That summer my then-husband and I were looking for a private school for his daughter from a previous marriage. She’d run away from her mother and we were in a custody battle for her and her two siblings. Starting with A in the phone book I called several schools only to be told they wanted a year’s tuition up front. When I got to S, I saw Summerhill. I was surprised and also confused, because I thought that was a school only in England. About a year before, I’d read A. S. Neill’s classic Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing<\/em> in which he explains how children can learn while not being compelled to attend class. When I called the school, despite its name, I didn’t know what to expect, especially about tuition. Ollie answered the phone. I told him, as I had the others, that we’d been advised by our attorney to place my stepdaughter in a private school away from our neighborhood in Van Nuys, to deter her mother from snatching her. Ollie agreed that we could pay at a rate that suited us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the end of summer my stepdaughter and I visited the school, which was holding a vacation session. It was on a large lot in North Hollywood on Vineland just south of the Los Angeles River. The “campus” consisted of Ollie’s one-story house and a barn and stable for three or so horses. Classes were held on the dirt in the open air. There was also vegetation and trees that the kids could explore. (During bad weather classes were held in Ollie’s house.) My stepdaughter immediately recognized the place. “My brother went here,” she said. Some years before, their mother had been concerned that he’d get in trouble during summer break and sent him there for at least one session. So we didn’t look any further, and filled out the paperwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Summerhill Day School wouldn’t have existed if its founder hadn’t lived the life he did, so I’m taking space here, with research by my husband David Hughes, to explain who Ollie was. In Part 2 I’ll reminisce about the school itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oliver Henry Haskell was born on October 9, 1908, in Thessaloniki (aka Salonika) in the region of Macedonia, the son of American Congregational missionaries.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Other than a mention of being educated in Switzerland,<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Ollie’s story in the public record picks up at Pomona College from which he\u00a0received a BA in 1931. In 1929, while at Pomona, he’d participated in a League of Nations “model assembly” of roleplaying at USC by reading an address (in German) originally given when Germany had been elected to the league three years before.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n A fortnight before the 1929 stock market crash, on October 4, Ollie had left with nine other Pomona students on a year-long “oriental study expedition” to China, Hawai\u2018i, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Russia.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Ollie was a replacement for Chinese graduate student Sam Lee who was unable to go, and Ollie’s area of study was to be labor conditions. The trip was thought to be “the first actual reciprocation by American students of similar action by Chinese student expeditions” to U.S. schools. The ten men were to write theses on their studies and contribute to a book.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> One of the party’s tasks was to aid an emissary of President Hoover in dispensing famine relief in China.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In that regard Ollie spent time in the region that, a year later, would become the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Manchuria.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> After his return, Ollie gave talks about his travels in the Soviet Union, notices for which take pains to remark on his impartiality.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> But in due time he would become involved with organizations that had alliances with the Soviet-friendly Communist Party in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n By 1932 Ollie was doing graduate work at both Pomona College and an unnamed UC school.<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He also worked as a camp counselor in the late summer of 1931, drawing upon “extensive experience with boys of this age [6 to 8] for a number of summers at Lake Placid, New York.”<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> That fall he worked at the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles.<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> By February 1932 he was superintendent of the warehouse for the Associated Charities in Los Angeles, which provided food for two thousand families a day.<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> (In later life Ollie became notorious for his dumpster diving in search of edible food thrown out by markets.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early summer of 1932 Ollie and two other Pomona College graduates, unable to find jobs, began panning for gold in San Gabriel Canyon and in Oregon.<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He returned from Oregon in August to be a camp counselor once again.<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Later that year he\u00a0became business manager and interpreter for the Bulgarian Folk School of which his father Edward was director in Pordim, north central Bulgaria. The school was “for teaching Bulgarian farm boys and girls the art of homemaking and farming” as well as sanitation and hygiene to combat disease that killed children whose deaths comprised thirty percent of the country’s mortality rate.<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> While in Bulgaria Ollie was “volunteer assistant to the correspondent on the Christian Science Monitor” and “for one and one half years was correspondent for three Bulgarian newspapers and for the Manchester Guardian.” At the time of the July 1934 assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss, Ollie worked as a correspondent in Vienna; he also did newspaper work in Athens.<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> (Ollie told me he spoke seven languages, which must have been Bulgarian, Greek, German, Russian, Mandarin, Spanish, and English.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1937 Ollie was a New England organizer with the new Textile Workers Organizing Committee, CIO, an alternative to the AFL’s United Textile Workers; the two merged in 1939.<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n At about this time (if not before) Ollie became involved with the American League for Peace and Democracy, a pacifist group dominated by communists who had driven out socialists and others since its inception in 1933.<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> By March 1938 Ollie was director of the league’s China Aid Council, headquartered in New York City, which acted as a charity on behalf of the Chinese side of the Sino-Japanese conflict, due to the organization’s opposition to fascism.<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/span> On a speaking tour that summer Ollie explained how $65 a month could support an anti-epidemic unit and $400 could buy an ambulance.<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span> During that fall of 1938 he told how Japan obtained half of its war supplies and all of its aviation fuel from the United States.<\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/span> And so it’s no surprise that in 1939 Ollie was director of the San Francisco Committee Against War Shipments to Japan, which kicked off a petition drive in April at the First Congregational Church.<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n By August 1940 Ollie was directing the China Aid Council from Chicago.<\/span>23<\/sup><\/a><\/span> And at the same time he was described as “leader of the Committee to Defend America by Keeping Out of War,” which was sponsoring the Emergency Peace Mobilization in Chicago to be held over Labor Day weekend.<\/span>24<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The meeting was attacked as being “Communist inspired,” leading to the pullout of several organizations and speakers.<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Nevertheless an attendance of twenty thousand is stated<\/a> by an academic archive, whereas the number of delegates varied in press reports. “Morris Watson, chairman of the credentials committee, announced that 4,198 delegates and 1,435 ‘observers’ were registered at the meeting from forty states and the District of Columbia,” the AP reported on September 2.<\/span>26<\/sup><\/a><\/span> But Ollie himself, “in charge of credentials” according AP on August 31, “said 7500 had registered when the meeting finally opened” after a delay due to late trains from New York and Ohio.<\/span>27<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Curiously Ollie is listed in the latter report as not from Chicago but rather from Seattle.\u00a0In any case, at the Labor Day peace event a new organization was formed\u2014American Peace Mobilization\u2014to fight conscription, to “restore the bill of rights,” and to “restore full rights to the foreign born.”<\/span>28<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Six weeks after the Chicago event, on October 16, 1940, Ollie filled out his draft registration, giving his residence in Seattle and his employer: American Peace Mobilization. As he’d done with the China Aid Council and Committee to Defend America by Keeping Out of War, Ollie went on the road for APM as its national field work director, from St. Louis to Portland.<\/span>29<\/sup><\/a><\/span> APM is generally considered a communist front organization, and it opposed the U.S. entering into the war, holding a forty-two-day White House picket, suspended only a day before Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.<\/span>30<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n Ollie is absent from newspaper reports in 1941 and 1942, except on October 7, 1942 to note his engagement, and, two days later, his marriage in San Francisco to Rosemary Wylde of Vancouver, BC.<\/span>31<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ollie’s obituary states\u00a0he began managing the largest City Housing Authority project in Los Angeles, Banning Homes (!), in the late 1930s, but that wasn’t dedicated until late 1942.<\/span>32<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0Nevertheless he was involved in projects like Banning and we can use it as a case study to explain why housing became a flashpoint in urban affairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Browsing the Banning Homes publicity photos in the Los Angeles central library’s Housing Authority\u00a0collection<\/a>\u00a0shows a multiracial community: adults registering to vote, showcasing their personal gardens, attending their housing council meetings; kids involved in onsite music classes, checking out toys from a lending library, posing in costumes at a party, attending exhibitions of flowers and minerals, having picnics and soap box derby races, and receiving food from a grocer as well as giving<\/em> food to a relief drive for Vanport, Oregon, an integrated, kindred housing community that had been wiped out in a flood.<\/span>33<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Kinda smacks of socialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sure enough, a year after opening, the Banning project was being whittled away. In November 1943 a representative of its six thousand residents (in two thousand units) testified before Congress, listing several issues faced by the tenants: inadequacy in health service, child care, and public transportation; an increase in juvenile delinquency; and the termination of a full-time recreational staff of five just two months before.<\/span>34<\/sup><\/a><\/span> It was wartime, of course, the perennial excuse for belt tightening. Except that wartime was Banning’s reason for being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Housing projects like Banning hadn’t been created for what we’d think of as the traditionally disadvantaged. Banning had been “built for war workers and their families,” its ad tag line being “So That War Workers May Live Close to Their Jobs” at the L.A. Harbor. It was to be<\/p>\n\n\n\n situated on a 156-acre tract of land within half a mile of the vital shipyard industries. [\u2026]<\/p>\n This vast war housing enterprise will be a self-contained community. There will be a hospital ward, drug store, beauty shop, cafeteria, grocery store and various recreational facilities among the accommodations offered residents.<\/span>35<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n We first find Ollie’s name associated with L.A. Harbor housing in October 1943 when he’s mentioned as, of all things, a committee member for the kickoff of Wilmington’s War Chest drive. (His wife Rosemary is listed in November as representing a military shipbuilder for USO programs.<\/span>36<\/sup><\/a><\/span>) The war chest event was held in the cafeteria of Wilmington Hall (aka Wilhall), itself a wartime housing project of 1266 rooms for 2000 male war workers.<\/span>37<\/sup><\/a><\/span> From then on Ollie is listed as Wilhall’s recreation director or its assistant manager.<\/span>38<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n Ollie’s recreational activities at Wilhall included various sports, a chorus and barber shop quartet, and a Coffee Cup club.<\/span>39<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Beyond recreation he facilitated civic meetings and chaired a “Meet Your Neighbor” program with participants from two dozen harbor area organizations that aimed to acquaint residents with people of color and the foreign born.<\/span>40<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Even when he left the harbor for L.A. Ollie joined the Family Service Harbor District Advisory Council and the Harbor Welfare Conference.<\/span>41<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the spring and summer of 1944 Ollie spoke about his experience in the Balkans to several local groups, including the Wilmington Kiwanis Club:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The use of the Balkan countries as a tool to foster international trade, its 500 years of war with the Turks, its economical status with the larger powers and its place and importance in the present conflict, was graphically pictured in a talk [by Oliver Haskell].<\/p>\n Haskell spent many years in the Balkans and his descendents back 80 years were missionaries in that region of Europe. His knowledge of the issues involved is from personal association with the peoples of the Balkans.<\/p>\n He told of the sufferings of the people and their will to survive and fight for their way of life to be undominated by international politics and bickerings of the larger powers. They look to America\u2014the one country they admire\u2014for freedom, but will turn to Russia or one of the other powers if offered any kind of light out of the chaos.<\/span>42<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n So interesting was his talk, the Kiwanians asked Ollie back two weeks later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In completing his talk Haskell warned the allies to follow the will of the people and not governments and royalty in exile at the coming peace table.<\/span>43<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In January of 1945 Ollie’s wife Rosemary was listed as the secretary of Banning Homes medical center.<\/span>44<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0By May of 1946 Ollie was manager of Pico Gardens, a housing project in Los Angeles that “offered housing to non-U.S. citizens (primarily non-naturalized Mexican citizens) by amending the FHA Act to allow ‘allied and friendly aliens’ admitted” there.<\/span>45<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ollie was a friend of the most famous L.A. Housing Authority figure, Frank Wilkinson, who joined the agency in 1942,<\/span>47<\/sup><\/a><\/span> four years after its formation<\/a> in 1938. Wilkinson was\u00a0memorialized in 2005 by Ry Cooder\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Call Me Red\u201d from his Ch\u00e1vez Ravine<\/em> song cycle, which is my favorite album.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOllie Haskell<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
China Aid<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Metate](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/metate_1929_haskell.jpg?resize=525%2C680&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Back to the Balkans<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
China Aid Redux<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Ollie](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/ollie_1938-07-28.jpg?resize=525%2C816&ssl=1\")
Against the Draft<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Oliver](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/draft_registration.jpg?resize=525%2C346&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nHousing (and) Authority<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Housing](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/housing_projects_ad.jpg?resize=525%2C849&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Kukla, Frank and Ollie<\/span>46<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n