Ok, just to prove that this isn’t all about early TV (although a lot of it will be), here’s a lovely Christmas card:
Now, take a look to see who it’s from:
What is especially ironic about the card is that I got it from a friend of mine, the late Bill Reuben, a legendary New York City journalist and character and a lifelong fighter against everything that J. Edgar Hoover stood for. Bill was a great hero of the 1950s. It was his columns for The National Guardian about the Trenton Six (the North’s Scottsboro case) that saved the defendants from the electric chair (an inspired Bill’s lifelong interests in false confessions). A couple of years later, he wrote a series of articles about the Rosenberg Case that inspired a wordwide movement to free the couple. While the effort was of course doomed to failure, no one has been able to write about the case since then without addressing (usually unsuccessfully) Bill’s arguments. I recently wrote about Bill as part of an introduction for a book I’m writing about Alger Hiss — a book based on Bill’s research. It’s long, so I’ve condensed it into a pdf that can be downloaded here.
For a while, Bill was married to Miriam Soloviev, who in her time was a pretty famous violinist. She toured Europe toward the end of World War II with Paul Robeson. Here’s a shot of Bill and Miriam with Paul:
One of the places they went to was Hitler’s bunker. Here’s a souvenir shot from that visit:
I’ve also uploaded some pdf excerpts from Bill’s series on the Rosenberg case and the Trenton Six. Click the links to download them.
