them. We sent her soap and money for getting those women jobs and clothes. Churches and organizations often ask if they can buy it cheaper to ship it to Third World countries. We tell them it's no charge.
We've donated money to the Black Holocaust Museum, and two months ago, I met its founder, Dr. James Cameron. He reminded me of my father, eighty-five years old and going strong. Dr. Cameron said, "The world is our country, and we are all children of the same God." I showed him my father's label from 1950: "The whole world is our country, our fatherland, because all mankind are born its citizens. We are all brothers and sisters because one ever-loving, eternal Father is our only God." That's from Thomas Paine. My father added the part about brothers and sisters. He always changed things.
Two months after floods hit Mississippi, Gisela and I took thirty-nine cases of soap down there to give away. The devastation was shocking. Some of the homes had been filled with stagnant water four to six feet high for months. There was plaster in the yards, and the owners were cleaning the mud off the two-by-fours because the homes were not going to be replaced by insurance. As I gave away the soap, I said, "It smells better than mud and dead fish."
The reason we love helping Adaku Nzeribe, Rosemary Landry, and others directly is that we avoid the bureaucrats. Now, the Red Cross and others do wonderful work, but there are people paid two hundred thousand dollars a year to be executive directors of those organizations. Rosemary doesn't get a cent and sometimes doesn't know where her next rent check is coming from.
A few times a month, I'm asked whether we're a New Age religion or a cult. Well, we're not, or if we are, we have no members. Our family is running a soap business based on Dad's teachings. All he did is what any religious person does: he read the great works . . . and picked what he liked. His theology was a sort of cosmic soup. . . . He saw his soap as one way of getting his message across. As he said, "Jew or gentile, everyone needs soap."
Sweet: What was your dad like?
Bronner: My father was the most dedicated person I've ever heard of or come across, and that's what made him somewhat impossible to work for. We all loved him, but his drive and intensity made it hard to be with him continually. I would say, though, that the more I do this work, the more I appreciate how far ahead of the rest of the world he was.
Sweet: What keeps you inspired to do this work?
Bronner: I never tire of telling Dad's story, whether it's to you, the guy stuck next to me on a plane, or to 2 million listeners on National Public Radio. I think I was born to tell it.
Sweet: What is your dad's story? I know he lost his folks in the Holocaust.
Bronner: Yes, but Dad was already writing long before his parents perished in the concentration camps. He was already saying that we're all children of the same God. I think it started because he was fed up with his father overemphasizing Jews as the chosen people. So he married my mother, a Catholic hotel maid. After that, he read the Bible, as well as the Torah.
He was dedicated to getting other people to find God, but his intensity sometimes got him into trouble. Once, he was speaking to student groups and organizations on the University of Chicago campus, but he hadn't bothered to ask permission. He was brought to the president's office. Dad claimed freedom of speech and refused to leave, so the president called the police, who used a parking ticket as an excuse to haul Dad off and put him in a straitjacket.
Eventually, they put him into Elgin Insane Asylum, which he called a concentration camp. He escaped and spent his first few nights of freedom on the roof of a ymca in LA. With no identification and no money, he got a job fighting forest fires. In his head, he had the soap formulas that he learned from the masters in Germany. He turned them into a soap so good that the twenty-fifth-anniversary issue of Natural Health said, "Since the fifties, all sorts of companies have put out natural soaps, but none beat Dr. Bronner's." He never apologized for the fact that he didn't have a Ph.D.; his knowledge of soap was equivalent to one. Real doctors are making soap that isn't as good as ours.
Sweet: What was Emanuel's early life like, before he became a visionary soap maker?
Bronner: He seemed to have been born a visionary. He was a member of a wealthy Jewish soap-making family, yet he felt he had to show the world that Jews could work with their hands and were not the chosen people. He also couldn't understand the prejudice and hatred of the times. At four years old, he had a bucket of urine thrown on him by other boys, who called him a "goddamn kike," and he had to go in and ask his parents what the word meant.
In his teens, in the 1920s, he joined the Zionist movement, but his father said, "Politics and soap don't mix. You bring up Zionism in the plant one more time, and you're out." So my dad left for America. It was 1929. Later, as the flames of Nazism spread, he tried to rescue his family. Luckily, he got his two sisters out, but even as late as 1938, he couldn't convince his mother and father to leave. They were proud to be Germans.
Sweet: Has this job made the world smaller for you?
Bronner: It's made the world more human. In this den, I got a phone call from a woman in Australia. She said, "I wanted to let you know that your father saved my life." Twenty years earlier, she'd been a hippie in Syracuse, New York. Her mother was about to kick her out because of drugs and sex. She was depressed and suicidal. In desperation, she called my father. (Our phone number is on every bottle, and we still answer every call.) My father listened to her story and said one sentence that saved her life: "Clean the house and call me back!" And he hung up. Now, a psychiatrist would say, "See me for a year" — at $150 an hour — "and I'll cure you." But my father's advice worked. She stopped whining. She felt good to be doing something constructive. Her mother almost fell over. She called Dad back twice, and he spent hours talking to her.
Sweet: Your dad's goal was to unite all religions. Some people fear the coming together of all religions as a sign of the apocalypse.
Bronner: A few times a month, I'm asked whether we're a New Age religion or a cult. Well, we're not, or if we are, we have no members. Our family is running a soap business based on Dad's teachings. All he did is what any religious person does: he read the great works — the Torah, the Bible, Thomas Paine — and picked what he liked. His theology was a sort of cosmic soup.
Sweet: Didn't he want to change the name of the soap?
Bronner: Dad once wanted to change the name of our company to "With Atomic Weapons and Guns, We Are All One or None." We told him that was too long. So he settled on "All-One-God-Faith." But it really isn't so much a faith as a collection of ideas. There is no collection box, no clergy. It's a collection of one man's favorite teachings. He saw his soap as a way of getting his message across. As he said, "Jew or gentile, everyone needs soap."
Sweet: What are your own religious beliefs?
Bronner: My wife and I are members of the United Church of Christ. The church impressed me because its members were doing things. I read about them helping prostitutes in Las Vegas, prisoners in California, and migrants. Since we joined, they've let me loose, and I've helped with the food pantry, an inner-city meal program, and a home for mentally retarded adults. Jesus didn't spend his time interpreting words. Jesus was with the prostitutes and the lepers and the poor.
Sweet: Tell me about your dad's spirituality.
Bronner: For him, spirituality and the universe were connected. I have this postcard from Pete Seeger that shows the galaxy with an arrow: "You are here." Dad would have loved it, because he loved the Mount Palomar Observatory. When he could still see, he'd take me to the observatory, where there's a mural of the galaxy that covers a whole wall. Dad would point his finger at one speck and say, "Ralph, this is a sun ten times bigger than ours — now step back and see the majesty of God's creation." Dad thought every church should be tied in with an observatory — a "planet temple" — so we would know how insignificant we are and how mighty God is.
Here's another example of Dad's spiritual focus. Three years ago, a woman named Karen Logan called. She was writing a book titled Clean House, Clean Planet, and she wanted some help. She was a big believer in our product. When her book was finished, I brought Karen to meet Dad, who was eighty-seven and lying in bed. His body was weak, but his mind was still bright and alert. Karen told him she was writing a book called Clean House, Clean Planet. He paused, pulled her down, and whispered into her ear, "It needs a third thing: Clean House, Clean Planet, Clean Soul." Karen called her publisher immediately to change the title, but it was too late.
Sweet: Your nephew David is now president of the company, and I talked with him at the plant in Escondido. He told me the people at the plant loved your dad.
Bronner: He was like a father to everybody, even though it was difficult for his family members to get along with him. If you worked in the office, his intensity sometimes drove you crazy. With me, it was always "Ralph, you are no longer my son unless you fly with me to the Soviet Union to present the Moral ABC to Brezhnev."
I'd say, "Are you crazy, Dad? We'll end up in Siberia."
He'd reply, "Don't you have any courage, Ralph?"
He'd say things like "You are no longer my son if you don't memorize that label." The label was three thousand words long, and it kept changing.
Sweet: And you kept retyping and retyping. . . .
Bronner: Yes, even when I was in Menomonee Falls and Milwaukee, if the phone rang at six in the morning, I'd know it was Dad. I couldn't complain, though, because it was four in the morning for him.
We don't want to get so big that we can't pack with five, six, or seven people. We want to stay a family business. The liquid soap is so concentrated that it's 1 percent away from being a solid. Can you imagine what would happen if we went public and the stockholders found out that all you have to do is add water and we could make more soap, more money?
Sweet: You say your dad saw his soap as a way to get his message out, through the label. But you've actually excluded several countries from your market. Don't you want to spread your message there?
Bronner: We refuse to sell the soap in a country if it requires us to change the label. For example, in a Moslem country, the word God cannot appear in the bathroom. What are we going to do — tell people to wash in the kitchen? Another problem is that we don't want to get so big that we can't pack with five, six, or seven people. We want to stay a family business. The liquid soap is so concentrated that it's 1 percent away from being a solid. Can you imagine what would happen if we went public and the stockholders found out that all you have to do is add water and we could make more soap, more money?
Sweet: Did you ever try to write your dad's life story?
Bronner: I tried to get it on tape, but he'd tell only a little about his life and then go into the Moral ABC. I'd say, "That's already on the label." And he'd say, "What's more important — my life or uniting Spaceship Earth?"
That was his favorite line.
"Dad," we'd say, "we're waiting to eat."
"What's more important — eating or uniting Spaceship Earth?"
At Dad's funeral, my son Mark cracked everyone up when he said, "Grandpa wasn't your ordinary grandpa. If you asked him, 'What do you think the San Diego Padres are going to do this weekend?' he'd say, 'Who cares? Let's unite Spaceship Earth!' "
Once, Dad and I were working outside. Dad liked lying in the sun with his leopard-skin bathing suit on. (Actually, he liked lying there nude; we had to talk him into the suit.) We were working on the label for the millionth time, going over and over the words, when the phone rang. He answered it and nodded his head silently for thirty seconds — a long time for him not to speak. Finally, he said, "I don't have time. Call me back when I've united Spaceship Earth!" And he slammed the phone down.
I said, "Who was it?"
"Life magazine."
My eyes bulged. "What did they want?" I asked.
"They wanted to write a feature, but I don't have time. Now, where were we? Oh, yes, Number Thirteen."
He was totally blind for his last twenty-five years and legally blind for twenty years before that. He called himself the happiest blind man in America, because he was helping the earth.
I believe Dad's slow passing from Parkinson's was God's way of letting us continue the business. If he'd been hit by a truck, the business would have collapsed. Everything was in this blind man's head. He was running it absolutely by himself. He would say to my brother, "Jim, I want you in the business," but as soon as Jim made a move, Dad would undercut it. Jim would find a peppermint-oil supplier and sign a contract, and our father would get on the phone (a blind man on the phone is dangerous) and find it two cents cheaper somewhere else. But when the Parkinson's hit, we slowly got involved, year by year, so that when Dad finally passed away, there was nothing different to do the next day. We had been running it for three years by ourselves.
I was concerned about what to put on the gravestone of a man who took all religions to heart. Then it came to me, without one word changed. All our family loved it. On his grave, it says, "A life dedicated to God, mankind, and Spaceship Earth," with the dates: 1908-1997.
In his last years, Dad was wondering why he was alive. I said, "So you can hear people tell you what a great thing you did, Dad." I would read him letters and tell him what people had said. Here's a letter I'm glad I got to read to him. Although people like to dismiss our customers as uneducated hippies, this letter writer had a master's degree. He wrote: "Your father's accomplishments may remain largely unsung in the public eye, but his contributions were great. He brought about a good far more sublime than any general or politician ever accomplished, and his soap will yet save the world."
The letter I picked from thousands to read at his funeral was written in red ink on a table napkin. It said simply, "Dear Dr. Bronner: Thanks for having the courage to care about world peace. We love you. The Brodys."
The Brodys were in their eighties. They had never met Dad. They knew him only from a label. And I got choked up reading, "We love you." Have you ever loved someone you know only from a product label?
We have three scrapbooks filled with photos, letters, and wonderful anecdotes. My favorite is an autograph from Muhammad Ali. Gisela and I spent an hour with him once and gave him a case of soap. And guess why he loved it.
Sweet: Why?
Bronner: Because the prophet Mohammed is quoted on the label. I still have the book that Muhammad Ali autographed with a shaking hand — he has Parkinson's, too, you know. He wrote: "To Ralph and Gisela Bronner, from Muhammad Ali. Serve God. He is the goal." It's the same thing Dad would have written.
Gail Grenier Sweet
I purchased two gift subscriptions for friends this past Christmas. How sad that, in the January 2001 issue, the second sentence of Gail Grenier Sweet's interview with Ralph Bronner ["Next to Godliness"] has a glaring typo. It's not what I wanted their first impression to be. I'm sure you feel the same.
Carolyn Koesters Cleveland, Ohio
Considering that The Sun gives a home to what is broken, blemished, and bruised in the world, it seems ironic that Carolyn Koesters is so saddened to find a typo in it [Correspondence, February 2001 ], and the editor so appalled. In the same issue, another reader writes about how The Sun's honest stories on abuse show that "grief is universal"; Sue Monk Kidd writes of a life-changing moment in which she "couldn't go back to a place where the worst thing in life was a misplaced salt bowl"; and Maggie Kast celebrates a child with what some might call a genetic "misprint." The Sun brings similar truths to light in every issue.
As a writer, I understand the love and dedication that spurs one to aim for error-free text, and I acknowledge that I still haven't learned to accept the occasional, inevitable mistake with the same grace with which I accept my freckles or the wilted edges of a petal. But let us save being saddened and appalled for the injustice and hatred that are the true errors in life.
M. Ziemer London
The Sun responds:
We, too, were appalled to discover the typo. The error wasn't the result of careless proofreading on our part. It turns out that new printing technology being used by our printer in Wisconsin can produce mysterious glitches — even when the computer file we send them is correct. Now that we know such errors can occur, we've taken steps to avoid them in the future.
— Ed.
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By Stephanie Mills
Ladies' Room, National Archives
By Lyn Lifshin
My Life As A Mermaid
By Jennifer Grow
Fear Of Rest
By Wayne Muller
Judaism's Mystical Heart
An Interview With Dovid Din
By Howard Jay Rubin
By Thomas Wiloch
Sy Safransky's Notebook
By Sy Safransky


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Q: .htaccess redirect from subfolder to main domain with same permalink structure Current I just finished migrating a WordPress site with the url www.boingnet.com/purl/ for the WordPress install. After migrating to a new server and changing the url to www.boingnet.com I am looking for a way to redirect all traffic from the old site to the new site and keep all digital assets.
http://www.boingnet.com/purl/pricing/
would go to....
http://www.boingnet.com/pricing/

A: Put this code in your .htaccess under DOCUMENT_ROOT directory:
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
# Turn mod_rewrite on
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.boingnet\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^purl/(.*)$ /$1 [L,R=301,NC]

A:  RewriteRule ^purl/(.*) /$1 [R,L]

Should do the trick.

A: Create .htaccess file in "pricing" folder ,  it contains those lines:
     RewriteEngine on
     RewriteRule (.*)$ /purl/$1 [R=301,L]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Bright ruby red in colour with aromas of summer berry fruits. Luscious, juicy red berries dominate the palate with a hint of spice on the finish. With its soft supple texture and mouthfilling fruits, it will soon have you reaching for a second glass.
Tasting Note: Bright ruby red in colour with aromas of summer berry fruits. Luscious, juicy red berries dominate the palate with a hint of spice on the finish. With its soft supple texture and mouthfilling fruits, it will soon have you reaching for a second glass.


Mobile applications for education institutions have completed an incredible thing for the understudies, making the learning procedure fun and simple based on the research by mobile app development company. Likewise, the different application highlights support commitment through information arranged exercises.
Nowadays, students out there are more determined towards utilizing a cell phone for each reason. A cell phone they call it. A student can gain information to any data from anyplace. This decreases the possibility of visiting a library and looking for the information. A cell phone consequently can be utilized for various such purposes. Learning is a constant procedure and the center has now totally moved to e-Learning. Because of the cell phones and the different element arranged applications, understudies can learn at their pace and take as much time as necessary at understanding things, as everything is only a tick away.
The presentation of uses in the education area has prompted the presentation of new learning techniques. There are fun recreations accessible on mobile applications that enjoy Al students into a sound point of view and help them comprehend things from an alternate point of view.
Parent-instructor communication applications help in building guardian educator relations past the dividers of instructive establishments. This encourages instructors reacting to the inquiries from the guardians with respect to the improvement of their ward.
Students are by and large exceptionally partial to web based contemplating. This is the place library applications and searching applications. These applications make it simple for the students to look through study material in the mobile application.
Online school installments and installments for different purposes, can be made through mobile applications. It spares the push to remain in a line and pay the expenses for different purposes at school. It makes it simple for the two instructors and guardians to monitor the participation of the students.
Establishments can not give careful consideration to all students. It is conceivable to connect with every one of them. School communication applications make it conceivable to grant data to each students. They can advise them about new timetables, diverse discussions, different gatherings, and social school exercises.
Copyright © 2019 Manya Bloggers Awards. All Rights Reserved.


Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, which literally translates to the Republic of the Equator) is a representative democratic republic in South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and by the Pacific Ocean to the west. It is one of only two countries in South America, along with Chile, that do not have a border with Brazil. The country also includes the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific, about 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) west of the mainland.
Ecuador straddles the equator, from which it takes its name, and has an area of 272,046 km2 (109,483 sq mi). Its capital city is Quito, which was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in the 1970s for having the best preserved and least altered historic centre in Latin America. The country's largest city is Guayaquil. The historic centre of Cuenca, the third largest city in the country, was also declared a World Heritage Site in 1999, for being an outstanding example of a planned inland Spanish style colonial city in the Americas. Ecuador is also home-despite its size-to a great variety of species, many of them endemic, like those of the Galapagos islands. This species diversity makes Ecuador one of the 17 megadiverse countries in the world. The new constitution of 2008 is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights.
Ecuador is a presidential republic and became independent in 1830, after having been part of the Spanish colonial empire and the republic of Gran Colombia. It is a medium-income country with an HDI score of 0.695 (2010), and about 35.1% of its population lives below the poverty line.


A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers, when bitterness and self-interest seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny.
But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.
Fairness is an across-the-board requirement for all our interactions with each other ...Fairness treats everybody the same.
For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.
How do we create a harmonious society out of so many kinds of people? The key is tolerance- the one value that is indispensable in creating community.
I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it.
I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in ?We, the people?.
If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.
If we promise as public officials, we must deliver. If we as public officials propose, we must produce.
Just remember the world is not a playground but a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday but an education. One eternal lesson for us all: to teach us how better we should love.
The American dream is not dead. It is gasping for breath, but it is not dead.
The majority of the American people still believe that every single individual in this country is entitled to just as much respect, just as much dignity, as every other individual.
We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present: unemployment, inflation... but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America.
We call ourselves public servants but I'll tell you this: we as public servants must set an example for the rest of the nation. It is hypocritical for the public official to admonish and exhort the people to uphold the common good.
We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, but we can find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny.
We must exchange the philosophy of excuse- what I am is beyond my control for the philosophy of responsibility.
We must not become the new puritans and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.
We want to be in control of our lives. Whether we are jungle fighters, craftsmen, company men, gamesmen, we want to be in control. And when the government erodes that control, we are not comfortable.
What the people want is very simple- they want an America as good as its promise.


A total of six banks were exempted from applying the maximum wage on their employees after the judicial ruling issued last week for employees of Banque Misr.
The list of banks that were able to avoid applying the maximum wage so far includes the National Bank of Egypt (NBE), Banque Misr, Banque du Caire, United Bank of Egypt, Housing and Development Bank, and Export Development Bank of Egypt.
Meanwhile, six other banks are awaiting their judicial rulings to exempt them from applying the maximum wage, including the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), Principal Bank for Development and Agricultural Credit (PBDAC), Arab Investment Bank (AIBK), National Investment Bank (NIB), Industrial Development and Workers Bank of Egypt, and Egyptian Arab Land Bank.
The Administrative Court at the State Council issued verdicts in the past week to cancel former prime minister Ibrahim Mehleb's decision to apply the Maximum Wage Law on employees of Banque Misr.
The court explained that Mehleb's decision contradicted with the provisions of the constitution and law, as well as with the provisions of decree 63/2014, which addresses the maximum wages of employees in state bodies. It is determined exclusively in explicit and clear clauses the subjects of its provisions and the banks' employees are not among them.
According to sources in the legal field, the rulings issued by the Administrative Court cancelling the application of the Maximum Wage Law on bank employees are enforceable and should be applied retroactively since the date the decision was enforced in July 2014.
A presidential decision amending the law addressing the maximum income of employees in state administrative bodies was issued in July 2014. The employees of the CBE, public banks, petroleum, aviation, and communications authorities and public companies were listed among the subjects of that law, making their monthly salaries no more than a maximum of EGP 42,000.


text:
Marek Sobczyk (1956 París) de madre polaca y de padre francés, es un pintor autodidacta formado en la tradición humanista centroeuropea y en la línea de la tradición literaria francesa de índole conceptual.

Trayectoria
Su constante interés por la filosofía y la poesía, así como su relación con el campo de las artes plásticas le llevan a trabajar e investigar en diferentes lugares de Europa.
Residió en Venecia, becado por el ministerio de asuntos exteriores italiano, para estudiar las técnicas muralistas.
En 1991 abre un taller en el norte de Holanda donde trabaja con el artista Robert Hogervorst en el proyecto de una revista de carácter filosófico y social en relación con el pensamiento de Joseph Beuys, que da lugar a numerosas conferencias y encuentros. Después de un viaje a Islandia, relacionado con el estudio del concepto paisajístico, es invitado por la Fundación Noesis de Barcelona.

Su pintura ha sido expuesta en diferentes galerías de arte e instituciones y recogida en diversos catálogos.

Exposiciones (selección)
 1986 - "La expresión de los años 80", BWA, Sopot
 1987 - "¿Qué es" apuestas Antiguo Norblin, Varsovia
 1990 - "las obras en curso" (3), Scheibler Palace, Lodz
 1992 - "Gruppa 1982-1991", Zacheta Gallery, Londres
 1996 - "Kunst in der neuen Messe", Leipzig

Obra escrita
 Del silencio a la voz, 1999.
 Ruido de cuerpo, 2001.

Referencias

Pintores de Polonia del siglo XX
Pintores de Polonia del siglo XXI
Nacidos en Varsovia

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: Mail header from server analysis Today received a mail who appears to be coming from a account from our domain, but when mail header is analized it comes from another server and user.
Mail arrived from a real owned domain directed to a real account on my owned domain.
How is this possible?
How i can avoid this problem?
Mail Header edited partially for security reasons:
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Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2019 12:26:21 -0500
**From: Presidencia <userinmyrealdomain@myrealdomin.com>**

Thanks in advance.

A: Faking the From: header is easy.
Only dkim(+dmarc) on your domain will help, and then only for receivers who actually check dkim and dmarc.
DKIM will include a digital signature based on several headers, including the From:. Receivers can check the public key in the DNS of your domain and verify the signature.
DMARC will stipulate policy about what to do when DKIM (and SPF) break.


text:
Polyurethane in industrial buildings
1 What is polyurethane?
2 Uses of polyurethane
2.1 Crack repair
2.2 Sealing concrete surface pores
2.3 Polyurethane Flooring: Cement-polyurethane mix
3 Advantages and disadvantages of polyurethane as a material for construction
4 Is the use of polyurethane recommended for industrial warehouses?
Polyurethane is a type of resin widely used in industrial constructions since it has favorable qualities to resist ultraviolet radiation, as well as chemical and physical abrasion.
In industrial buildings, just as polished concrete flooring is an alternative to epoxy resin, polyurethane is also an epoxy resin, used as a substance to cover a floor.
A polyurethane flooring is characterized by being flexible and resistant to wear, however, it can't be applied in all industries. Accordingly, certain conditions are required for optimal and lasting performance.
What is polyurethane?
In general terms, polyurethane is a synthetic polymer (resin) that results from condensation treatments used on certain organic compounds (polyols with diisocyanates).
Depending on the polyurethane's molecular structure, there are two types of polyurethane:
Thermosetting resins.
Thermoplastic resins.
Both polyurethane resins are plastic materials with low thermal conductivity, which are differentiated by the degree of fluidity.
Uses of polyurethane
Polyurethane is a highly versatile resin in industrial and civil constructions, thanks to the fact that it can manifest itself in two different ways.
Thermoset polyurethane is used as a foam to thermally and acoustically insulate any type of building.
On the other hand, thermoplastic polyurethane stands out for being an elastomer, which improves the finish and durability of a concrete floor. It is also the most commonly used resin in industrial constructions.
Among the uses of thermoplastic polyurethane, the following stand out.
Crack repair
The polyurethane's high elasticity allows to close any crack openings, waterproofing the surface, and providing the repaired area with an aesthetic finish.
When repairing concrete cracks, polyurethane should not be applied directly on to the opening, as ports may be required depending on the properties of the resin.
Sealing concrete surface pores
In addition to elasticity, thermoplastic polyurethane is a fluid with a relatively high viscosity that enables it to penetrate the concrete's tiny pores, covering any gap in the stone mass.
The thermoplastic characteristics are also used for the expansion joints repair, offering an elastic filler that is resistant to chemical attacks.
The polyurethane seal provides extra protection to the concrete floor, preventing harmful substances from entering into the mass. In addition to this, it reduces the impact of the adverse effects of the weather.
Source: paintingselpanona.es
Polyurethane Flooring: Cement-polyurethane mix
A polyurethane flooring is characterized by being a hybrid mix between thermoplastic resin, and cement. This mixture is usually applied as a covering mortar.
Cement-polyurethane mixtures provide greater mechanical, chemical, thermal and waterproofing resistance to conventional flooring. Also, they contribute to hygiene and safety, since it is also a non-slip surface.
Polyurethane flooring is widely used in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and food industries.
Advantages and disadvantages of polyurethane as a material for construction
Like all construction materials, polyurethane has both advantages and disadvantages in its usage.
Among the most notable advantages are the following:
Thermal and acoustic insulation.
It has a high capability to neutralize thermal shocks.
Waterproof and flexible.
High tolerance to freezing temperatures.
Resistance to abrasion, chemical attacks and ultraviolet radiation.
In contrast, the main disadvantages are:
Sensitivity to humidity: the presence of humidity increases its thermal conductivity.
Polyurethane coatings have a low repair potential, they must be renewed; removed and replaced.
Its flexibility makes it a soft material susceptible to scratches.
Installing polyurethane coatings requires specialized personnel, due to its complexity.
Is the use of polyurethane recommended for industrial warehouses?
Polyurethane is a valuable material for industrial warehouses when it comes to repairing cracks and sealing joints and pores in concrete flooring, as it meets the primary requirements of closing and waterproofing openings and voids.
However, polyurethane flooring is not the best option for an industrial warehouse. This is due to the risk of scratching and temperature changes that can occur in this type of environment.
As we commented before, polyurethane flooring is a good option for industrial environments with demanding activities and not a lot of machinery; For example, chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
Cement-polyurethane mixtures are not the only materials available to improve the mechanical-chemical resistance and impermeability of an industrial concrete floor.
There are chemical treatments that significantly improve the resistance and durability of the flooring.
The BECOSAN® treatment is a systematic process that molecularly densifies the concrete of the pavement, increasing its hardness, which in turn leads to greater strength and durability without affecting the initial composition of the material.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Militants stir in Lebanese outposts
UN officials say that militants in 16 remote Palestinian outposts are adding guns and recruits to stir more trouble for the American-backed government.
By Nicholas Blanford Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Naameh, Lebanon
The fight between Lebanese soldiers and Al Qaeda-inspired fighters just outside Tripoli is quieting. But as that battle ends, Lebanese officials are now accusing pro-Syrian Palestinian factions of stocking up on weapons and fresh fighters, possibly representing the next big challenge for the over-stretched and under-equipped Lebanese Army.
Both Lebanon and United Nations say that the 16 militant outposts held by pro-Syrian Palestinian factions, which lie outside the 12 established Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, are being reinforced with personnel and weapons smuggled in from Syria with the aim of sowing further instability.
Indeed, some of the very Fatah al-Islam militants that the Lebanese forces have been battling in the seven-week confrontation in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp are believed to have received training at the Palestinian bases in the Bekaa Valley before deploying to north Lebanon.
"In recent weeks these camps have been reinforced with munitions, arms, and fighters," Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said recently. "Everyone knows that these groups are supported and armed by Syria."
These small military bases consist of a few huts, training grounds, and tunnels that are sunk into rocky hillsides. They have been largely ignored by Lebanese governments for more than three decades.
But Lebanon's anti-Syrian politicians now say Damascus is using local allies, such as the Palestinian factions, to stir more trouble for the American-backed government, which is already struggling to cope with a political crisis, a spate of deadly bombings, and the recent battles outside Tripoli.
The factions that look to Syria for support include the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), Fatah Intifada, which broke from the mainstream Fatah movement in 1983, and As-Saiqa. All of the groups have headquarters in Damascus.
"After the Army lost nearly 100 soldiers against Fatah al-Islam, it cannot allow bases like Naameh to continue to exist where they can host another terrorist group. It would be a fatal mistake to allow them to stay," says a senior Lebanese Army officer who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Palestinian fighters on edge
At one outpost manned by the PFLP-GC just outside Naameh, tensions are running high.
The entrance to the compound, which consists of tunnels dug into the hillside beneath a war-damaged and long-abandoned factory, has been reinforced with new barricades and additional fighters. The approach is guarded by 15 heavily armed gunmen, some with faces hidden by checkered head scarves.
The gray-haired commander, Abu Amine, wears an old US Army uniform in desert camouflage and flip-flops. He says that the PFLP-GC and other allied groups need to protect themselves against the US and Israel. "The Americans and Zionists want us as slaves for their projects and to destroy our jihadist vision of defeating the Zionists," he says.
Abu Amine, who says he has fought with Palestinian groups since 1965, adds that the PFLP-GC's weapons are for defending Palestinians in the refugee camps. "The minute the Lebanese government gives us our rights to live an honest and honorable life in this country, we will hand over our weapons to the Lebanese Army," he says.
Outposts like this have existed since the early 1970s under Syrian protection until Damascus disengaged from its tiny neighbor in April 2005. Most of the bases are linked to Syria by a maze of unguarded trails that snake across the mountains.
Eighteen months ago, the Lebanese Army tightened its grip around the bases – five belonging to the PFLP-GC, 10 to Fatah Intifada, and one to As-Saiqa – setting up checkpoints and new positions to monitor movement.
The hilly area between Yanta and Deir al-Ashayer villages in southeast Lebanon – home to several Fatah Intifada outposts – has been declared a military zone by the Lebanese Army and cut off to all but local residents. Lebanon's daily Al-Mustaqbal reported last week that Syrian troops had penetrated two miles into Lebanon near Halwa, an area where the joint border is disputed, and were building fortifications, adding to the tensions in the area.
UN report claims militants are rearming
At the end of June, a UN report on the resolution that ended last summer's Hizbullah-Israel war found that the PFLP-GC and Fatah Intifada had reinforced their positions in the Bekaa Valley after fighting broke out between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam in mid-May. Citing a detailed intelligence report compiled by the Lebanese Army, the UN said weapons including rockets, mortars, and antitank guns had been deployed in the bases.
At a PFLP-GC base on a 3,000-foot plateau over-looking the village of Qussaya in the eastern Bekaa, the group has installed multi-barreled rocket launchers and pointed them at the nearby Lebanese Army base at Rayak airport, the UN report said.
"It is widely believed in Lebanon, including by the government, that the strengthening of Fatah Intifada and PFLP-GC outposts could not have taken place without the tacit knowledge and support of the Syrian government," the report added.
Syria has denounced the claims as "lies" and insists that it is doing all it can to prevent the smuggling of arms into Lebanon.
Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, a veteran security official with Fatah Intifada, says his group's weapons "will never be used against the Lebanese."
The proud member of the pro-Syrian faction insists that the group was created "to die for the Palestinian cause, not fight in Lebanon." At his office in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, a poster proclaims the "martyrdom" of a fighter who blew himself up in Iraq in December 2003. It hangs next to pictures of Che Guevara and Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
In south Lebanon, resistance from cradle to grave
In Lebanon's camps, rising sympathy for Islamists
Is Lebanon facing a 'new breed' of Al Qaeda?
Reporters on the Job


Liza: Is it possible to press my ashes into a record after I die? Why, yes! Funny you should ask. I just saw an article in Wired.uk.com about a British company that will allow you to have your ashes pressed into a vinyl recording as a special keepsake for your loved ones. Really. The record can have your favorite songs, your voice, or simply the pops and crackles made by your last remains. This could be just the thing for that Nick Hornsby fan, or the person for whom scattering their ashes in an exotic local is just too much of a cliche.
Estate Planning for Families of All Ages.


text:
Special Collections and University Archives : University Libraries Email an archivist
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What we want? What do we keep?
Digital (Credo)
Highway indexes (Hampshire Council of Governments)
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Fellowship application (2020)
Collecting area: Journalism	(Page 2 of 2)
Maslow, Jonathan Evan
Jonathan Evan Maslow Papers
ca.1978-2008
20 boxes 30 linear feet
Call no.: MS 639
Part of: Famous Long Ago Archive
Jon Maslow
A man of diverse and interests, Jon Maslow was a naturalist and journalist, an environmentalist, traveler, and writer, whose works took his from the rain forests to the steppes to the salt marshes of his native New Jersey. Born on Aug. 4, 1948, in Long Branch, Maslow received his MA from the Columbia University School of Journalism (1974), after which he spent several years traveling through South and Central America, studying the flora and fauna, reporting and writing, before returning to the States. Always active in community affairs, he was a reporter with the Cape May County Herald (1997-2002) and the West Paterson Herald News (2002-2008). The author of six books, including The Owl Papers (1983), Bird of Life, Bird of Death, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1986, and Sacred Horses: Memoirs of a Turkmen Cowboy (1994), he often combined an intense interest in natural history with a deep environmentalist ethos and, particularly in the latter two cases, with a deep concern for the history of political turmoil. He died of cancer on Feb. 19, 2008.
A large and rich assemblage, the Maslow Papers document his career from his days as a young journalist traveling in Central America through his community involvements in New Jersey during the 2000s. An habitual rewriter, Maslow left numerous drafts of books and articles, and the collection includes valuable correspondence with colleagues and friends, including his mentor Philip Roth, as well as Maslow's fascinating travel diaries.
Authors--New JerseyCentral America--Description and travelJournalists--New JerseyNew Jersey--HistoryReporters and reporting--New Jersey
Maslow, Jonathan EvanRoth, Philip
Related collections: Central & South America, Environment, Famous Long Ago, Journalism, Prose writing, Travel
Mayo, Anna
Anna Mayo Papers
2 boxes 2 linear feet
John Gofman and Anna Mayo, 1970s
Photo by Lionel Delevingne
Beginning in 1969, the New York-based journalist Anna Mayo wrote a column, "Geiger Counter," for the Village Voice, that became a sounding board for the antinuclear movement of the 1970s. With roots in community resistance to Columbia University's plans to install a Triga-type reactor in the middle of New York City, Mayo covered the "nuclear horror stories that the New York Times neglected," as she later wrote, including Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. A change in ownership at the Voice and ongoing pressure from the nuclear industry led to her being forced out in 1989, although it did not end her commitment to the cause. She contributed to publications such as the Texas Observer, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Kursbach, and Liberation (Paris) until the time of her death in March 2016.
The Mayo Papers are an assemblage of writing, research notes, and and some correspondence documenting Anna Mayo's career as an antinculear journalist. The files include information on major figures in the antinuclear movement, including John Gofman and Ernest Sternglass, and include a special emphasis on the accident at Three Mile Island.
Gift of Meg Mayo, 2016
Antinuclear movement--New York (State)Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant (Pa.)
Related collections: Antinuclear, Environment, Journalism
Milne, Teddy
Teddy Milne Papers
Call no.: MS 1048
Teddy Milne, ca. 1981
Born in 1930 in Delaware, Ohio, Margaret Theodora "Teddy" Milne, graduated from Boston University in 1952 before attending the University of Paris in 1953-1954 for post-graduate studies. Milne moved to Northampton, Mass. in 1959 to teach at the Northampton School for Girls. She married Alexander W. Milne, general manager of radio station WHMP, in 1965 and together the couple had three sons: Timmon, Peter, and James. Milne worked as a writer, serving as a reporter and copy editor at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, before establishing and editing two journals focused on peace: Laser, a children's newsletter, and Compassion Magazine. She owned and operated the Pittenbruach Press, which published her journals as well as several book she authored, including Peace Porridge (v. 1-3, 1987-1995), War is a Dinosaur (1987), Solo Publishing (1990), Mooncakes and Flower Beans (1994), and Calvin Coolidge Doesn't Live Here Any More (1994), and contributed articles, stories, and crossword puzzles to magazines and newspapers.
As an active author and peace activist, the Teddy Milne Papers cover all of her primary passions from parenting and teaching to publishing and anti-nuclear activism. The collection contains photographs and newsletters from her days as a teacher at the Northampton School for Girls as well as articles and columns she prepared for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. There are extensive records documenting the Pittenbruach Press, which Milne operated, including materials related to the journals and books she published. A series of letters along with files related to committee work and Milne's membership in Quakers United in Publishing (QUIP), reveal the important role her Quaker faith played in her life.
Antinuclear movement—United StatesAuthors and publishersNorthampton School for Girls (Northampton, Mass.)Peace movementsPublishers and publishing—Vocational guidanceQuakers—New England
CorrespondencePhotographs
Related collections: Antinuclear, Arts & literature, Journalism, Literature & language, Peace, Quakers, Social change
Sommer, Mark
Mark Sommer Papers
13 boxes 16.5 linear feet
Digital (+)
Mark Sommer, with Zetta, the first newborn goat at the Sommer homestead in northern CA, May 1985
Mark Sommer is an explorer, storyteller, and award-winning public radio and print journalist focused on advocacy and narratives of social, political, and environmental change and positive action. In Washington, D.C., Sommer found himself on hand for some of the 1960s pivotal moments, where he was involved with the Liberation News Service and the New Left think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. Sommer moved to California in 1969 to explore the counterculture, spending several years journeying – spiritually, psychedelically, and physically between communes, farms, and wilderness homesteads along the western coast – before he and his wife built a self-reliant organic homestead in the deep woods of northern CA, where they lived from the 1970s to the 1990s. The resilience of nature deeply impacted Sommer's outlook and work as a writer and journalist, driving his interest in the human capacity for overcoming adversity. Sommer founded and directed the Mainstream Media Project, a nonprofit media placement service scheduling leading edge thinkers and social innovators for extensive radio interviews, and Sommer served as host and executive producer of the internationally syndicated and award winning, one-hour weekly radio program, A World of Possibilities. Sommer is the author of three books (Beyond the Bomb, The Conquest of War, and Living in Freedom), and hundreds of op-eds in major newspapers worldwide. Current projects include short and movie length videos crafted from his photographs, films, interviews, and experiences.
Chronicling over five decades of creative and journalistic output of a life-long explorer and progressive advocate, the Mark Sommer Papers are an extensive collection, covering Sommer's entire career and personal life from the late 1960s to the present. Writings include personal and multiple travel journals (including a unique trip to North Vietnam in 1968), correspondence, student essays, op-eds, articles, project and grant plans, memoirs, and book manuscripts. Additional journals exist in audio format, along with radio interviews where Sommer served as a guest. Slides, photographs, and movies cover Sommer's family and home life to his wide-ranging travels and interests. Some main topics of coverage include foreign policy and international politics, progressivism, peace and conflict studies, the anti-nuclear and disarmament movements, wilderness and back-to-the-land experiences, and later in life fatherhood. Materials from Mainstream Media Project have been separated into the Mainstream Media Project Records.
Gift of Mark Sommer, May 2017
Antinuclear movementCounterculture--United StatesInstitute for Policy StudiesJournalists--CaliforniaNuclear disarmamentPeace--researchPeaceful change (International relations)Political activistsReconciliationSelf-reliant living--CaliforniaSustainable livingTravel writingVietnam War, 1961-1975
ArticlesCorrespondenceDiariesMemoirsPhotographsSound recordingsVideo recordings
Related collections: Alternative energy, Antinuclear, Counterculture, Digital, East & Central Europe, Environment, Farming & rural life, Journalism, Media, Organic farming, Peace, Photographs, Reform, Social change, Social justice, Travel, Vietnam War
Stack, Jonathan
Jonathan Stack Collection
36 boxes, films 65 linear feet
Gabriel Films logo
A renowned independent film maker and founder of Gabriel Films, Jonathan Stack has written and produced over two dozen documentary films and fifty television programs. Born in New York City in 1957, Stack graduated from UMass Amherst in 1979. From the time of his film Damned in the USA (1992), Stack has taken on challenging subjects, earning a reputation for gaining access into forbidden and often dangerous situations, from crack dens in Harlem to war-torn Liberia. The recipient of numerous honors in his career, Stack has been awarded five Emmy Awards, has twice been nominated for the Academy Award, and his film The Farm, on Angola Prison, won Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize in 1998.
The films and videos in the Stack collection include copies of his work in Liberia and Haiti and material from his documentary on prison rodeos at Angola Prison. The collection includes film from Damned in the USA (1992), Final Judgment (1996), and The Farm (1998), as well as footage from Harlem, Angola Prison, St. Gabriel Women's Prison, and on body piercing, rodeo, and the prisoner Vincent Simmons.
Gift of Jonathan Stack, April-Dec., 2017
Documentary filmsLouisiana State PenitentiaryMotion picture producers and directors
Videotapes
Related collections: Drug policy, Film & video, Journalism, Media, Political activism, Prison issues, Social justice, UMass alumni
Wendell Post
Wendell Post Collection
1 box 1 linear feet
Wendell Post editorial crew
From 1977 through 2001, the Wendell Post newspaper was published by and for the residents of Wendell, Mass. With its distinctive local perspective, the Post covered local politics, people, and events, but also issues with national implications, including the anti-nuclear movement, environmental concerns, recycling, and peacework.
The Wendell Post collection contains nearly every issue of a community newspaper produced in a small, rural New England town. Most issues include reports on town meetings and elections, the schools, and public works, but the Post also carried news of the stuff of daily life such as births and deaths, high school graduations, anniversaries and Old Home Day, profiles of town residents and town history, and the crime report.
New Salem (Mass.)--HistoryNewspapers--MassachusettsWendell (Mass.)--History
Related collections: Antinuclear, Environment, Journalism, Massachusetts (West)
Whipple, Charles L.
Charles L. Whipple Papers
Charles L. Whipple, ca.1935
Charles Lewis Whipple was a noted journalist, editor, and the first ombudsperson for the Boston Globe. As a student at Harvard in the 1930s, Whipple joined the Young Communist League, carrying his radical politics with him when he joined the Globe's staff in 1936 and became an active member of the American Newspaper Guild. Although classified as unfit for military duty due to the loss of vision in one eye, Whipple joined the Red Cross during the Second World War, and served with distinction with over thirty months of overseas service. After returning to civilian life and severing ties with the Communist Party, he resumed his position at the Globe, rising steadily to become editor of the opinion page in 1962 and ombudsperson in 1975. An editorial he wrote in 1967 is considered the first editorial in a major American newspaper to oppose the war in Vietnam. Although he formally retired from the Globe in 1979. Whipple worked an additional three years with the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing as editor of the Beijing Review and the China Daily, China's first English-language daily. Whipple died in Northampton, Mass., in 1991, following complications from surgery.
A mixture of personal and professional correspondence, writing, and subject and clipping files, the Charles Whipple Papers document a long and exceptional career in journalism. The diverse roles that Whipple filled at the Boston Globe from the 1930s through 1970s resulted in rich documentation of his work as an organizer for the American Newspaper Guild on the eve of the Second World War; his writing and editorial work during the Vietnam War and as the Globe's Ombudsman in the 1970s; and the three years he spent in China setting up an English-language newspaper during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
American Newspaper GuildBoston GlobeCommunists--MassachusettsJournalists--Massachusetts--BostonLabor unions--Massachusetts--BostonNewspaper employees--Labor unions--MassachusettsVietnam War, 1961-1975
Related collections: China, Communism & Socialism, Journalism, Labor, Political activism, Vietnam War, World War II
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