A Remembrance: Martin Hoffmeister

© 2020 (Text only)  Gregory E. Montes

Introduction

In this remembrance essay about Martin Hoffmeister, some might feel that I get too far off the subject—Martin—at some points.  But I have written this essay in this way for three main reasons, relating to: 1) Similarities; 2) Circularities; and 3) Uncertainties.

1. Similarities – Martin Hoffmeister and I found a lot to talk about to each other over some years because we came from similar backgrounds, although on two different continents.  Martin’s family and mine have known many people who related to politics, government and/or art—in our own and each other’s continents.

2. Circularities – I am interested to see how some contacts, associations and/or interests that Martin Hoffmeister and I had, related to various people and places, but sometimes came back to the same place, such as in my below discussion of the Czechoslovak film and multimedia exhibits at Hemisfair ’68 in San Antonio, TX; which I visited, and about which I talked to Martin in Fall, 1968; and where the Hemisfair President,  Marshall Steves, Sr., was the brother-in-law of my family friend and art philanthropist, Gloria Galt, whose boyfriend when we knew her in early 1960’s Mexico was artist Barclay Ferguson who, in the 1970’s/1980’s, befriended artists Jack and Virginia Morse in Monterey, CA; and Jack Morse’s father, Samuel F. B. Morse, was a namesake of his 19th century relative, telegraph inventor and painter Samuel F.B. Morse, namesake of Morse College where Martin Hoffmeister and I lived and talked in 1966-69, before we both went on to Yale School of Architecture.  Jack and Virginia Morse painted and taught in the Yale  School of Art, then still in the Yale Art and Architecture Building, the year after Martin and I finished earning, in that building, our Master of Architecture degrees at Yale School of Architecture in 1972.

At Yale and later, Martin Hoffmeister gave as his main avocations/interests: sailing or bicycling, and history.  I do not know about sailing.  I have been only once on a sailboat, in Long Island Sound, near New Haven, in about 1971, with a fellow graduate student at Yale who knew how to sail.  I last owned and rode a bicycle in 1970, my second one that was stolen in New Haven.  My first New Haven bicycle was stolen from a rack in front of the Yale Art and Architecture Building, and the second one, two blocks away, in front of the apartment building where I then lived on Crown Street.  In both cases the bicycle locks had been cut.  Some people told me later that cutters required to cut such locks are so large that if the police see someone walking down the street with them, they will stop and ask what they are using the cutters for.  The second bicycle theft had a good side effect in that it caused me, in November, 1970 to move to the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), with a room overlooking the neo-Gothic central courtyard, which I liked a lot, and where I stayed until I finished my coursework at Yale Architecture School in August, 1972.  And the food at HGS Dining Hall, as at Morse College Dining Hall and elsewhere at Yale, was excellent, as it still is throughout Yale, as far as I have experienced it.

While sailing and bicycling are out of my bailiwick (or wheelhouse, as some say these days), I know some about history and some about relatedness of Martin Hoffmeister’s family and mine to history, at some points fairly close together.  Thus I write about that here as my tribute to Martin.  I think he would have been interested to read this and would appreciate me writing this—or most of this!

3. Uncertainties – Uncertainties in my own life, looming larger in 2020, cause me to write some things here, while I know that I can write them, that I want to say about Yale University, and how I think it needs to look comprehensively at how and what it has taught, teaches and will teach its students and how they have interacted, interact and may interact with the world, some in what many would say have been widely beneficial ways and some others in what many would say have been widely and wrongfully destructive ways.

Martin Hoffmeister, and his uncle and mentor, Adolf Hoffmeister, a prominent Czech artist, writer and diplomat, knew what it was like to live in a nation where government has at times not only not worked for the best interests of the people and environment, but has, under some regimes of extreme right or left, opportunistically sought to oppress and damage both in various ways.  I think that they would both appreciate me writing about how Yale can look in depth at how its graduates, faculty, and administrators have impacted human society and environment of the U.S. and the world, favorably and not, and how Yale education may be improved to increase the favorable, and decrease the unfavorable, impacts of Yale graduates upon the world.

Some of the material I present here, especially with regard to history of my family, and some of our interactions with others over time, which mainly relate to the theme, discussed above and throughout this remembrance of Martin Hoffmeister, that Martin’s family and mine, and persons our families have known, have interacted with some figures prominent in cultural, political and governmental activities at local, regional, national and/or international levels.  To reduce diversion in the main body of this essay from remembrance of Martin Hoffmeister, his family and cultural, political and governmental activities related to them over time, I have placed in Appendices, following this essay, some of the materials which relate more to contacts of my family, but which show similarities and circularities, as mentioned above, in contacts of Martin’s family and mine, over time, in the worlds of culture, politics and government.

Truth and Transparency for Light and Truth

I recommend that Yale University and the Yale Community form a Truth and Transparency Commission, similar to what countries recovering from and examining their dictatorships have done.  This does not mean that Yale has ever been a dictatorship, although it probably has had a larger dose of secrecy than most leading universities in the United States, but that perhaps it can improve its insightfulness about itself, in its quest to find and propagate its motto, “Lux et Veritas”—‘Light and Truth’—and improve how and what Yale teaches its students so that more of them have widely beneficial, and fewer have widely destructive, impacts in the world, going forward.

Martin Hoffmeister and his uncle, Adolf, a well-known Czechoslovak artist, major newspaper editor and diplomat, navigated a very difficult, collectively and individually hazardous time in the history of their native country, which experienced dictatorships of the right and left in the 20th century.  The United States and Yale have seemed in the 20th and early 21st centuries to be about liberal democracy, but in fact some Yale graduates have been key figures in leading the United States and its allies into some of the most senselessly and widely destructive wars, such as in Vietnam and Iraq (or ‘Vietnam without trees’, as I call it).

The U.S. war in Afghanistan, another ‘Vietnam without trees’, now in its 18th year and the longest war so far in American history, began when the administration of President George W. Bush (Yale, ’68), sought not only to capture or kill Al Qaeda terrorists who launched attacks on the United States, but to indefinitely occupy and try to transform a nation where many men, the main controllers in the country, pride themselves on hailing from “the graveyard of empires,” and are willing to wage war for years to keep that sobriquet valid.  Instead of that approach, some recommend that it is better to watch and block whatever terrorism might again emanate from Afghanistan and similar places, rather than try to sit on top of it indefinitely.  And, as much as possible without military occupation, help the society of Afghanistan, or any nation in similar situation, try to achieve better aspects of the 21st century so it can collectively forge a better future.

Perhaps if George W. Bush had been raised with more intellectual curiosity (which of course Yale did not care about much when admitting him in 1964 as a ‘legacy’ student because of his father and grandfather, both prominent Yale graduates), and Yale had been able to sandwich more learning into George W. between his party bouts at ‘Deke’ fraternity (and also at the Skull and Bones/Russell Trust Association ‘tomb’?), George W. might have had a better plan for dealing with Al Qaeda and Afghanistan.

And if the Bush and similar families and corporations, long involved in international, oil-related opportunities, had not seen so many economic opportunities in Iraq, the U.S. might not have invaded that country at all.  Zimbabwe had a dictator in 1987-2017, but no oil.  It has diamonds.  When did you last see Tiffany (with many Yale alums in that and related families) or Harry Winston invade a country?  Have we seen U.S. tanks roll into Harare (capital of Zimbabwe), to liberate its people?

George W. Bush said he felt “sickened” when, after he ordered March, 2003 invasion of Iraq, no “weapons of mass destruction”, nuclear or otherwise, were found there, after he gave supposed presence of such in Iraq as the main justification for invading it.  One might be more easily ‘sickened’ by such a lame excuse.  The month before the invasion, Hans Blix, head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), reported to the U.N. Security Council that in 700 inspections throughout Iraq in 2002-03, no weapons of mass destruction were found.  The Bush Administration tried to undermine Blix’s credibility during his Iraq inspections.  In 2002, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz asked the CIA to investigate whether Blix had been too lax with Iraq when he was Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1981-97.  The CIA reportedly found no such evidence of that.

Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, were among key leaders in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a Washington, D.C. think tank founded in 1997 which in 1998 was a main force behind Congressional passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, signed by President Clinton, which called for removal of Saddam Hussein, President/dictator of Iraq, five years before the U.S. did that, using the excuse that he had nuclear weapons when it had already been shown that he did not.   And ‘9-11’ was used as the reason for U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to take out Al-Qaeda.  Even though there was a long-active chain of cooperation between U.S. and Saudi intelligence agencies, and Saudi to Pakistani intelligence agencies and the latter to the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, hosts of Al Qaeda, it would be beyond the imagination of almost all Americans, and even most people in the world, that some U.S. ‘intelligence’ and perhaps also governmental/political leaders could have had foreknowledge of attacks which would provide pretext for the U.S. to : 1) invade some oil and natural gas-rich Middle East nations; and 2) pass some U.S. laws, such as the U.S. A. ‘Patriot’ Act which allowed for much greater surveillance within the United States, in what some might call the forerunner of a de facto military-police state within the United States.  Ironically, in some ‘developing’ nations, with generally lower education levels than in the United States, where the public is accustomed to illegal, violent acts by their governments within their nations, there is probably much more inclination to believe that some officials of the national government can be involved in some crime(s) against some citizens of their own country, viewed by some high up in government as expendable if at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Some very widely respected, intelligent people such as Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian and  1997-2009 IAEA  Director General and winner, with IAEA, of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, wrote in 2011 that if the World Court (International Court of Justice) in The Hague would determine that the Iraq War of 2003-11 was illegally, wrongfully and/or fraudulently initiated, the International Criminal Court (ICC) should determine who is responsible for that “war crime” and the ensuing deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them civilians.  The only problem there is that 1973 Yale Law School graduate, Bill Clinton, as U.S. President, did not send to the U.S. Senate for ratification, the treaty to recognize ICC jurisdiction and participate in its proceedings, and the administration of Yale College graduate George W. Bush stated that it would not join the ICC.

Perhaps if Yale University graduates Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, in college (Georgetown for Clinton, alma mater of my uncle and niece), and/or graduate school, had studied and/or better learned about history of Middle East culture and religions, and/or later been better advised on the matter, they might have received the news flash that Saddam Hussein was of the Sunni minority in Iraq, and by removing him, one might well empower the Shiite majority which then would ally itself with adjacent, Shiite oil power, Iran.  U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 not only greatly increased Shiite-ruled territory but created instability and violence in the heart of the Middle East, long on war’s edge with the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One might validly wonder whether long or indefinite wars, in the Middle East and elsewhere, are income guarantors for the huge ‘military-industrial complex’ of the United States, seeded through military installations and defense contractor operations in practically every Congressional district of the U.S.  (While the U.S. has been bogged down in one long war after the next, internationally, the Chinese government and Chinese companies have been buying up natural resources and have financed new infrastructure worldwide, to ship those resources to their burgeoning economy and population, perhaps leading to a not-distant future in which a depleted, bankrupt, former world power, the U.S., is replaced by and at the ‘mercy’ of a much-better financed and supplied world power.  And that new world power may not necessarily be very magnanimous to many, within and beyond China.  In its recent (since 2014) and less recent (1960’s) history, China has interned large numbers of its own citizens that it has viewed as threats to its national security ).

But as long as the U.S. can maintain a very large military-industrial complex, many in the wealthy ‘one percent’ of top American income, including some associated with Yale, may particularly benefit from feeding that complex with wars with no certain end points.  Two-time Yale dropout, Dick Cheney, before he became the second Bush President’s Vice President , was Chairman of Halliburton, the Houston-based oil services giant which reportedly obtained more contracts in the Iraq War than any other company, to the tune of about $62 billion.  I would be interested to know if any Cheney family member(s) benefited financially, through stock holdings and/or other channel(s), from Halliburton’s heyday in Iraq.  But for the Cheneys, who live near where my parents lived in McLean, VA in 1974-96, there are many fields to plow in the vast military-industrial complex of the U.S.  Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne, served, in 1994-2001, on the board of directors of aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.

(One might say that in 1971 my family had a medical intersection with the Bushes and Cheneys.  When George H.W. recommended to his son in 2000 to pick Dick Cheney as his vice presidential running mate, the 41st President suggested to his son that before choosing Cheney, he should have Cheney checked by the senior Bush’s cardiologist, Dr. Denton Cooley at the Texas Medical Center in Houston.  Thus Cheney was examined by Dr. Cooley who declared him fit to run for and serve as Vice President, and if necessary, to become President.  In 1971, my father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, on his way from Nigeria to Mexico, stopped at Houston to have a heart catheterization, supervised by Dr. Cooley, and to consult with him about the results.  In 1918, when my father was one year old in El Paso, TX, he had rheumatic fever? which damaged a mitral valve in his heart.  The 1971 catheterization determined and Dr. Cooley advised that my father did not yet need a value replacement, although that was done in 1989.  I do not know by whom my father was referrred to Dr. Cooley.)

From a summary I have read of the 2018 film, “Vice”, for which actors Christian Bale and Amy Adams were praised for their performances as Dick and Lynne Cheney, it does not depict Mr. Cheney’s reportedly alcohol-impacted time in Yale College in the early 1960’s.  And apparently the film does not relate the considerable influence that Yale political science professor H. Bradord Westerfield, then-very supportive of U.S. military actions in Vietnam, had, per Cheney’s own later statements, in Cheney’s later promotion of hawkish, war-oriented U.S. foreign policy.  Another student of Westerfield was George W. Bush, ’68.

On the domestic front of the United States, some Yale graduates have been leaders in: 1) bailing out failed savings and loans companies in the 1980’s/’90’s (thank you, George H.W. Bush, ’48) and major banks in 2008-09 (thank you, George W. Bush, ’68, and Barack Obama–can we blame Columbia University and Harvard Law School for whatever mistakes he made?), which lured millions of working class Americans into losing their homes via sub-prime mortgages they could not pay on (and no “major” Wall Street executive went to prison for involvement in that episode); and 2)  formulating and passing tax laws benefiting the rich and super-rich (thank you, U.S. Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, ’85 (and Skull and Bones/Russell Trust Association (RTA), to boot!, like the two Bush Presidents);—and his Marie Antoinette-wanabee third wife?); in a nation that has hundreds of thousands of homeless people sleeping on its streets every night.

As the homeless class hardly existed before the Reagan/Bush Administration transferred, in about 1981-82, huge amounts of U.S. budget funds from domestic to military programs, I call the homeless of the United States, ‘the children of Reagan-Bush’.  Also in the 1980’s the wealthy of the U.S. discovered that in many manufactures they could make more money by closing their U.S. factories and having production done in ‘developing’, highly populated nations with lower wages and fewer labor and environmental protections.  And as China opened its economy in the 1980’s/1990’s, “Made in China” became the most common statement on many products sold in the U.S.  With these converging factors since 1981,  a substantial number of Americans, formerly in the working clas,s ended up in the homeless class, permanently or long-term. )

I think that Yale can and needs to do better in educating its students as to how they will interact with socio-economic, governmental and environmental issues in and beyond the United States. And Yale needs to look comprehensively at how it has educated its students in the past and how that and some of those graduates have impacted the U.S. and the world and how Yale can educate students in the future to more widely benefit societies and the physical environment.   As some say that in recent years the wealthy and super-wealthy in the U.S. and some other countries are enjoying a ‘Gilded Age’ for themselves that rivals or surpasses that of the late 19th century, it would be interesting to find out, if possible, how many current Yale University students, and graduates of about the past 35 years who are still in potential ‘peak earning’ years, have as their primary career and life goals, to obtain as much wealth and material goods for themselves and their families.

I think that Martin and Adolf Hoffmeister, who knew firsthand what it is like to live under full dictatorship, would appreciate Martin’s double alma mater taking a deep look at how it has impacted the world through some of its students and graduates (and also faculty and administrators), for better and worse, and how it can do a better job in the future of helping strengthen democracy, reduce armed conflicts and improve living standards and environmental sustainability in the U.S. and around the world.

Czechoslovakia, Love It and/or Leave It

In Morse College in 1966-69 I saw Martin Hoffmeister mainly in the dining hall at lunch and dinner.  Martin was a very smart, humorous person.  We mainly talked about travel, history, art, architecture and other subjects of mutual interest to us.  Although Martin talked some about his uncle, Adolf Hoffmeister, who was the Czechoslovak Ambassador to UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in about the mid-1960’s, he did not talk much about the political situation in then-Czechoslovakia and other countries behind the ‘Iron Curtain’.  Martin may have said his car was either a gift from his uncle or he was able to have a car, and in fact to come to the U.S. when travel was restricted for many East Europeans, because of his uncle’s diplomatic status and/or income above that of an average Czech at that time.  I do not know if Ambassador Hoffmeister paid for any part of Martin’s costs in attending Yale.

One warm Spring night, in either 1968 or 1969, I think, Martin asked me if I would like to go for a drive with him along the Long Island Sound shoreline.  I said yes.  As i recall, the car was a large convertible of some make such as Oldsmobile, Chrysler or Buick.  When Martin drove along or near the Long Island Sound shoreline at about Milford, with the roof down, he mentioned that because Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), is a land-locked country, many people there have a longing to visit seas or oceans, to get a feeling of greater openness and expansiveness.  And, of course, in the Communist era it was difficult for most people in Czechoslovakia to travel abroad.  But Martin also told me, as other Czechs have since then, that the Czech and Slovak people are very proud of and love their large forests, many of which are on public or public-accessible lands, and perhaps many of the trees are of original growth and centuries old.

I told Martin, in Fall, 1968, that I had been in Mexico City when Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia in August, 1968 to put an end to the reformist, liberalizing Alexander Dubcek government.  I told Martin that I joined large crowds outside the Soviet embassy in Mexico City (then the largest Soviet, and perhaps now the largest Russian, embassy in Latin America).  Protestors yelled in various languages to tell the Soviets to get out of Czechoslovakia.  As usual, Martin was very circumspect when it came to political matters and he smiled and was interested in what I had seen and done in Mexico City, but I do not recall hearing Martin say much about Soviet control of Czechoslovakia.

I would guess, but am not sure, that Martin’s financial and/or other situation(s) may have changed and perhaps became more constrained after August, 1968 in that his uncle was recalled to Prague  and was no longer the Czechoslovak Ambassador to UNESCO.  But Martin never said anything to me about that.  And Tom Doremus, who was a classmate of Martin and me in Yale Architecture School in 1969-72, wrote to me that in 1970 when he worked with Martin and several other Yale Architecture students on the annual Yale (Architecture School) Building Project (I worked on a different Yale Architecture project in summer, 1969), Martin had a different car than the big convertible he had in Yale College when he drove me along Long Island Sound, and that other car was smaller but equally stylish, an MG sports car.

Successes and Failures in Communications

Although Martin Hoffmeister, the son of Adolf Hoffmeister and first cousin of Martin I. Hoffmeister, ’69, stated in a 2010 interview with Tel Aviv’s Haaretz newspaper (see:https://www.haaretz.com/1.5099701), that his father worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in New York City during World War II, that radio network was not formed until 1949.  The ‘other’ Martin probably meant Voice of America, a U.S. Government network that began broadcasting Allied news and propaganda from New York City in early 1942.  After the war, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, based in Munich, Germany, was formed mainly to counter Soviet propaganda and rule in Eastern Europe during the Cold War of 1945-89.

But ‘other’ Martin’s mention of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reminded me that I had read some years ago about associations of that broadcaster with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.  In fact, the network was created by the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), an anti-Communist, CIA-front organization formed in New York City in 1949 by New York attorney Allen Dulles, a former operative of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services—which employed various East Coast socialites, including some from Yale, such as Paul Mellon), the World War II CIA predecessor.  Allen Dulles served as CIA Director in 1952-62.  (Washington Dulles International Airport, designed in 1958 by Eero Saarinen, Yale Architecture School, 1934, is named after Allen Dulles’ brother, John Foster Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State in 1953-59.  Saarinen’s firm, with Cesar Pelli as project architect, designed Morse College in 1959-61.)

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty had an intersection with Yale Architecture School when ‘our’ Martin Hoffmeister and I were students there in 1960-72.  Bill Durkee, about one class behind me and Martin, and who took or was assigned to a drawing table next to mine (I think after I chose that table) on the fourth or so floor of the Yale Architecture Building in about 1971, told me that his father was then President of Radio Free Europe.  I think that Martin Hoffmeister probably knew Bill Durkee, and if he did, I think he was particularly interested that Bill’s father was then President of the main U.S. Government network which daily broadcast news and other information to the ‘Eastern bloc’ European nations, including Czechoslovakia, then behind the ‘Iron Curtain’.

I found online the obituary of Bill’s father, William Durkee III, a Dartmouth and 1947 Yale Law School graduate, who, before he was Radio Free Europe President in 1968-75, worked in the 1950’s for the U.S. State Department and the CIA in the U.S. and Europe (perhaps mainly from Paris where William IV lived with his parents at ages 7 to 11 in 1955-59; I went to Paris in 1959 at age 11, with my family, but apparently did not run into Bill at that time!).  I am fairly certain that while Bill Durkee told me in 1970-72 that his father was then President of Radio Free Europe, he did not tell me that his father had previously worked for the CIA.  While I think that Martin Hoffmeister knew Bill Durkee in Yale Architecture School in 1970-72, I do not know if Martin knew that Bill’s father had worked for the CIA in Europe, apparently while based, in 1955-59, in Paris, where Martin’s uncle, Adolf Hoffmeister, had been Czechoslovak Ambassador to France in 1948-51, and Czechoslovak Ambassador to UNESCO in the 1960’s. 

In Appendix 1, entitled “Paris, Yale, Pittsburgh and Chicago – 1950’s and Forward”, following this essay, I discuss further, Bill Durkee and his family, and my family and myself, in Paris, at Yale, and in Pittsburgh and/or Chicago, in some related and potentially related events of the 1950’s and since then.

Adolf versus Adolf

Adolf Hoffmeister, Martin’s uncle and mentor, was long a leading Czech cultural figure in opposition to foreign oppression of Czechoslovakia, first by the German Nazis, leading up to and in World War II, and then by the Soviet Union in the ensuing Cold War.   In 1938, the year before German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Adolf Hoffmeister wrote the libretto and Hans Krasa composed the score for an operetta, “Brundibar”, about two children who sang in the street in a Czech town to earn money to buy fresh milk for their ill mother.  Brundibar (a veiled symbol of Adolf Hitler) was an evil street organ grinder who tried, with his music, to drown out sound of the children singing.  But the two children got 300 children from throughout town to sing with them and drown out Brundibar’s noise.  Then Brundibar tried to steal their money but the children, adults and police chased him off, and the children took their money to buy fresh milk for their mother who got well.

Towards the end of the Hoffmeister/Krasa operetta/play, Brundibar sings/says of the children and his other opponents—and ruminates rather presciently with regard to oppressors and oligarchs the world has seen and will see: “They believe they’ve won the fight, they believe I’m gone—-not quite!” “Bullies don’t give up, completely.  One departs and the next appears, and we shall meet again my dears!…I’ll be back,…”  Adolf Hoffmeister made the point that democracy survives only through vigilance, intelligence, education and courage, and that authoritarians are always looking for opportunities to take over governments and rule for economic and other benefits for themselves and those closely allied with them.  As Benjamin Franklin (namesake of one of the two most recently built residential colleges at Yale) reportedly said when asked what the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had created in establishing the United States: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

“Brundibar” was performed many times at Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp for Jews in Czechoslovakia, where its performance, including with many children, became a way for camp inmates to express opposition to their Nazi oppressors who either did not understand or care about the central message conveyed in the play.  Composer Hans Krasa, who was Jewish, and most others, mainly Jewish, who were associated with the creation, staging and performance of “Brundibar”, including many children, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, were ultimately sent to their deaths at German concentration camps.

Adolf Hoffmeister escaped from Czechoslovakia to France, and later, via  Morocco and neutral Portugal, to the U.S.  Hoffmeister’s 1939-40 escape was remarkably similar to that of fictional Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo, played by the virtuoso actor and later director, Austrian-born Paul Henreid, in the now-legendary 1942 film, “Casablanca”, directed in Hollywood at Warner Brothers studios by Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz (Mihaly Kertes in Magyar), who had been drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I and wounded on the Russian or Eastern front before the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, as discussed elsewhere, on a macro scale, with regard to the 1918 creation of Czechoslovakia and other European nations; and on a micro scale, with regard to my step-uncle, Hungarian Gaspar Vass (1896-1974), who served on the Italian front in World War I, before becoming, in 1916-18,  military aide-de-camp to Austro-Hungarian Empress Zita, and part-time tutor of her eldest son, Crown Prince Otto.

In “Casablanca”, which won 1943 Oscars for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay, Victor Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa, played unforgettably by Ingrid Bergman, enlist the help of Mrs. Laszlo’s former love, Rick Blaine, American owner of a Casablanca café, performed also memorably by Humphrey Bogart, to get transit visas which allow them (in 1941), to fly to Lisbon, Portugal, and then on to the United States. 

In 1940, Adolf Hoffmeister was deported from southern France, by the German-controlled Vichy government, to Morocco, then a French colony, where Vichy officials put him in an internment camp.  But Hoffmeister escaped the camp and boarded a smuggler’s ship to Portugal and on to Havana, Cuba and New York City.  I have not yet found any historical evidence that Michael Curtiz, who directed films and plays throughout Eastern and Western Europe until he emigrated to the U.S. in 1926, knew about and/or based any part of “Casablanca”, made in 1941-42, on Adolf Hoffmeister’s 1939-40 escape to the West.  However, it seems very possible that, at the least, Curtiz knew about Hoffmeister and Krasa’s 1938 anti-totalitarian operetta, “Brundibar”.

In 2003, Tony Kushner, the American playwright most famous for his two-part, 1991-92 work, “Angels in America”, about suffering in the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s, wrote a children’s book interpretation of the Adolf Hoffmeister/Hans Krasa operetta, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and also entitled Brundibar (New York: Michael di Capua Books/Hyperion Books for Children).  In 2005 Kushner wrote an English language libretto for an opera, based on Adolf Hoffmeister’s libretto.  Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and end of Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia and other East European countries, “Brundibar”, both as a play and an opera, has been performed worldwide, including in 2006, as a play, at the Yale Repertory Theater.  I note elsewhere here that I thought that Martin Hoffmeister told me that before he entered Yale College in 1966, he briefly studied at Yale Drama School, which puts on performances at the nearby Yale Repertory Theater.  But so far there has been no additional confirmation that Martin was briefly enrolled at Yale Drama School.  If Martin Hoffmeister studied at Yale Drama School, he certainly had the background for that in that, according to his biographical sketch in the 1969 Yale Banner,  he had studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague from September, 1962 to March, !966.  Although the Yale Banner states that Martin enrolled at Yale College in March, 1966, that would be an unusual matriculation time for anyone entering undergraduate Yale.  I do not recall having met Martin Hoffmeister before Fall, 1966 when I think I first met him at the Morse College dining hall.  Thus I wonder if Martin may have studied at Yale Drama School in March through August, 1966, and then entered Yale College. 

In his 2010 interview with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, earlier-mentioned here, Martin Hoffmeister, Adolf’s son and first cousin of Yale alumnus, Martin Ivan Hoffmeister, noted that over some decades some European governments were not sure of Adolf’s allegiances and associations.  Martin noted that after his father, Adolf, fled to France from German-occupied Czechoslovakia, but again ended up under Nazi domination after Hitler’s forces took over the northern half of France and installed the Nazi-controlled Vichy government in southern France, Adolf Hoffmeister was imprisoned successively in northern and southern France because the Nazi and Vichy governments considered that Hoffmeister might be an agent of the Soviet Union.  After Adolf Hoffmeister ended up in a detention camp in Vichy-controlled Morocco, he somehow soon managed to escape from there, be smuggled onto a ship to Portugal, and sail on another ship to the United States, where he remained for the rest of World War II.  In New York, Adolf Hoffmeister, created and exhibited anti-Nazi art and worked for Radio Free Europe, the U.S. Government’s main news and propaganda outlet to people and nations then living under Nazi German occupation. 

Martin Hoffmeister, Adolf’s son, also noted in his 2010 interview with Haaretz newspaper, that in 1951, when Stalinist forces in the Czechoslovak Communist government purged and executed many of its high officials it then suspected of being moderates or even anti-Communist, including its Foreign Minister, Vladimir Klementis, Adolf Hoffmeister’s boss when he was Czechoslovak Ambassador to France in 1948-51, Adolf was recalled from Paris, was briefly imprisoned, but was not prosecuted or executed.  Adolf’s son told Haaretz that he thinks that his father was saved, at that time by his friendship with the then-Soviet Ambassador to France (or to Czechoslovakia?).  Apparently some officials in the early-1950’s Czechoslovak Government were as uncertain as the 1939-40 Nazi and Vichy officials in France and Morocco had been about the potential connections, affiliations and protectors of Adolf Hoffmeister, and whether he was an ‘asset’, operative and/or secret agent of one government or another.  As Adolf Hoffmeister had worked for the U.S. Government agency, Radio Free Europe, in New York during World War II, I wonder if Hoffmeister, during the war, may have worked with, or at least provided information to, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and if, after 1947 when the OSS successor, the CIA, was created, Adolf Hoffmeister may have worked for, or as an ‘asset’, at least periodically provided information to, that agency.  People such as Adolf Hoffmeister, with extensive connections in both the political and cultural lives of their countries, have long been of interest to the CIA and other U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies, and sometimes recruited as either regular or occasional sources of information or as operatives/spies.  And, as in the 1950’s/1960’s especially, some U.S. ‘intelligence’ agency information sources or operatives obtained informant or operative statuses also for their sons, and perhaps also their nephews and/or other close male relative(s) (women were then frequently not considered optimal for such work), as a way of obtaining long-term source(s) of income for male relative(s); I wonder if Martin Hoffmeister, the nephew and protege of Adolf Hoffmeister, may have obtained, beginning in his 20’s in the 1960’s, through his uncle, some operative status with the CIA and/or other ‘intelligence’ organization(s) of the U.S., and/or of some other nation(s) with ‘intelligence’ organization(s) closely cooperating with those of the U.S., such as of the United Kingdom.   If in fact Martin Hoffmeister, who obtained his B.A. and M. Arch. degrees, as I did, from Yale University in 1969 and 1972, worked at some time(s) as an ‘asset’ or operative of the CIA and/or other ‘intelligence’ agency, that may help explain how Martin was able to continue living in the U.S. and attending an expensive university, if he was not otherwise working in the U.S. after 1968 when his uncle, Adolf, a supporter of anti-Soviet reformists in Czechoslovakia, was called back to Prague, from his position as Czech Ambassador to UNESCO, after Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.  From 1968 until his death in 1973 at age 71, Adolf Hoffmeister was given no other government post, was not allowed to publicly exhibit his art and lived at his country home in the Orlicky Mountains of Czechoslovakia. 

HemisFair, ’68

In Fall, 1968, at Yale, I mentioned to Martin Hoffmeister that on my way back from Mexico in August, 1968 I visited the HemisFair ’68 international exposition at San Antonio, TX and saw at the “Kino Automat”, the world’s first interactive film, by Czech screenwriter and director Raduz Cincera; and at Beethoven Hall at Hemisfair, the Czechoslovak Laterna Magika (‘Magician’s Lantern’) multi-media performances.  Martin was very interested to hear about that.  Partly because of his education in Czechoslovakia and partly because of his uncle’s prominence in Czechoslovak arts and letters, as an artist, poet, literary editor and major newspaper editor, Martin knew a lot about the cultural output and history of his country and naturally was proud of that.

In Summer, 1968, shortly before the Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Martin’s uncle, Adolf Hoffmeister, was president of a film festival at Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia that was attended by some international film stars, including Henry Fonda and Claudia Cardinale (see online Aug.. 13, 2010 article, cited earlier here, from Haaretz newspaper (Tel Aviv, Israel), about Adolf Hoffmeister with interview of Martin’s first cousin, also Martin Hoffmeister, son of Adolf, and born in 1947, five years after the ‘Yale Martin’).

Henry Fonda is another example of how Martin’s family and cultural world intersected directly and indirectly with some persons and cultural activities in my family’s world.  From 1925 to the 1950’s, Henry Fonda and his actor children, Jane and Peter, began their acting careers at the Omaha Community Playhouse (OCP), in Nebraska, where my mother, Marcia S. Montes, performed in some plays in the 1960’s.  In 1966 my mother received the OCP Actor of the Year award for her lead role in “The House of Bernarda Alba”, by Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, executed in 1936 by right-wing forces during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, and possibly not only or mainly for political reasons, but for his homosexuality.

My parents also had an indirect connection to the Fondas through their 1960’s friendship in Omaha with Bob and Anne Duncan, members of a Great Books club, of about 10 members, that my parents then belonged to.  The Duncan’s son, Bill, was a good friend of Peter Fonda.  Peter and Jane Fonda lived with their aunt, Henry’s sister, in Omaha for some years after the 1950 suicide of their mother in a New York psychiatric hospital (Peter and Jane did not know until years later that their mother died by suicide).  We heard from the Duncans that when Bill and Peter were both about 16 in 1956, they left Omaha and went on a road trip across the U.S., ultimately ending in Los Angeles at Peter Fonda’s home.  Fortunately that road trip did not end as did the fatal one of two motorcycle buddies, played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, in the 1969 film, “Easy Rider”, that they also co-wrote, produced (Fonda) and directed (Hopper).

Bob Duncan also connected indirectly to Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, whom Adolf Hoffmeister knew in France from the 1920’s to 1960’s.  Adolf Hoffmeister had drawn portrait(s) of Picasso and Picasso drew a billy goat for Martin, Adolf’s son and ‘Yale Martin”s  first cousin, in about the late 1950’s/early 1960’s when the younger Martin, born in 1947, was a boy.  Bob Duncan’s only sibling, war and portrait photographer David Douglas Duncan, settled on the French Riviera, became a friend of his neighbor, Picasso, and produced seven photographic essay books about Picasso.

Photographs of and by. and papers of, David Douglas Duncan are now at the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas, Austin.  Since 2012 I have donated some hundreds of photos and negatives, and some papers, clippings and other items, of and relating to my parents, who earned four degrees at University of Texas, Austin, in 1936-46, to begin forming the Dr. Gustavo E. and Marcia S. Montes Papers at the Benson Latin American Collection at University of Texas, Austin.  One can see at the web page for the Dr. Gustavo and Marcia Montes Papers, photographs of my parents at University of Texas, Austin in the 1940’s.

I told ‘Yale Martin’ about Gloria Galt, an art patron from San Antonio, Texas whom my family knew in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in the 1960’s, and whose brother-in-law, Marshall T. Steves, Sr., a San Antonio businessman, was, as mentioned earlier here, President of Hemisfair ’68, where I saw, in 1968, the above-noted Czechoslovak films and multi-media performances.  Gloria Galt endowed a Latin American art appreciation program of lectures and classes at the San Antonio Museum of Art.  In 2007, the Museum of Art landing on the San Antonio Riverwalk extension was named after Gloria Galt (see Figure 7).  I own a semi-abstract painting by Scots-born artist Barclay Ferguson, who dated Gloria Galt during part of the time she lived in San Miguel de Allende in the early 1960’s.

San Miguel/Monterey/Yale

After Gloria Galt’s artist friend, Barclay Ferguson, left San Miguel de Allende in the early 1960’s, he moved back to Canada, where he had lived in the early 950’s, then moved in 1970 to Monterey/Carmel, CA and continued his friendship, begun in late 1950’s San Miguel de Allende, with John Boit (Jack) Morse, a Yale and Skull and Bones/Russell Trust Association (RTA) alum (early 1930’s), and Elizabethan Club member, who painted and taught art at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel until 1959.  Jack Morse was the son of Samuel F. B. Morse, also Skull and Bones (1907), who developed the Del Monte Forest residential area and some golf courses, including Pebble Beach, on the Monterey Peninsula.  (Incidentally, Montes Rey was my father’s last name in Spanish usage where the mother’s surname is often used after the father’s surname.)  Samuel F.B. Morse, the Monterey developer, was a distant cousin of his namesake, the telegraph inventor and talented painter, the namesake of Morse College, where I first met Martin Hoffmeister in 1966.  Jack Morse and his wife, Virginia were both painters.  Virginia painted a portrait of Barclay Ferguson.

Barclay Ferguson was a talented painter and graphic artist.  Barclay had some art shows in the Monterey/Carmel area in the 1970’s/1980’s, including at the Monterey Museum of Art (MMA) in a two-man show of his work and that of his friend, Hank Ketcham, 1951-94 creator of the “Dennis the Menace” comic strip, who was also a painter.  MMA owns some paintings by Barclay.

Samuel F. B. Morse, the Monterey Peninsula golf course developer and 1907 Yale/S & B/RTA alum, was a longtime friend of Yale College 1917 graduate and fellow Skull and Bones/RTA member Prescott Bush, an officer, including President, of the U.S. Golf Association, in 1928-35.  Prescott Bush; Managing Partner, in 1935-52, of Wall Street investment bank, Brown Brothers Harriman, founded in 1931 by brothers and 1913 and 1917 Yale College grads and S & B/RTA members W. Averell (earlier mentioned here) and E. Roland Harriman; was the father of U.S. Presidents and 1948 and 1968 Yale grads and S & B/RTA members George H.W. and George W. Bush.  George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, were long time friends of Samuel F. B. Morse’s daughter by his second wife, and Jack Morse’s half-sister, Mary Morse Osborne Shaw, who became one of the  top amateur golfers in the U.S.

I always seemed to just miss Jack and Virginia Morse.  Jack Morse last taught art at Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende in 1959, where my family began to rent a second home and take art, Spanish and other courses at Instituto Allende in 1960.   Jack and Virginia first met Barclay Ferguson at Instituto Allende where, in 1954-59, Barclay earned a Master of Fine Art degree and painted a mural.  As I recall, Jack and Virginia Morse taught and painted art at Yale Art and Architecture School in 1973, the year after I earned there my Master of Architecture degree.

Yale Art and Architecture School separated into separate art and architecture schools in 1972.  However the Art School did not move out of the famous, 1963, Paul-Rudolph-designed, originally named  Yale Art and Architecture Building until 2000.  Then the Yale Art School moved across Chapel Street to the former Jewish Community Center, renovated per design of Deborah Berke, Yale Architecture Adjunct Professor and since 2016, the first woman Dean of Yale Architecture School.

In Spring, 1987 Jack and Virginia Morse left their longtime Carmel, CA home on the south side of the Monterey Peninsula, planning to move to Spain, about a month after I  began work at the Santa Cruz County Planning Department, in the County Administration Building at the town of Santa Cruz, facing Monterey Bay and the north side of Monterey Peninsula.  Virginia and Jack Morse died in Santa Barbara, CA and Scottsdale,  AZ in 1987-88.  Their friend, Barclay Ferguson, died near Carmel in 1991.

See Appendix  2 – Texan and Other Ladies, following this essay, for more about Barclay Ferguson and his early 1960’s girlfriend, Texas oil and natural gas heiress Gloria Galt; Gloria’s sister, Patsy Galt Steves, and her longtime, close friendship with U.S. First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, and President Lyndon B. Johnson.  As Barclay Ferguson’s close friends in 1970’s Monterey, California were, as note above, Jack and Virginia Morse, half-brother and sister-in-law of amateur golf champion Mary Morse Osborne Shaw, longtime good friend of U.S. First Lady Barbara Pierce Bush and U.S. President George H.W. Bush, I think of Barclay Ferguson as ‘a Scotsman between two U.S. First Families’. 

I have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to find out if Barclay Ferguson and his wife, Harriet, knew, either in Carmel/Monterey and/or at their ranches in adjacent Klamath and Jackson counties in southern Oregon in the 1970’s/1980’s, Czech-American actress Kim Novak, co-star of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece 1958 film, “Vertigo”, and her veterinarian husband, Robert Malloy.  Barclay belonged to and exhibited at, as Ms. Novak, also a painter, may have, the Carmel Art Association in the 1970’s/1980’s.

In Appendix 3, following this essay, entitled “A Vertigo Family?”. based on some writings of mine since 1993, I question whether, by small chance, film director Alfred Hitchcock may have known about and based a central character of “Vertigo”—whom one never sees in the film, that is the already-murdered San Francisco socialite Madeleine Elster, impersonated by ‘shop girl’ Judy Barton, brilliantly acted by Kim Novak—at least in part on my father’s first cousin, June Emery Stephens (1920-2005).  June Stephens circulated on the San Francisco social scene in the 1950’s to 1990’s.  June, with her husband, Dr. Warren Stephens, a very successful orthopedic surgeon (including for the San Francisco ’49ers football team), lived in the very ‘upscale’ San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough.  Many may not have known, that June, like Madeleine in “Vertigo”, with natural blonde hair and ‘Anglo’ maiden and married names, had Spanish/Mexican ancestry through her mother.

To Catch a Copy?

Not until years after my family and I knew Barclay Ferguson and his then-girlfriend, Gloria Galt, in San Miguel de Allende in the early 1960’s, did I realize that they were probably then modeling themselves, probably consciously, on the characters played by Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film, “To Catch a Thief”, set on the French Riviera and Monaco (where Grace became Princess in 1956, but died from a stroke and car crash in 1982).  In “To Catch a Thief”, the (nouveau) rich, beautiful American heiress, Frances Stevens (not far from Stephens; that my above-mentioned cousin and San Francisco socialite, June; and Steves that Gloria Galt’s earlier-mentioned sister, Patsy, a San Antonio socialite, both became by marriage in about the late 1940’s/early 1950’s!), drives fast along the narrow, winding Corniche highway high above the Mediterranean Coast, but never hits anyone or anything.  Grant, the intermittent jewel thief, along for the ride in an ultra-cool black turtleneck under a gray sports jacket, is terrified by the heiress’s driving, but does his best to keep calm (see Figure 9).  The only differences, besides being in Mexico instead of Monaco and France, is that very lovely Gloria had brunette hair, instead of Grace’s blonde (although both Gloria and Grace had ‘peaches and cream’ complexions), and Barclay had prematurely silver hair instead of Grant’s then-dark hair.   Ironically—or more?—as I like to say sometimes, David Dodge author of the 1952 novel, To Catch a Thief , upon which the film is based, retired, with his wife, Elva, to San Miguel de Allende in 1968.  They died there in 1973-74 and are buried there.

One night, in or about 1961, Gloria Galt drove my mother, Marcia Montes, and another family friend, horticulturist/birdwatcher and Pittsburgh native, Margaret Lappe Wheeler (author of 1967 book, A Bird-Watcher’s Guide to Mexico), about 40 miles from San Miguel de Allende to Queretaro to see the 1959 French/Brazilian film, “Orfeu Negro” (‘Black Orpheus’), set in Rio de Janeiro.  As Gloria gunned the Oldsmobile or similar, large, luxury car up to about 80 miles per hour, a loud bell sound went off in the car.  My mother and Margaret froze in place.  Gloria exclaimed, in her languorous Texas accent, ‘Daddy had that damn alarm installed in the car to remind me to not drive too fast.  I know a nice car mechanic in Queretaro, and I’m going to ask him to disconnect it.’  My mother told me afterwards that she and Margaret had “our hearts in our throats” through the whole ride to and from Queretaro that night.  (As Gloria, Margaret and my mother roared along the Pan-American Highway on the then-outskirts of Queretaro, they passed by a chapel built by the Austrian Government at the site of the 1867 execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, a younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austro-Hungary, mentioned further on here.)   On Gloria Galt’s hair-raising drives that night between San Miguel and Queretaro, no one and nothing got damaged, as usual with Gloria’s driving, the same as with Frances Stevens/Grace Kelly’s on the Corniche highway.  (While Martin Hoffmeister’s large car, in which he drove me along Long Island Sound at night in the late 1960’s in our Yale College years, was more like Gloria Galt’s car in early 1960’s Mexico (although Martin’s was a convertible and Gloria’s was not); the small, sleek sports car in which Grace Kelly/Frances Stevens drove Cary Grant along the Riviera coast in 1955 “To Catch a Thief” was more like the MG? sports car Martin had in the early 1970’s (that I did not ride in), when he was in Yale Architecture School.  At least in his large car in Yale College, Martin Hoffmeister drove very normally, almost sedately, as I recall—but like Frances Stevens/Grace Kelly and Gloria Galt, he always engaged in charming, humorous and/or interesting conversation as he drove.

“It’s Not Even Past.”

At Yale in 1966-72, Martin Hoffmeister and I knew that we had in common that we had been brought up in families and among family friends where art and history are constant presences.  We lived what William Faulkner wrote about the South: “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.” (the inspiration for the “Not Even Past” web site of the University of Texas, Austin Department of History, referred to in Footnote 1, below, with regard to a photo from the site’s page, at Figure 1 here, showing protests at Prague’s Wenceslas Square, against the 1968 Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia).   To get a humorous idea of how much the past can remain in the present for some, especially on the losing side, my mother had, in about 1941-42, a roommate, from Alabama or Mississippi, at University of Texas, Austin who said to my mother, “Before I came out here to Texas, I didn’t know that damn and Yankee are two separate words!”

A Mexican friend of my family also acknowledged the presence of history, especially for families which have been in government at high levels.  My mother, Marcia S. Montes, was President, in 1975-77, of the Wive’s (now-Spouse’s) Association of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where my father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, worked in 1974-84.  In about 1975, Martha Salinas de Ortiz Mena, Honorary President of the Wive’s Association, and wife of the IDB President in 1971-84, , Antonio Ortiz Mena, Finance Minister of Mexico in 1958-70; first visited my parent’s house in McLean, VA.  As my mother showed Mrs. Ortiz Mena through the house,  Mrs. Ortiz Mena noticed, in the library, a framed, black-and-white photo of a painting that showed boys throwing rocks from the roof of a building overlooking the Zocalo national plaza in Mexico City, protesting the arrival of U.S. Army troops at the Zocalo on the last day of the two-year Mexican-American War on September 13, 1848.  The photo had been given to me by Margaret Collier, an excellent art history instructor at Yale (and longtime, close friend of then-Yale Art and Architecture School Librarian Helen Chillman), in a class on Mexican colonial architecture taught by above-mentioned Art History Professor George Kubler, with Miss Collier as his assistant.  Miss Collier had examined the photo because the painting shows the ornate 18th century Sagrario or Sacristy church next to the Cathedral of Mexico, facing the Zocalo.  I have read at Sterling Library, the excellent Ph. d. thesis, with Professor Kubler as her advisor, that Margaret Collier wrote about the  Sagrario history and its elaborate architectural style which is frequently called Churrigueresque, but which Kubler, Collier and other art historians have called ‘Ultrabaroque’.  As Mrs. Ortiz Mena looked closely at the photo of the painting of the  Zocalo plaza in 1848, my mother asked her, “Are you and don Antonio (Mr. Ortiz Mena) interested in history?”  Mrs. Ortiz Mena looked up at my mother, smiled and said in her perfect English, learned at a private girl’s school in San Antonio, TX: “Oh, we live history!”

Speaking of Yale Art History Professor George Kubler, in Appendix 4 of this writing, entitled “Academician Assassination?”, I question whether  Kubler and/or his brother-in-law and confidant, then-former CIA Deputy Director for (Covert) Plans, Richard M. Bissell, Jr., members of the Yale College Classes of 1934 and 1933 (and leading members of the Elizabethan Club in the 1930’s, and at least Kubler, the club President in 1950-52, active at least until his retirement from the Yale faculty in 1984), either: 1) was or were original, intellectual author(s) of a plan to secretly commission the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, to retaliate for Kennedy’s firing of Bissell, over the 1961 Bay of Pigs failed invasion of Cuba to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro, which Bissell led; or 2) had secret knowledge of; and/or coordinated with other individual(s), one or more of whom may also have been Yale College graduate(s), in; secret commissioning of, through intermediary(ies), the assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Dallas, TX on November 22, 1963.

The above-noted, large painting of Mexico City’s main Zocalo Plaza in 1848, of which Mrs. Ortiz Mena saw a black-and-white photograph at my parent’s house in McLean, VA in 1975, is at the Seward House Museum in Auburn, NY, the former home of U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, almost assassinated in the same 1865 plot in which President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.  After Seward recovered and was out of office, he traveled widely outside the U.S.  In Mexico the Mexican Government, gave Seward the Zocalo painting now at the Seward Museum, as a token of friendship, although with a reminder of the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846-48.

Antonio and Martha Ortiz Mena were close friends of U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica in the Kennedy Administration, Raymond Telles (who, as noted elsewhere in this writing, met and was photographed with Lee Harvey Oswald’s erstwhile Dallas social contact, George De Mohrenschldt in Costa Rica in 1962), and Mrs. Telles.  During the 1979 visit of Pope Paul II to Washington, D.C. (about a year and a half before the May, 1981 attempt to assassinate him in Rome), my parents were walking down a street in Washington, D.C. to see the pope at the Pan-American Union Building.  A long, chauffeured Mercedes 600 limousine pulled up along side my parents, a back window rolled down and Mrs. Ortiz Mena asked my parents, “Marcia, Gustavo, are you going to see the pope?”  They said yes, and Mrs. Ortiz Mena said, ‘Ride with me,’  My parents got in and they found sitting in the back seat of the limousine, with Mrs. Ortiz Mena, Mrs. Raymond Telles.  The four of them chatted on the short trip to the Pan-American Union.  Mrs. Ortiz Mena gave my parents two extra tickets she had for getting close to the pope at the Pan American Union Building, where my father, a devout Catholic and longtime, avid photographer,  got to take some up-close photos of Pope John Paul II.

In the early 1980’s, Antonio Ortiz Mena, the Inter-American Development Bank President, appointed IDB employee Raymond Telles to be the IDB Representative in El Salvador at the height of the civil war there, in which the Reagan-Bush Administration backed a right-wing government against leftist rebels.  After Mr. Ortiz Mena appointed Ambassador Telles to that position, my father told me that a joke went around the IDB, with regard to Mr. Ortiz Mena sending Telles to a potentially dangerous location, which said: “If that’s what he does to his friends, imagine what he does to his enemies!”  In fact Ambassador Telles had a close call in El Salvador when he was scheduled to take some important papers to a government minister, but at the last minute could not go and instead sent his driver with the papers.  The driver was stopped by armed men in downtown San Salvador, the Salvadorean capital, was ordered out of the car and the guerrillas set the car on fire, important papers and all.  As  recall, the driver was not harmed.

The nephew of Martha Salinas de Ortiz Mena, Carlos Salinas Gortari, President of Mexico in 1988-94 (during the time that George H.W. Bush was U.S. President in 1989-93), nominated as his successor (as Mexican Presidents could during the continuous rule of the PRI party in 1929-2000), Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was assassinated in 1994 while campaigning at Tijuiana on the Mexico/U.S. border.  President Salinas nominated as Colosio’s replacement, Ernesto Zedillo, who had then-recently become Colosio’s campaign manager, and who of course was subsequently elected President of Mexico, serving  in 1994-2000.  Colosio’s assassination allowed President Salinas to appoint a technocrat, Zedillo, as his successor, which originally he could not do because ”dinosaurs” in PRI wanted Colosio whom they saw as the next generation of themselves as party politicians.  Since completing his presidential term of 1994-2000, Ernesto Zedillo has been Director of the Center for Globalization at Yale.

Births of Some Nations

In the early 1990’s, at a book signing at a Berkeley, CA bookstore, I met and briefly spoke with 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Czeslaw Milosz.  As he had been Cultural Attache of the Polish Embassy in Paris in about 1948-51, about the years when Martin’s uncle, Adolf Hoffmeister was Czech Ambassador to France in 1947-49, I asked Milosz if he knew Hoffmeister.  I think he said he had heard of him but not met him.  Also, I asked Milosz if he knew Count Mihaly Karolyi who was Hungarian Ambassador to France in 1947-49, and in 1918-19 was the first President of Hungary after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  I think that Milosz  said he also knew of Karolyi, but had not met him.  I would guess that ambassadors, especially of adjacent nations such as Poland, then-Czechoslovakia and Hungary, posted at the same time in major capitals such as Paris, know each other more than they know each other’s Cultural Attaches.  In the first few years after World War II, before Soviet domination and the Iron Curtain came down firmly upon Eastern Europe, there was a brief period in which some moderates held leadership positions in some East European governments and their embassies abroad.  That came to an end as Soviet military and political influence was increasingly exerted throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1940’s/early 1950’s.

Martin Hoffmeister was interested that an in-law of my family, my aunt and mother of my first cousin, came from Hungary and that her third husband, after she and my mother’s brother, divorced in the late 1950’s, was an older Hungarian who, during World War I, had been an aide to and protégé of Count Joseph Karolyi, a cousin of Count Mihaly Karolyi who served at the same time as Martin’s uncle, as an East European Ambassador in Paris in the late 1940’s.

The third husband of Aunt Marianne (mentioned earlier here with regard to her hostess work at the Washington Hilton Restaurant in front of which President Reagan was almost assassinated in 1981), was Gaspar Vass.  (Marianne’s first husband was a soldier killed in World War II on the Eastern Front when Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany and joined its fight against the Soviet Union.)

Gaspar Vass served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, under Count Josef Karolyi, on the brutal Italian Front in the high, steep mountains along the Italian-Austro-Hungarian border during World War I, much of the subject of Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms.

William Holabird, foumder of the famous Chicago architectural firm of Holabird and Root founder, had a niece, Agnes von Kurowsky, who was the American nurse who, in 1918, took care of seriously injured Ernest Hemingway, an 18-year old ambulance driver from the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, at a hospital in Milan, Italy, and whom he wanted to marry but she left him for someone else; as thinly fictionalized in A Farewell to Arms.  Some say that this lost love of youth led to Hemingway’s subsequent difficult relations with women, leading to his two divorces.  Adolf Hoffmeister, the uncle and mentor of Martin Hoffmeister (who was Vice President of the Chicago architectural firm of Perkins & Will in 1975-84), was an acquaintance or friend of Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the 1920’s/1930’s and did a drawing or painting of him, as he did of various other famous and well-known writers and artists in Paris between the world wars.

In 1964, in a combining of my interests in history and architecture, a woman we knew who lived part-time in Chicago and part-time in San Miguel de Allende, took my mother and me to the Chicago home (late 19^th century brownstone) of architect Bill Holabird, a grandnephew of Holabird & Root founder William Holabird.  My mother, sister and I had met the wife and four daughters of Bill Holabird in San Miguel de Allende when they spent part of a summer there, in 1964 or 1963, as I recall.  The Holabirds suffered tragedy in 1966 when one of their four, very lovely, blonde daughters, Lisa, was killed in a crash of her sports car, perhaps an MG or Jaguar, while traveling (alone, as I recall), between Chicago and Madison, WI where she was then attending University of Wisconsin, I think in her first year at age 18.  If one wants to picture Lisa Holabird, check out Twiggy (Dame Lesley Lawson, as of 2019), the slender British model/actress, with long, blonde hair, in her sleek Jaguar XK-E sports car in the 1980 classic, comic, John Landis-directed film and ode to the Chicago region, “The Blues Brothers”, co-starring John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Carrie Fisher.  Aretha Franklin also gives one of her greatest singing, acting and dancing performances in that movie

In 1916, Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austro-Hungary (and older brother of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, mentioned earlier here), died and as his nephew and immediate heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been assassinated at Sarajevo in what started World War I in 1914, Franz Joseph was succeeded by his grand-nephew, Karl (Charles) I, who called Count Josef Karolyi from the Italian Front to Vienna to advise him and his wife, Empress Zita, on education of their children.  Gaspar went to Vienna with Count Karolyi and became military aide-de-camp to Empress Zita.

In 1917-18, Gaspar tutored then-five-year-old Crown Prince Otto at about the first-grade level of school.  Gaspar and Otto remained friends for life.  I have a large black-and-white photo, given to me by Aunt Marianne, of Dr. Otto von Habsburg, former Crown Prince Otto, visiting with Marianne and Gaspar, at their apartment in Washington, D.C. in about 1970, along with Marianne’s longtime friend, Hungarian actress Ilona Massey, and her fourth husband, U.S. Air Force Major General Donald Dawson, an aide to President Harry Truman, who devised the “whistle-stop” train tour which greatly helped Truman get elected in his own right in 1948, after succeeding to the Presidency in 1945 upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Emperor Karl and Empress Zita tried to withdraw Austro-Hungary from World War I because they knew that nationalist movements were pushing for dissolution of the empire and creation of independent nations throughout Central and Eastern Europe.  In 1917, in what was subsequently called the “Sixtus Affair”, Karl and Zita tried, in communications through Zita’s brother, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, an officer in the Belgian Army, to enter secret negotiations with France for Austro-Hungary to withdraw from the war.  That line of communications came to public light, the effort failed, political pressures increased in Austro-Hungary, Emperor Karl relinquished his role in government and ultimately the deposed Emperor and his family went into exile at the Portuguese island of Madeira.  After Gaspar’s death in 1974 at about age 80, I asked Aunt Marianne if he, as military aide-de-camp of Empress Zita, had any role in delivering then-secret communications between Zita and/or Emperor Karl and Prince Sixtus, about trying to withdraw Austro-Hungary from World War I.  Marianne said she did not know about that.  Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other East European nations declared their independence in 1918 from the Austro-Hungarian Empire which then ceased to exist, as did the Ottoman, Russian and Prussian empires which also fell during or at the end of World War I.

Martin Hoffmeister and I talked about dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I and creation of Czechoslovakia and other East European nations.  (Perhaps because East Europeans have always looked to Western Europe for salvation from the ‘Russian bear’ in the east, some from that region, such as my aunt, Marianne, have referred to Hungary and adjacent nations as being in “Central” rather than “Eastern” Europe.)

Worldly Martin

Martin Hoffmeister entered Yale Architecture School in January, 1970, four months after I did, to study for the Master of Architecture degree.  I do not know or recall what Martin did between our graduation from Yale College in June, 1969 and his matriculation at Yale Architecture School, six months later. I do not know if Martin returned to Czechoslovakia in that time and/or perhaps worked awhile, when he may have been deciding what to do next.

I recall distinctly that Martin Hoffmeister told me he studied for a while at Yale Drama School, before he applied to and was accepted into Yale College in 1966.  But so far, I and others have found no record or memory of others about that.  Martin told me that when he was at Yale Drama School (perhaps only in the first six months of 1966, before he matriculated in Yale College in September, 1966), he lived in an apartment of a long, two-story apartment building that I recall was on the west side of Park Street, across the street from the back of Davenport College (where I and other members of the Yale College Class of 1969 attended and stayed for our 50^th Reunion in May/June, 2019), and was later demolished to make way for an expansion of St. Thomas More Catholic Center, designed by Yale Architecture School teacher and later Dean, Cesar Pelli (1926-2019), mentioned earlier here, and with whom I, and perhaps also Martin Hoffmeister, studied.  Martin mentioned to me a girlfriend he had when he lived in that building on Park Street.

As I lived first off-campus and then at Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS) when I was in Yale Architecture School in 1969-72, I saw less of Martin when I was in Architecture School than when he and I lived in Morse College in 1966-69, while in Yale College.  I think that Martin lived off-campus when we were in Yale Architecture, and he did not live at HGS when I lived there in 1970-72.

I contacted Martin Hoffmeister’s former employers, as found at Prabook.com, which listed Martin’s positions as: Chief Designer, Taisei Corporation in Tokyo, 1973-75; Vice President, Perkins & Will, Chicago, 1975-84; Vice President, Perez Architects, Denver, 1984-86; and University Architect and Assistant Director, Facilities Planning and Services Department of New Mexico State University (NMSU), Las Cruces, NM, 1989-2003.  I heard back only from NMSU.

Online I found an NMSU News Center article of October 2, 2001 (https://newscenter.nmsu.edu/articles/view/996), in which Martin Hoffmeister told about the $5 million, complete renovation/restoration of NMSU’s Goddard Hall (see Figure 10 below), which he apparently coordinated, while the renovation design was by ASA Architects, Las Cruces, NM.   Renovated Goddard Hall, originally built in 1913, houses College of Engineering administrative offices. conference rooms and the Boeing Corporation multimedia classroom, for which Boeing made a $400,000 contribution at the behest of C. G. (Jerry) King, B.S., NMSU, 1958, and President, Boeing Defense and Space Group.  NMSU operates an engineering master’s degree program for Boeing employees at Seattle.

I found online the 1992 NMSU Transportation Plan for which Martin Hoffmeister, as University Architect, was the chief author.  The well-organized, well-documented, well-written plan analyzed projected transportation and circulation needs and potential solutions for the NMSU campus and adjacent city of Las Cruces up to the year, 2000.

An introductory page of the 1992 NMSU Transportation Plan listed the 1991 NMSU Regents, including ex officio member Bruce King, Governor of New Mexico.  Bruce King (1924-2009), was New Mexico Governor in 1971-75, 1979-83 and 1991-95.  During Governor King’s first term, my father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, was his Energy Advisor in 1973.  While my father then had an office in a very attractive, New Mexico Spanish Colonial style building in downtown Santa Fe, he frequently visited his direct supervisor, the Governor’s Science Advisor, who had his office at the State Capitol, next to the Governor’s office.  In floor plan, the New Mexico State Capitol is in the shape of the Zia sun symbol (also in the New Mexico state flag and license plates), a circle with rectangles projecting in the four cardinal directions.  The Governor’s office is (or was in 1973) in one wing of the Zia configuration, but the Governor’s bathroom was in another wing on the same floor.  In between the Governor and his bathroom was the office of his Science Advisor.  Thus my father would be talking to the Science Advisor in his office, there would be a knock on the door and Governor King would enter, on his way to his bathroom.  My father, Gustavo Montes, was naturally courtly to some degree, in the manner of a Spanish/Mexican-American gentleman.  Each time Governor King would enter the Science Advisor’s office, going to and coming from his bathroom, my father would stand up.  After this happened several times, Governor King smiled and said to my father, ‘Dr. Montes, thank you for your respect for my office, but you do not need to get up each time I pass through here.’  After that my father did not, and probably just flashed a friendly smile.

Bruce King’s name up in a lurid context in 2019 which I think would have displeased him.  After Governor King’s death in 2009 at 85, his family, among the largest landowners in New Mexico, sold a large land parcel from the estate of Governor King to New York financier Jeffrey Epstein who built there what became the largest, private residence in New Mexico.  In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested in New York for alleged sex trafficking of minors in Florida where he had been previously convicted of procuring and soliciting prostitution, including of a minor.  Mr. Epstein’s case garnered national and international attention because he had flown various well-known people on his private planes, including former U.S. President and Yale Law School 1973 graduate Bill Clinton, well-known for some peccadilloes of his own, that led to various civil but not criminal problems, including 1998 impeachment of Clinton by the U.S. House of Representatives.  The press, especially the tabloid press, speculated that some prominent individuals breathed easier when Mr. Epstein, on an apparently unwatchful suicide watch, turned up dead in his jail cell, seemingly by suicide.

I wonder if Martin Hoffmeister ever met at New Mexico State University, or elsewhere in Las Cruces, Dr. Ralph Skaggs (1902-2000), longtime Professor in the NMSU College of Agriculture, largest such college west of the Mississippi, I have been told.  Ralph was married to Amelia Montes Skaggs (1910-2003), who was a first cousin of my grandfather, Elceario Martin Montes (1887-1972).  Ralph and Amelia researched and wrote a book, The Bells of San Eli, about history, customs and family histories of San Elizario, Texas, the town centered on the former Spanish presidio (of which my great-grandfather, to the fourth great, Ysidro Rey, was, as noted earlier here, the last Spanish Commandant).  The related Montes, Rey, Alarcon, Garcia and other families have lived at San Elceario/San Elizario since the 18th century.  Ralph and Amelia Skaggs were lifetime close friends of my grandparents, E.M. (as he liked to be called) and Francisca Rey Montes.  At the 1962 50th wedding anniversary luncheon at El Paso’s Hotel Cortez, mentioned earlier here, Ralph and Amelia Skaggs ate lunch at the same large, round table with my grandparents, parents, sister, myself, first cousin, aunt (Eva Montes Larrazolo) and uncle (then-New Mexico State District Judge, Paul Larrazolo).

Amelia and Ralph Skaggs had three children: Jean, Robert and Richard, whom they raised mainly in Las Cruces, NM while Ralph was a professor at NMSU.  In 1966, after earning B.S. and M.S, degrees at NMSU, Richard went to Guatemala to train the national swimming team there for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.  Richard married a niece of well-known Guatemalan legal scholar Francisco Villagran Kramer who served in 1978-80 as Vice President of Guatemala.  Richard Skaggs and his wife, Guisela, had four daughters and three grandchildren.  Richard died in Guatemala City in 2016 at age 76.

Francisco Villagran Kramer joined the government of military President Romeo Lucas Garcia, to try to moderate his rule during the Guatemalan civil war of 1960-96.  In 1980 President Lucas Garcia ordered attack of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City when it was besieged by protesters.  In the ensuing fire, 37 people were killed, including Vicente Menchu, father of 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu.  Some months after that fiasco, and seeing that he could not cause the military President to rule less harshly, Villagran Kramer resigned as Vice President and moved to the U.S. where he worked, as my father did then, at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C.  In Fall, 1983 Francisco Villagran Kramer and his wife came to dinner at my parents’ house in McLean, VA when I was visiting there.  He said to me at dinner, “Guatemala es feudal.”  Feudal means the same in Spanish as in English.

Francisco Villagran Kramer’s son, Francisco Villagran De Leon, has been one of Guatemala’s main diplomats in recent decades.  Besides having been Vice Foreign Minister of Guatemala, he served successively as Guatemalan Ambassador to the Organization of American States, the United Nations, the United States, Canada, Germany and Norway (the latter two at the same time), and as Guatemalan Permanent Representative at the United Nations Offices in Geneva, Switzerland.  Thus Francisco Villagran De Leon worked, although about 40 to 50 years later, as Adolf Hoffmeister, Martin’s uncle and mentor, did in the 1960’s, in diplomatic circles of the United Nations and in Europe.

Google searches of “Martin Hoffmeister Architect” turn up some other interesting items about him, in addition to those related to his work at New Mexico State University.  Martin and Jerry Spearman, either working for or with Moshe Safdie Architects and/or photographing some project(s) by Safdie, are listed in Illustration credits in Pedagogy and Place: 100 Years of Architecture Education at Yale (Yale University Press, 2016), by Robert A. M. Stern (Dean, Yale School of Architecture, 1998-2016), and Jimmy Stamp.

Moshe Safdie, in an indirect way, takes one back to above-discussed HemisFair ’68.  A few years after earning his architecture degree in 1961 at Montreal’s McGill University (the ‘Harvard (or Yale?) of Canada’), Safdie oversaw development of the master plan for the Expo ’67 world’s fair at Montreal.  Then Safdie designed the stacked, pyramided, modular, pre-fabricated, reinforced concrete apartment units, called Habitat ’67, hailed as a new form of urban living and development, which became one of the signature sights/sites at Expo ’67, and first made Safdie well-known beyond Canada and Israel.  Another memorable aspect of Ecpo ’67 was Laterna Magika, the Czechoslovak multi-media show, performed there 12 times per day, and performed the next year at HemisFair ’68, at Beethoven Hall (see Figure 6).

Whether Martin worked for and/or photographed project(s) by Moshe Safdie, that reminds me of a memorable incident at Yale Architecture School.  In about 1971-72, when I had a drafting table (with table neighbor Bill Durkee, mentioned earlier here), on the Art and Architecture Building fourth or so floor, prominent Israeli-Canadian architect, Moshe Safdie, was a visiting teacher.  One day, about 40 feet from me, Safdie was on the phone to, as I was told by someone in the know, his wife in Montreal, reportedly dealing with an accusation that he had an affair with a young(ish) Yale architecture instructor who perhaps saw her career path steering via Safdie.  Apparently Mrs. Safdie was very displeased and Mr. Safdie was protesting, if not his innocence, at least his rectitude (or something with ‘rect’ in it) in the matter.  Moshe was yelling into the phone in French, English and Hebrew, in a mixture that I might dub ‘Frengrew’.  At one point, in the conversation (shout-fest) that went on for at least 20 minutes, I had to pass nearby to get something, and, as I recall now, I could hear Mrs. Safdie yelling back into the phone, also in ‘Frengrew’!, in Montreal.  While I think it is probably better karma to restrain my schadenfreude in this memory, I am nonetheless smiling as I write this!

Israelis, and perhaps Jews, Arabs and other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people in general, are known for very expressive communications, within their families, in politics, in businesses, just about everywhere.  Through my father’s work at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 1974-84, and my mother’s service in 1975-77 as President of the IDB Wive’s (now Spouse’s) Association, my parents knew Ruth Dayan, who worked on IDB loans to small businesses in Latin America, many owned and operated by women, which made and sold folkloric arts and crafts, for domestic and export markets.  Ruth Dayan (still alive at almost 103 in Israel as I write this in early 2020), was the first wife of Israeli war hero and Defense and later Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan, a key figure, along with his then-former brother-in-law and then-Defense Minister, Ezer Weizman (then-future President of Israel and nephew of Israel’s first President, Chaim Weizmann), at the 1978 Camp David Mideast Peace negotiations hosted by U.S. President Jimmy Carter.  At Camp David, Weizman was more of a hardliner, unwilling to grant many concessions to the Arabs and Palestinians, and Dayan was more a moderate, wanting to give some concessions to get more comprehensive, lasting peace and security for Israel.  Ruth Dayan told my parents that at one point, Ezer Weizman became so exasperated with Dayan that he exclaimed privately to some aides of his, “Moshe is an a…… .”  I do not know if Weizman said that in English or Hebrew, but it is hard to imagine that an ancient, Biblical language such as Hebrew has an off-color word for that part of the human anatomy.  ‘Frengrew’ probably does!  And the other Moshe may have heard it that day when, as I recall, I heard Mrs. Safdie yelling at him into the phone from Montreal.  🙂

Besides mention of his published photography of some project(s) by Moshe Safdie, I also saw online that Martin Hoffmeister and others, apparently in a graduate seminar class on Minoan architecture at Yale, taught by Donald Preziosi in 1967-71, measured and analyzed spatial relationships, especially modular spaces, in Minoan buildings at archaeological sites in Greece, as documented in Preziozi’s 1983 book, Minoan Architectural Design: Formation and Signification (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.).  (I noticed that the three-man Editorial Committee for the book, included Alain Rey.  As noted elsewhere here, some in my paternal grandmother’s Rey family at the El Paso Valley, on the Mexican and American sides of the river, claimed 18th century ancestry in France.)

In Yale College I took a course on Minoan and Mycenean archaeology and architecture, taught by Classics Department Professor Jerry Pollitt, a great scholar and teacher with a great sense of humor.  When Pollitt was told that two of his graduate Classics students had gotten engaged, he exclaimed: “In their house there will be Wissenschaft (German for science or academic scholarship; pronounced: ‘Vihssen-schahft’), in the attic, Wissenschaft in the basement, Wissenschaft in the garage and Wissenschaft all over the house!”

At Yale, I told Martin Hoffmeister, in one of our discussions in Morse College dining hall, about some buildings in Prague that I studied in a course on Baroque architecture in one of my courses as an art history major.  I told Martin that some of the buildings were in the Mala Strana section of an older part of Prague, just below Prague Castle.  I apparently messed up the proper Czech pronunciation of Mala Strana.  Martin smiled and said to me, “No, Gregory, it is pronounced…”  And then he said it in a very different way than I did.  As I have now forgotten how he pronounced it, I would need to ask a Czech speaker, the proper pronunciation.  As perhaps a sign of how discrete Martin was in talking about his family in Czechoslovakia, behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, he did not mention to me then, or at any time I think, that the ancestral Hoffmeister home, now turned into the luxury Hotel Hoffmeister, is in Mala Strana.

Conclusion

Martin Hoffmeister was, as I knew him, in Yale College in 1966-69 and in Yale Architecture School in 1969-72; a charming, good-humored, cosmopolitan, very intelligent, well-educated person.  I enjoyed knowing him and talking with him, especially about history, art history and architecture.  I am very sorry to learn that he has died.

NOTES:

1.  Photo from: https://notevenpast.org/media-and-politics-from-the-prague-spring-archive/.  Not Even Past site, Department of History, University of Texas, Austin.
2.  Photo by Museum of Modern Art?, New York, NY.  In the photo, President Benes, wearing glasses, is bending down a bit to look at the art.  Adolf Hoffmeister is the man on far right in foreground with his hand on his hip.  Edvard Benes was President of Czechoslovakia in 1935-38 and 1945-48. Benes had been Minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia from when it was created in 1918, upon collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, discussed in my essay on Martin, until 1935 when he became President.  Adolf Hoffmeister had a son, named Martin, born in 1947.  Martin Ivan Hoffmeister, nephew of Adolf Hoffmeister and member of the Yale College Class of 1969 and Yale School of Architecture Class of 1972, was born in 1942.  Thus the two Martin Hoffmeisters were first cousins.   I have previously known of a set of Czech-American cousins with the same first and last names.
3.  Image from Movieclips Classic Trailers, YouTube – Dec 6, 2013.  “Casablanca” filmed in 1942 by Warner Brothers – First National Pictures, now Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc. , Burbank, CA.
4.  Image of Hemisfair ’68 poster owned by Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio, TX.
5.  Photo creator not known. The photo image is at : Slide #1998-42-062-034, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Special Collections.  The image is posted at University of North Texas The Portal to Texas History site, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth65811/?q=kino%20automat%20image.
6.  Image creator not known.  The image is at:  Txsau_ms00031_9205-058-052, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Special Collections.  Photo posted at University of North Texas The Portal to Texas History site.  https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth66486/?q=beethoven%20hall%20
7.  Photo by Lans Hobart.  https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/lanshobart.
8. Ferdyonfilms.com image from 1958 film, “Vertigo”, produced by Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions and distributed by Paramount Pictures Corp., subsidiary of Viacom/CBS.
9. Image from  1955 film, “To Catch a Thief”, property of Paramount Pictures Corp., subsidiary of Viacom/CBS, as printed in https://travelerdreams.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/tocatchathief.jpg.
10.  Photo by G. O’Grafer, 2014.  https://www.flickr.com/photos/gograffer/1578782407.3

APPENDICES

Appendix 1 – Paris, Yale, Pittsburgh and Chicago – 1950’s and Forward

Appendix 2 – Some Texan and Other Ladies

Appendix 3  – ” A Vertigo Family?”

Appendix 4  –  Academician Assassination?

Appendix 1 – Paris, Yale, Pittsburgh and Chicago – 1950’s and Forward

In the main text of this essay, I note that Bill Durkee (William IV); who entered Yale Architecture School in September,1970 or 1971, between some months and two years later than I and Martin Hoffmeister did in Fall, 1969 and January, 1970; lived in Paris in 1955-59, when he was about seven to eleven years old and his father then worked for the CIA.  A little blonde boy in Paris in the 1950’s, as Bill Durkee (William IV) was, with a spy father, reminded me of the 1963 film, “Charade”, in which a French boy unwittingly buys at a Paris stamp fair, a stamp worth $250,000 (US) (real money in 1963!) which a former operative of the OSS (Office of Special Services, the World War II CIA predecessor), bought to hold some ill-gotten gains from the war, before he is murdered and three of his OSS buddies look for the stamp and threaten the widow (played by Audrey Hepburn), to find the stamp, but she finds protection in a U.S. official (played by Cary Grant), at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, who first claims to be a CIA official, but is really with the U.S. Treasury Department, reclaiming what the OSS looters took.

Cary Grant was as debonair and daring in “Charade”, set in Paris, as he was eight years earlier in the 1955 film, “To Catch a Thief”, discussed further on here with regard to David Dodge, author of the 1952 novel, of the same title, on which the film was based, who later retired in the late 1960’s to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where, in the early 1960’s my family knew Oklahoma/Texas oil and gas heiress and art education philanthropist, Gloria Galt, and her friend, Scots-born artist Barclay Ferguson, who, in retrospect, seemed to channel, consciously probably, Grace Kelly and Grant in “To Catch a Thief”, set on the French Riviera and Monaco.

“Charade”, partly set at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, reminds me of the October, 1972 trip of my father, Dr. Gustavo Montes (Ph. d., chemical engineering), from Lagos, Nigeria, to Paris, to give deposition in a U.S. lawsuit, when he stayed at the Hotel de Crillon, across a side street from the U.S. Embassy, and facing on the Place de la Concorde.  My father met then with the Counsel for his 1959-69 employer in Omaha, NE; Northern Natural Gas Company (after changing its name to Inter-North in the 1970’s, merged in 1985 with Houston Natural Gas to form Enron, which became the largest contributor to the two, successful Texas gubernatorial races and first U.S. Presidential run of George W. Bush, ’68, before Enron imploded in Fall, 2000).  My father was not a party in the lawsuit, for which he gave deposition in Paris, about a worker killed in an explosion at a Northern Natural Gas plant in Illinois during the time my father worked for Northern Natural, first as Technology Director and later as Vice President of the Venezuelan subsidiary of Northern Natural when he lived and worked part-time in Omaha and part-time in Caracas.

The Northern Natural Counsel, with whom my father met in Paris, and his deputy, were killed two months later in December, 1972 in a United Airlines Boeing 737 crash at Chicago, with 41 others, including Dorothy Hunt, wife of former CIA operative and June, 1972 Watergate burglary co-leader, Howard Hunt, who had worked on the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, under CIA Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Director Richard M. Bissell, Jr. (Yale, ’32, Elizabethan Club member and brother of William T. Bissell, Yale, ’25, Skull and Bones), mentioned elsewhere here.  (William T. Bissell’s close friend, with whom he yachted in the Caribbean in 1925 was William Thompson Lusk, ’24, one of relatively few who combined membership in both the Elizabethan Club and Skull and Bones/Russell Trust Association.  William T. Lusk, a great-grandson of Tiffany & Company co-founder Charles Lewis Tiffany, served as Tiffany & Co. President in 1955-67, when Tiffany gave permission for a scene for the  1961 film, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, co-starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, and loosely based on Truman Capote’s 1958 novel of the same title, to be shot on the main sales floor of its flagship Fifth Avenue Store.)

Dorothy and Howard Hunt worked at the U.S. Embassy in Paris in the late 1940’s when they were secretary and press secretary of W. Averell Harriman (Yale and Skull and Bones/RTA, 1913), then head of the European office of the Marshall Plan (Economic Cooperation Administration), of which Richard Bissell, Jr. was then Deputy Director in Washington.  Bissell sometimes conferred with Harriman in Paris, and also visited then with his brother- and sister-in-law, George and Betty Kubler, when George was doing post-graduate art history study in Paris.  As noted elsewhere here, in 1966-71, while in Yale College and Yale Architecture School, I studied Ibero-American art and architecture of the colonial era with Professor Kubler.

Some have questioned whether the well-experienced United Airlines pilot crashed at Chicago in 1972 because a ground-based navigational radio beacon had secretly, temporarily been disabled so that he thought he was at a higher altitude than he was before coming below low December  clouds on landing approach to Midway Airport, and pulled up the plane abruptly, causing it to stall and crash.  William F. Buckley, Jr. (Yale and Skull and Bones, 1950 and Elizabethan Club member), who worked for Mexico City CIA station chief, Howard Hunt, in 1950-52, was executor of Dorothy Hunt’s estate and obtained settlement from United Airlines with regard to her death.

The 1972 United Airlines Boeing 737 crash on landing approach to Chicago’s Midway Airport, reminds me some of the 1983 crash of a Colombian Avianca Airlines Boeing 747, coming from Paris and on landing approach to Madrid-Barajas Airport.  In that catastrophe a Spanish air traffic controller gave incorrect navigational information to the flight crew, which the crew did not catch, causing them to crash in nearby hills, killing 181, including Mexican author and journalist, Jorge Ibarguengoitia, whom I knew in 1966-83, and three other writers prominent in Latin America, all of whom had spoken and written against U.S. and CIA interventions and support of authoritarian regimes in Latin America.  Two authors, Angel Rama and Marta Traba, a married couple from Uruguay and Argentina, would probably not have been on the fatal flight from Paris to Madrid, with ultimate destination of Bogota, Colombia, where the four authors had been invited to a cultural conference, if Rama, then a professor of Latin American modern literature at University of Maryland, College Park, had not been forced out of the Unites States in 1981-82 by the Reagan-Bush Administration which accused him of being a Communist, which he vehemently denied.

Marta Traba’s novel, Conversacion al sur‘ (‘Conversation in the south’), published in 1981, and later in English as Mothers and Shadows, is about two women who join weekly protests of the ‘Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’ in Buenos Aires against the U.S./CIA-supported military government of Argentina in 1976-83, before military police come to their home at night and kill them.  Traba, also an art historian, wrote Art of Latin America, 1900 -1980. published after her death by the Inter-American Development Bank, my father’s employer in 1974-84.

Getting back to Bill Durkee at Yale Architecture School in the early 1970’s, who lived in Paris in the 1950’s when his father worked for the U.S. State Department and CIA, I do not recall, as I note in the main text of this essay, if Martin Hoffmeister, ’69, knew Bill, but he may well have.   If he did, I think that Martin would have been interested, at the least, that Bill had lived some years in Europe and that his father, William Durkee III, was then President of Radio Free Europe, daily beaming broadcasts into Eastern Europe.

I wonder if there may have been hereditary circulatory and/or heart-related illness in the Durkee family.  William Durkee III died of arteriosclerosis in 1982 at age 63, and William Durkee IV, the Bill I knew, died at age 59 , of a heart attack in 2007.  Bill Durkee was Vice President of a Pittsburgh, PA architectural firm since 1984.  Bill had been brought to Pittsburgh by Yale Architecture School professor Ray Gindroz who had an architectural practice in Pittsburgh.  Gindroz was very impressed, at Yale, by Bill’s great ability in drawing and his strong aesthetic sense in architectural design.

I was interested to read that Bill Durkee was a good friend of Peter Kountz, President of Shadyside Academy, in the Pittsburgh suburb of Fox Chapel.  

(Fox Chapel, PA is the site of the main home of Teresa Heinz Kerry, first married to Pennsylvania U.S. Senator John Heinz (Yale 1960, Manuscript senior society), killed in an unusual 1991 helicopter/airplane crash onto the playground of Lower Merion (PA) Elementary School, killing besides Senator Heinz and pilots of both aircraft, two schoolchildren.  NBA basketball star Kobe Bryant, killed in a California helicopter crash in February, 2020 (while I continued writing this essay), was a teenage basketball star while attending Lower Merion High School in 1991-95.   In 1995, widowed Tereas Heinz married divorced Massachusetts U.S. Senator John Kerry, Yale and Skull and Bones, 1966.  Former Pennsylvania Governor and 1954 Yale College graduate, Richard Thornburgh, U.S. Attorney General in 1988-91 in the Reagan-Bush and Bush-Quayle administrations, who has known some in-laws and members of my family since the late 1970’s and with whom I spoke for about 20 minutes at at a 1978 Christmas party at his Pittsburgh home, ran unsuccessfully in a 1991 special election to replace Senator Heinz.  In some of my writings since 1993, I question whether some Yale College graduates such as Richard Thornburgh and former San Diego Mayor and California U.S. Senator and Governor Pete Wilson, who were not invited into any Yale senior societies during their mid-1950’s Yale College years, but had roommates who belonged to such societies, may have joined some of the long-rumored ‘secret, secret’ or ‘underground’ societies, some of which I believe may have some links to some of the known 10 or so oldest senior societies of Yale students and alumni.)  

Yale Architecture graduate Bill Durkee designed some buildings for Shadyside Academy prep school in Fox Chapel, which my nephew attended in the 1980’s/early 1990’s.)

I was also interested to read that Bill Durkee’s wife, Maria Caruso, was apparently from Pittsburgh.  Nina Caruso was one of several people at BNY Mellon’s Pittsburgh office who handled a trust fund I inherited from my mother in 2004 which lost a considerable portion of its value in the 2008 stock market downturn and subsequent rocky years, during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.  Maria Caruso, Bill Durkee’s widow, died “suddenly” in 2016, perhaps from a heart attack.

Appendix 2 – Some Texan and Other Ladies

In about 1988, while reading a Monterey, CA newspaper article, I first saw Barclay Ferguson, the Scots-born artist who was the early 1960’s boyfriend of Texas oil and gas heiress Gloria Galt in San Miguel de Allende, who moved to Monterey Peninsula in 1970, referred to as: “Lord Barclay Ferguson”.  I gasped slightly and said to myself, “Oh my God, the Queen knighted Barclay!” Well, not exactly, it turned out.  I read on and found that a man, in Connecticut as I recall, perhaps Greenwich (1920’s-80?’s Bush and Buckley families’ home town), named James Edward Stewart, and claiming the title of Prince and descent from or relatedness to the last recognized King of Scotland, James VII, of the Stuart dynasty, who was also King James II of England and Ireland in 1685-88; had knighted’ Barclay as “The Right Honourable Viscount Barclay Ferguson of Lamond”.  Well, one can imagine that I was right honorably astounded!

I do not recall that Gloria Galt, Joy Laville (from England), my mother (Marcia Montes), or anyone else who knew Barclay Ferguson in San Miguel de Allende in the 1950’s/1960’s, ever mentioned that he had any claim to any title of nobility, or of being able to obtain such from someone who claimed royal ancestry and generally recognized authority to dispense such a title.  In San Miguel in the 1960’s my family knew only two people, and occasionally saw a third, who claimed a noble title.  One was Jorge Palomino, the Marquis of Selva Nevada (snowy jungle), whose family, large landowners in the state of Jalisco (of which Guadalajara is capital), received their title from the Spanish crown in the 18th century.  The second was Baroness Nina van Bremen, from the Netherlands, who said that her father was Dutch Ambassador to France at the time of World War II German invasion.  The third, with whom I think we never spoke, but we saw at times, walking or driving, was Roberto Lambarri, the Count of Canal, whose family received its title also from the Spanish crown in the 18th century.  In the 1960’s the Lambarri family still lived in their ornate palace on the west side of the main plaza of San Miguel, with an arcade and shops under the palace, facing towards the plaza.  In Summer, 1966, my family rented, with the Rice family of Chicago (the friends of the Holabird family mentioned elsewhere here), a home with ornate furnishings (Aubusson tapestries, Bacarrat chandeliers, etc.) that had been, on Calle (Street) Canal, the carriage house of the adjacent Palace of the Counts of Canal, until an American interior designer, Al Pyle, bought and rebuilt the property as a Spanish Colonial style home (with a not very Spanish Colonial, blue mosaic-lined swimming pool in the patio).

I found in the 2015 obituary of Barclay Ferguson’s second? wife, Harriet, who died at age 73 in Oregon, that she referred to herself as, and was called, ‘Lady Harriet Ferguson’.  Barclay was a colorful guy, and I think the title he got through ‘Prince James’ pleased him, Harriet and others in their orbit.  That’s fine, and as the character, who played Austrian Emperor Joseph II in the 1984 film, “Amadeus”, said with regard to just about any situation, “Well, there it is!”

(“Amadeus”, which won eight 1985 Oscars, including for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor, was directed by Czech-American Milos Forman, a leading figure in the 1960’s “Czechoslovak New Wave” of avant-garde film-making.  Forman had been an assistant to Czech stage director Alfred Radok, creator of the multi-media production, “Laterna Magika” (‘Magic Lantern’), performed regularly in Beethoven Hall (see Figure 6, above), at HemisFair, ’68 in San Antonio, TX.)

In about 1961-62, my mother and I visited Gloria Galt, then-recent girlfriend in San Miguel de Allende of artist Barclay Ferguson, at her San Antonio home, a white mansion with portico and all, and African-American butler.  The visit was a bit like stepping into a set from the epic, landmark 1939 film, “Gone With the Wind”. In fact, the Galts had left the Deep South after the Civil War, probably to escape ruin and/or Reconstruction, as many Southerners did.  Gloria’s great-grandfather became director of a Confederate soldier’s retirement/convalescent home in Oklahoma, and ‘yadda, yadda, yadda’, the Galts hit oil and natural gas about 50 years later and Gloria’s father retired very comfortably with his wife and three daughters to San Antonio.  Years later a vigilant Galt family attorney discovered that a major oil company was not paying the Galt sisters the full royalties due to them for some of their oil and/or natural gas wells.  Mainly for the principle (and principal) of the matter, the Galt sisters sued the oil company, and yadda, yadda, yadda, they won and had about another $60 million.

Patsy Galt Steves, Gloria’s younger sister, and Patsy’s husband, Marshall Steves, Sr., member of a successful German-American business family in San Antonio since the mid-19th century, were involved in original conception and promotion of San Antonio’s HemisFair ’68 of which, as noted in the main body of this essay, Marshall became President.  Patsy first met then-U.S. First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, while HemisFair ’68 was being planned.  (Patsy, Gloria and Lady Bird may sound like members of a Country Western women’s band, but that’s the South and Southwest!)  Patsy Steves was later Chairwoman of the National Wildflower Research Center, established by Lady Bird and her actress friend, Helen Hayes, now named the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. at University of Texas, alma mater of my parents, in Austin, my birth city.  Mrs. Johnson and Texas Governor John Connally opened HemsiFair on April 6, 1968.  Because Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated two days earlier, security was very tight around them.  Of course, Connally had almost been killed in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Dallas.

As noted in the main body of this essay, Governor Connally decided, with President Kennedy and aides in June, 1963 at El Paso’s Hotel Cortez, the November 22, 1963 date for the visit of President and Mrs. Kennedy, Governor and Mrs. Connally and then-Vice President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson to Dallas.  And almost a year earlier, in Fall, 1962, my family and friends celebrated my paternal grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary in the same or nearby Hotel Cortez meeting/private dining room where the presidential/vice presidential visit to Dallas was decided in 1963.

After Patsy Galt Steves died in 2018 at 90, Luci Baines Johnson Turpin, one of the two daughters of President and Mrs. Johnson, recalled that after their time in the White House in 1963-69, and the President knew he had health problems (he died in 1973), he wanted to be sure that someone would always throw a birthday party for Lady Bird, as he did, on her December 22nd birthday, which sometimes got overlooked by other family members busy with Christmas preparations.  Thus President Johnson asked Patsy Steves, “When I’m gone, will you always make sure that Lady Bird has a party?”  Patsy answered, “President Johnson, that’s exactly what I will do.”  Luci Johnson Turpin added, “And she did.”   Until Lady Bird’s death in 2007 at 94.

Luci Johnson Turpin’s sister, Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, tried to get my parents to also do something.  Lynda Bird and my parents had friends in common, Aggie (Agnes) and Alfred Wolf, when all of them lived in McLean, VA in the 1970’s to 1990’s.  Aggie’s husband, Alfred, worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C. when my father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, worked there in 1974-84.  (As I recall, my father told me that a main function of Mr. Wolf’s work at the IDB was to be sure that U.S. funds, a major part of IDB funding, did not get lost in graft or corruption.)  In about the mid- to late 1980’s my parents were at a party at the Wolf’s, when Lynda Bird Robb, another guest, learned that my parents were, as is Lynda Bird, graduates of University of Texas, Austin,  (My father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, was the first Hispanic to earn a Ph. d. in chemical engineering in the University of Texas system, in 1946.  My mother, Marcia Montes, earned her Master’s degree in English Education at UT Austin in 1943.)  The President’s daughter asked my mother, with that languorous but insistent Texas accent, “Why Mrs. Montes, why haven’t we seen you at meetings of the Northern Virginia Texas Exes (the UT alumni group)?”  For her excuse for not getting out more, my mother pointed to her four-prong walking cane that she used since suffering a massive stroke (Arterio-Venous Malformation or AVM that broke in 1980, as mentioned elsewhere here).    Lynda Bird Robb smiled at my parents and said something like, ‘We hope you can get to the Texas Exes meetings.’  My parents told Lynda Bird they would try to do that, but I think they never did, as my father began to be treated for Parkinson’s Disease in 1988.

During the 2001-09 George W. Bush Administration, I saw a smiling Lynda Bird Robb help her stroke-ridden mother, Lady Bird Johnson, across the front portico of the White House to be greeted by smiling First Lady and fellow Texan and ‘Texas Ex’, Laura Bush (a UT Austin Master of Library Science grad).   That reminded me that at least in the world of Lady Bird Johnson and Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, one was and is not necessarily easily deterred from doing something important.

Aggie and Alfred Wolf, at whose home my parents met and talked with Lynda Bird Johnson Robb in about the mid- to late 1980’s, lived near  Lynda Bird and her husband, Chuck Robb, Virginia Governor in 1982-86, and U.S. Senator in 1989-2001, and near the home of 1962-2009 Massachusetts U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy and the sometime childhood home of Jacqueline Bouvier, later Kennedy and Onassis, at the Merrywood estate of her step-father, Hugh D. Auchincloss, overlooking and near the Potomac River.   The two main areas in McLean with homes on relatively large lots are, as I recall, near the Potomac River, and about two to three miles away, where my parents’ home of 1974-96 was on a one-acre lot, in what some realtors have called “The Golden Triangle” (more like a parallelogram), of high land values, north of the Washington Beltway (I-495), east of Leesburg Pike and west and south of curving Georgetown Pike (in McLean, not nearby Georgetown, D.C.).

My parents bought their McLean home in 1974 from a military attaché of the then-West German (now-German) Embassy in Washington, D.C.  Military attaché positions are frequently ‘diplomatic cover’ for ‘intelligence’ agency officers or operatives, in that case probably of the West German Intelligence Service, founded in close cooperation with the U.S. CIA in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union dominated East European countries behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, including East Germany and Czechoslovakia.  The house my parents bought in McLean in 1974 had also previously belonged to Frank Zarb, ‘Energy Czar’ for President Richard Nixon and later Chairman of the New York City-based NASDAQ stock exchange.  My parents found their McLean home through part-time realtor Laurie Naylor whose husband, then-retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Bill (William E., Jr.) Naylor had commanded a U.S. Air Force intelligence center at Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, West Germany in the early 1950’s.  I do not know if Bill Naylors knew the West German Embassy military attaché from that time or if from the 1970’s forward when he was Vice President of McLean-based defense contractor Planning Research Corporation (PRC), later bought by Litton Industries, later merged into defense contractor giant, Northrup Grumman.  I have wondered if Bill Naylor, who served in Italy in World War II in the U.S. Army Air Force, predecessor of the U.S. Air Force created in 1947, may have met or known Yale College graduate, playwright/novelist and long-active Elizabethan Club member, Thornton Wilder, mentioned elsewhere in this essay, who served in U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence in Italy and North Africa in 1942-45.  Although Army Air Force Intelligence certainly interacted with Army Air Force aerial bombing campaigns such as Bill Naylor flew many times, obviously many people were involved in such activities even in one country, such as Italy, without ever meeting or knowing each other.

Perhaps as early as the mid-1950’s, and until 1970, Colonel Bill Naylor was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, where my parents first met him and his second wife, Laurie.  I do not know if Colonel Naylor worked in the U-2 spy plane program that had administrative headquarters at Offutt and was overseen at CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., Richard M. Bissell, Jr., another Elizabethan Club member, discussed elsewhere in this writing, and brother-in-law/confidant of Yale Art History Professor and 1950-52 Elizabethan Club President George Kubler, with whom I studied in 1966-71.  In 1958, U-2 planes began flying from Wiesbaden U.S. Air Force Base, where Bill Naylor had been a commander in a U.S. Air Force intelligence center, probably about the early 1950’s, before he was stationed at Offutt AFB.  In 1956, CIA Deputy Director and U.S. Air Force General, Charles Cabell, and Richard Bissell, Jr., then Executive Assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles, flew to Bonn, West Germany and Cabell personally persuaded West Germany’s first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to allow some of the U-2 spy planes flying (illegally) over the Soviet Union to be stationed at Wiesbaden U.S. AFB.

I am not sure but think that Bill Naylor may have been stationed at Offutt AFB by about the mid-1950’s when the base commander was U.S. Air Force Major General Curtis LeMay, who led extensive bombing missions over Germany and Japan during world War II and who, during the October, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, by which time LeMay was U.S. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., advised President Kennedy to bomb Cuba even after the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw nuclear-armed missiles from the island.  General LeMay is generally considered to be the model for the crazed general in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 hilarious, classic film, with a serious message, “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”.  In “Dr. Strangelove,…”, a U.S. Air Force Base Commander suddenly loses the little sanity he had, and launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union which cannot be recalled and leads to immediate Soviet counter-attack, nuclear holocaust and end of the human race.  After General LeMay stated during the Vietnam War that the U.S. could, if it wanted, bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age”, President Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, forced General LeMay to retire in 1965.

In about 1969 at a party in Omaha,  Laurie Naylor, Bill’s wife, introduced my mother to General LeMay’s wife, Helen, when the LeMays were visiting Omaha, from their then-home in California.  In the 1968 U.S. presidential campaign which Republican Richard Nixon barely won over Democrat Hubert Humphrey, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vice President, General LeMay was the Vice Presidential candidate of the American Independent Party for which the Presidential candidate was segregationist former Alabama Governor George Wallace, almost assassinated in 1972 when he ran again, unsuccessfully, for President, but as a Democrat.

I thought for years that my parents told me in about the mid-1970’s that after Bill Naylor retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1970 and moved from Omaha to McLean, VA, that he went to work for the CIA which has its headquarters about a quarter mile from where he and Laurie lived from 1970 until their deaths in their 90’s in 2010 and 2018.  The CIA headquarters at Langley, VA, the former site of Langley farm, is surrounded by McLean, not far from the George Washington Parkway along the Potomac River, near where, as noted above, Lynda Bird Johnson Robb and Chuck Robb, Edward Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier, later Kennedy and Onassis and Aggie and Alfred Wolf have lived at various times, mainly in the mid- to late 20th century.  The 2010 Washington Post obituary of William E. Naylor, Jr. makes no mention of any CIA work, and says that he was Vice President of Planning Research Corporation (PRC) from 1970 to his retirement.  In about 2000 I told my mother that I thought she and my father had told me in the mid-1970’s that Bill Naylor worked for the CIA as of 1970-71, and she answered simply: “He did not work for the CIA.”

Perhaps my memory is better supported in knowledge of Laurie Naylor’s ancestry.  As I recall, my mother and/or father told me in about the mid- to late 1970’s that Laurie Naylor had then recently visited Czechoslovakia and that her husband, Bill, was not able to accompany her on that trip because of his work—whatever that was then—for which either he had some security clearance that would not allow him to then visit a Communist-ruled country, and/or the Communist country would not grant him entry.  I recall that my mother and/or father told me that Laurie Naylor visited Czechoslovakia because her mother was from there.  In an online obituary of Laurie’s brother, Robert D. Marcotte, Sr., who died in Omaha in 2016 at age 91, I found that his mother and Laurie’s was  Emily Novak Marcotte.  Novak is perhaps the ‘Smith” name of Czechs, that is perhaps the most common, and certainly one of the most common, of Czech surnames.  Of course given the context of my longtime interest in actress Kim Novak, from Chicago, in her lead role in “Vertigo”, discussed in the main body and Appendix 3 of this work, and as a 1970’s/1980’s resident and painter in Monterey/Carmel, CA and southern Oregon when Barclay Ferguson was a painter living also on the Monterey Peninsula and in southern Oregon, I wonder if Emily Novak Marcotte was related to Kim Novak.  Of the many Czech-Americans who settled in early to mid-20th century Omaha, probably many came from the large Czech-American community in Chicago, it is probably not easy to determine if an obscure Novak is related to a well-known one.  Although the Marcottes were not obscure in Omaha.  Laurie Naylor’s father, Lionel Marcotte, husband of Emily Novak Marcotte, was an early agent of what became Mutual of Omaha, and founded his own company, Marcotte Insurance Agency.

Czech-American Laurie Naylor, and her husband, Bill, had both connections to art and government, particularly to diplomats, as have had my family and some of our friends, and as the Czech and Czech-American family of Martin Hoffmeisteer has had.  After the Naylors moved from Omaha, NE to McLean, VA in 1970, Laurie Naylor founded The Art Guild, a group of women who met monthly to discuss various artists and aspects of art history, with a different woman presenting a paper each month on an artist or art movement.  Art Guild members also visited many art museums in the Washington, D.C. region.  Among 1980’s Art Guild members were: 1) Penny Laingen, whose husband, Bruce, was Charge D’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran when it was taken over by Iranian students/protestors for 444 days in 1979-81 (The Tehran U.S. Embassy siege helped George H.W. Bush, ’48, persuade former California Governor Ronald Reagan that he needed a vice presidential running mate, such as himself, with more foreign policy experience than Reagan had, for what became their 1980 successful run for the U.S. Presidency and Vice Presidency.); 2) Mrs. Samuel Lewis whose husband was, during the 1978 Camp David Arab-Israeli peace treaty negotiations and the 1979-81 Iran Hostage Crisis, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and a key player in the Camp David talks; 3) Mrs.  Hedrick Smith whose husband had been Moscow and then Washington, D.C. bureau chief of the New York Times; and 4) the wives of longtime CBS correspondents and brothers, Marvin and Bernard Kalb. 

In about 1979-80 my mother, a former English and drama teacher, taught Shakespearean plays and acting to the daughters of Marvin and Bernard Kalb, and the daughter of Hedrick Smith.  When my mother was in the ICU at Fairfax Hospital, recovering from a second brain surgery to deal with the massive stroke she suffered on March 30, 1980, and she was semi-conscious, my father, sister and brother-in-law (a 1968 Harvard College graduate and neurologist), waited outside the ICU while the Turkish-born neurosurgeon, Dr. Ezel Dogan, who had operated on my mother, examined her.  Dr. Dogan came out of the ICU, smiled and said to us, “She’s doing better. She’s quoting from Shakespeare.”  My mother lived, with her speech intact, almost all of her mental faculties (except numbers which she never liked much, anyway), and about half-paralyzed on one side, for another 24 years to age 84 in 2004.

In the mid- to late 1970’s, Laurie Naylor took my mother to some afternoon parties at some foreign embassies in Washington, D.C., including of Egypt during the government of President Anwar Sadat (assassinated in 1981), and of Iran during the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (overthrown in 1979).  Years later I learned that embassy afternoon parties are a favorite venue for intelligence operatives to communicate with each other and converse with and/or observe persons of interest to them.

As to whether Laurie Naylor’s husband, Colonel Bill Naylor, in 1970 going forward, could have worked at the same time for one employer, such as his then-known employer,  defense contractor PRC, and also for the CIA, I have learned that some people have worked for and been paid by the CIA, perhaps as a contractor or other operative, at the same time they worked for another employer.  In fact, my father worked with such a person, although I do not know if he knew that at the time.  

In about the early 1980’s my father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, in his work at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C., went on a “mission” of the usual duration of about a month, to Colombia, with several other experts from the IDB.  The ‘missions’ were usually to determine whether a large loan was to be given to a national government for development aid, rather than to an individual company or organization.  My father later told me that one of the members of the IDB team on that Colombia mission was Arturo Cruz, Sr., former head of the Nicaraguan central bank and later Nicaraguan Ambassador to the U.S.  Arturo Cruz became one of the leaders of the ‘Contras’ who broke with the leftist government of Daniel Ortega (President of Nicaragua in 1985-90 and again since 2007), and began waging the guerrilla war backed by the Reagan-Bush administration in the early 1980’s.  Only in recent years I read that Arturo Cruz, Sr., after retirement from the IDB, admitted publicly that while he worked for the IDB he was also on the CIA payroll.

Arturo, Sr.’s son, Arturo, Cruz, Jr., had a cameo role in the Iran-Contra Scandal of 1986-87 during the Reagan-Bush Administration, because he was then the boyfriend of Fawn Hall, the secretary of Col. Oliver North, a central figure in Iran-Contra.  Fawn helped North shred or spirit out of the White House, many key documents related to Iran-Contra, including some that some investigators said could have shown that then-Vice President and later President George H.W. Bush ( ’48), was not “out of the loop” about Iran-Contra as he said he was.  In 1993, just before leaving office, after losing re-election to Yale Law School grad, Bill Clinton, pardoned former U.S. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, whom some thought had some knowledge and perhaps proof about whether then-Vice President Bush had been more deeply involved in Iran-Contra than he later claimed.  Arturo Cruz, Jr., like his father, served as Nicaraguan Ambassador to the U.S., in 2007-09, during part of the time when my cousin’s cousin-in-law, Francisco Villagran De Leon, mentioned elsewhere in this writing, was Guatemalan Ambassador to the U.S.

While the Republican Reagan-Bush Administration of the 1980’s got bogged down in scandal, of Iran-Contra; the Democrat Johnson-Humphrey Administration of the 1960’s got mired in war, in Vietnam, despite helping make many important advances for civil rights and community improvements, nationwide.  Despite the widely destructive Vietnam War which he pursued on a large scale, Lyndon Johnson was ranked, as of 2017,  number 10 among 44 past U.S. Presidents,  by a committee of professional historians convened by non-partisan television network, C-SPAN.  The Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, and the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations were instrumental in proposing and passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act which allowed many African-Americans to enter the American middle class, and decreased discrimination against other minorities in the United States.  While President Lyndon B. Johnson and many others were constrained by fears and concerns of the post-World War II Cold War, Johnson was enthusiastically advised to increase U.S. armed actions in Vietnam by his two successive National Security Advisors, McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, both Yale College graduates and the former, a Skull and Bones/RTA member.  Walt Rostow’s brother, Eugene, Yale Law School Dean in 1959-65, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in 1966-69 for President Johnson, was an active member of the earlier-mentioned Elizabethan Club at Yale.

Appendix 3  –  “A Vertigo Family?”

I question whether, by small chance, film director Alfred Hitchcock may have known about and based a central character of “Vertigo”—whom one never sees in the film, that is the already-murdered San Francisco socialite Madeleine Elster, impersonated by ‘shop girl’ Judy Barton, brilliantly acted by Kim Novak—at least in part on my father’s first cousin, June Emery Stephens (1920-2005).  June Stephens circulated on the San Francisco social scene in the 1950’s to 1990’s.  June, with her husband, Dr. Warren Stephens, a very successful orthopedic surgeon (including for the San Francisco ’49ers football team), lived in the very ‘upscale’ San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough.  Many may not have known, that June, like Madeleine in “Vertigo”, with natural blonde hair and ‘Anglo’ maiden and married names, had Spanish/Mexican ancestry through her mother.

In the case of June Stephens, her mother, Isabel Rey Emery (1900-98), and Isabel’s siblings, including my paternal grandmother, Francisca Rey Montes (1887-1970), were members of the Spanish-Mexican (and French?) Rey family, and great-great-grandchildren of Ysidro Rey, the last Spanish Commandant, in 1818-21, of the Presidio (fort) of San Elceario, about 30 miles southeast of what is now El Paso, TX.  In “Vertigo”, Carlotta Valdes (not Montes, thank you!), the Hispanic great-grandmother of 1950’s San Francisco socialite Madeleine Elster, came from the Spanish mission town of San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist), about 100 miles south of San Francisco.

My grandmother, Francisca Rey Montes, and her siblings, including Isabel Rey Emery, were born at Guadalupe Bravos, Chihuahua, Mexico, more or less across the Rio Bravo/Grande from San Elizario, Texas.  Guadalupe Bravos was founded in 1848 by their grandfather, Jose Maria Rey II, and his siblings, who moved there from San Elizario because, as a family of former Mexican and Spanish military and civilian leaders in the area, they did not want to live under American rule after Texas and all of what are now the U.S. Southwest and California became part of the United States, due to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.  About 10,000 Mexicans moved southward and westward into Mexico to avoid living in the expanded United States.  It might surprise some current U.S. politicians that there were ever 10,000 Mexicans who did not want to live in the United States!  As my grandfather, Elceario M.Montes, said to me in the 1960’s, “We did not immigrate to the United States.  It immigrated to us”

Most Mayors of Guadalupe Bravos in 1848-1912 were male members of the Rey family, which owned the 40,000 acre Rancho de San Martin, extending several miles along the Rio Bravo/Grande and inland some miles to mountains where they owned two silver mines.  As the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 became more violent, the Reys, as local, major landowners, needed to flee, and moved back in 1913, to the United States, near San Elizario, where they had retained ownership of some land since 1848.

While June Emery Stephens lived at Hillsborough, CA in the 1950’s to 1990’s, her mother, Isabel Rey Emery lived in San Francisco’s Marina District from about 1961 until the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989.  Great aunt Isabel lived in an apartment building on a street that ended at the park and lagoon setting of the ornate colonnade and rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts, the only building surviving from the vast 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition for which the Marina District was created with landfill along San Francisco Bay.  The Palace of Fine Arts park and lagoon was visited by the Judy Barton/Madeleine character portrayed by Kim Novak in “Vertigo”.   Isabel Emery’s apartment building was almost demolished in the Loma Prieta Earthquake.  But Isabel survived at age 89 (the Reys were known as a stubborn bunch, perhaps from a particular Mexican/Spanish/French ancestry!), and June then moved her mother to a comfortable retirement home in Burlingame, adjacent to Hillsborough, where Isabel lived until her 1998 death at age 98, almost 99.

In “Vertigo”, based on the French novel, D’entre Les Morts (‘Among the Dead’), San Francisco private detective, John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, played by Jimmy Stewart, drives Judy Barton, impersonating blonde socialite, Madeleine (already murdered by her husband, Gavin Elster), to San Juan Bautista to confront her with her fraud and murder accomplice role, contributing to Judy looking at least as concerned in the car in the 1958 Hitchcock film (see Figure 8, above, in the main body of this essay, “Martin Hoffmeister Remembrance”), as jewel thief John Robie (played by Cary Grant), looked in Hitchcock’s 1955 film as blonde socialite Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly) drove him at high speed along the French/Monegasque Riviera coastline (see Figure 9 in the essay on Martin).   Undoubtedly, ‘Scottie’ Ferguson was no relation of Barclay Ferguson, who with his early 1960’s, fast-driving, socialite girlfriend Gloria Galt in Mexico, seemed to channel characters played by co-stars Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief”, as discussed in my above essay.

In “Vertigo”, Judy Barton re-enacts trances that socialite Madeleine Elster had before her husband, Gavin, killed her for her money.  In those trances Madeleine takes on the persona of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes (1831-57), from the Spanish mission town of San Juan Bautista, who had an affair with a wealthy man, who kept their son and threw her out.  Carlotta moved to the (fictional) McKittrick Hotel in San Francisco, where Madeleine, about 100 years later, sometimes rents a room.  Madeleine also visits the Legion of Honor Museum (a gift from the French Government to the American people to thank them for their help to France in World War I), where she looks at a portrait (made for the film), of Carlotta as a young woman.

The “Vertigo” aspects of a jilted woman, losing her child and wandering alone after that, and with Judy/Madeleine seeming to try to drown herself by jumping into San Francisco Bay, seems to take some material from the “La Llorona” legend of Mexico and Latin America.  In that widely known tale with some variations in various places, a betrayed woman who drowns her two sons by her cheating husband to punish him, drowns herself and becomes a ghost, wailing at night in city and town streets and along rivers and lakes, lamenting her two sons, and in some versions of the legend, kidnapping other children and drowning them also.  I do not know if Hitchcock and/or any of his screenplay writers for “Vertigo” learned, in the 1950’s or earlier, about the “La Llorona” legend while living in heavily Hispanic Southern California, adjacent to Mexico.

I first learned about “La Llorona” in San Miguel de Allende, after my family began to rent a house there in 1960.  In 1960-61 I saw at the Teatro Angela Peralta, then the only movie house in San Miguel, the 1960 Mexican film, “La Llorona”, set in Guanajuato, capital of the state of Guanajuato where San Miguel is located. Both cities (San Miguel then more of a town) were widely known then and now for their Spanish Colonial and 19th century architecture.  As noted elsewhere here, Mexican author/journalist Jorge Ibarguengoitia, to whom British artist Joy Laville introduced me in 1966 in San Miguel, was born in Guanajuato, and his ashes were taken and interred there after he was killed in the 1983 plane crash in Spain.

In the 1960 film, “La Llorona”, contemporaneous (1950’s) Gerardo Montes (This is where 13 year old me began to get spooked!, but at least it was Gerardo instead of Gregorio, or my father’s name, Gustavo!), played by Mexican actor Carlos Lopez Moctezuma (1909-80), visits his newly wed daughter, Margarita, and son-in-law, Felipe, and tells them the legend of “La Llorona”, set in 16th century New Spain (Mexico as of 1821).  Mr. Montes tells the story that a Spanish Conquistador, Nuno de Montesclaros, had a boy and girl, out of wedlock, with an Indian woman, Luisa, but then married a Spanish woman.  Furious Luisa stabbed to death her two children with the Spaniard (no drowning as in the most common versions of “La Llorona” legends), and put a curse on all firstborn descendants of don Nuno de Montesclaros.  (Ok, 13-year old me breathed a little easier at this point because my sister is the firstborn in our generation!)  Luisa is caught and executed but many believe that she survives as a ghost through the centuries, still looking for revenge on the aristocratic family of Montesclaros (‘Clear mountains’, Spanish version of English “Claremont” or French “Clermont”, as in Clermont-Ferrand, where successive Archbishops of Santa Fe, Jean-Baptiste (Juan Bautista) Lamy and Jean-Baptiste Salpointe (the latter, the guardian, in 1870’s Arizona, of then-teenage Octaviano Larrazolo, and later my uncle’s father and New Mexico Governor/U.S. Senator in the 1920’s), which, by the mid-20th century has shortened its surname to Montes.  My surname may have been shortened from Montes de Oca in about the 17th century in New Spain.

Although Felipe believes Gerardo Montes’ telling, in the 1960 film, “La Llorona”, is just a folktale, a nanny, calling herself Carmen Asiul, but who is really reincarnated Luisa, soon arrives to look after their newborn son.  (My family had in about 1961-62 in San Miguel de Allende, a maid, Carmen Flores, who had a large facial scar from a knife fight with another woman—over another cheating man?, and she always carried concealed a large, curved knife.  But Carmen Flores was highly dependable and intelligent and my parents left her to cook and look after me at our Omaha, NE home when they went to Europe for a month in October, 1962.  With money that Carmen earned while working for my parents, she built a concrete block home, with large windows, in her barrio/neighborhood on the north side of San Miguel, where most other houses then were adobe with small or no windows.)  In 1960 “La Llorona”, one night while Felipe and Margarita are out, Gerardo Montes goes to check on his sleeping, infant grandson, just as Carmen/Luisa is about to stab him to death.  She flees into the night, dropping her knife, which Gerardo burns, along with a drawing of Luisa, and then realizes that the 400 or so year old curse of Luisa/La Llorona is over.  After seeing how the movie ended, I went back to our San Miguel house that night in 1960/61, much reassured!

The legend of “La Llorona”, especially as it relates to Mexico, is seen by many as a metaphor for the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519-21 (exactly 400 years before the single term of Octaviano Larrazolo as New Mexico Governor), in which a Spanish conquistador or other wealthy/powerful man, used a native woman for pleasure and cast her aside, keeping and controlling their offspring, the mestizo mixed Spanish and Indian race resulting from the conquest.  Particularly, that outlook has been applied to Hernan Cortes, leader of the Spanish invasion, who fathered a son, Martin, with the young, multi-lingual native woman, successively called Malinalli, Malintzin, dona Marina and ” La Malinche”, who translated for Cortes, with regard to both Aztec and Maya-related peoples, and was a key factor in Cortes’s rapid conquest of central Mexico.  In historical fact, Cortes did not cast aside Malinalli/Marina, but instead gave her to a Spanish conquistador in New Spain, Alonso Hernandez Puertocarrero, with whom she had a second child, a daughter.  (Hey, how did we get Montesclaros and Montes in the 1960 “La Llorona” film?  Someone in Mexico film land at that time must have loved my family!)

In 1982, Jose Lopez Portillo, President of Mexico in 1976-82, and a son of an engineer and historian and grandson of a politician and academician, had statues of La Malinche, Hernan Cortes and their son, Martin, made and placed in front of the house where they lived about 460 years earlier in the town of Coyoacan, now a southern suburb of Mexico City, and where famed artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in the early to mid-20th century.  So many protests arose because Malinche is seen by many as a betrayer of the native Mexican people, and because Cortes led the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, that the statues had to be moved to an obscure park some distance away.  This reminded me that when I last visited and stayed a few days with Mexican author, Jorge Ibarguengoitia (before he was killed in the 1983 plane crash in Spain), and his British-born wife and artist, Joy Laville, at their very attractive Coyoacan home, Jorge showed me a very large (full Quarto size) book, bound in light brown calf’s leather, hand-tooled with Aztec motifs, which, as I recall, was about Mexican archaeology and/or pre-Spanish conquest civilization(s).  Jorge said to me (in English), “The President gave me that book.”  I then asked, “The President of what?”  Jorge smiled and said, “Well, of course, the President of Mexico, President Lopez Portillo.”  I probably should have guessed!

Legends about women ghosts wailing in the night about jilted love, lost children, impending death, whether “La Llorona” in Mexico and Latin America, or “banshees’ in Ireland, may have roots in Greek mythology where Hera, queen of the gods on Mount Olympus, torments, in various ways, the many women who have affairs with and children by Zeus, Hera’s husband, the king of the Gods and a philanderer—on an Olympic scale!

Thomas Narcejac (aka Pierre Ayraud), co-author, with Pierre Boileau, of the 1954 novel, D’entre les morts (‘From Among the Dead’), the basis for 1957 “Vertigo” (released, 1958), stated that part of the plot and themes of the novel and film came from the ancient Greek myth about Orpheus, who tried but failed to bring his love, Eurydice, back from the dead, much as ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) tried to recreate deceased, uber-elegant San Francisco socialite Madeleine Elster in similar-looking San Francisco shop girl, Judy Barton (whom Ferguson ultimately finds out was paid by Madeleine’s husband to impersonate her to cover up the murder of her so her husband could inherit her wealth), but in the process Judy, dressed and coifed at Ferguson’s request to look like Madeleine, accidentally falls to her death from a Spanish mission church tower.  The Orpheus reference caught my attention because, as noted in my above essay, the “Martin Hoffmeister Remembrance”, in about 1961, San Antonio, TX art philanthropist Gloria Galt, at her usual high speed then but with no impacts (besides terror in the passengers!—as with the Riviera driving of socialite Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly) in the 1955 film “To Catch a Thief”);  drove my mother, Marcia Montes, and Margaret Wheeler, about 40 miles each way between San Miguel and Queretaro, to see the 1959 French/Brazilian film, “Black Orpheus”, which sets the Orpheus legend in a favela (shantytown) overlooking Rio de Janeiro.  “Black Orpheus” won the 1959 “Palme d’Or” (‘Golden Palm’) of the Cannes Film Festival and 1960 Best Oscar for Foreign Film.  I wonder if artist Barclay Ferguson, then dating Gloria Galt, may have suggested to Gloria, my mother and/or Margaret to go see “Black Orpheus”—and did not joint them, as he might have already seen it and/or wanted to avoid Gloria’s inter-city driving, especially at nighttime, somewhat like John Robie (Cary Grant), fairly terrified by Frances Stevens’ driving in “To Catch a Thief”.  As noted elsewhere here, Barclay first met, in about the mid- to late 1950’s at Instituto Allende art and language school in San Miguel, artist John Boit (Jack) Morse, early 1930’s Yale College graduate and one of the relatively few members of both Skull and Bones/Russell Trust Association senior (secret) society and the Elizabethan Club.  And also in the mid- to late 1950’s, Barclay was, at Instituto Allende, a close friend of Joy Laville, wife, in 1973-83, of above-mentioned Mexican author Jorge Ibarguengoitia.

Gloria Galt’s high-speed excursion, in about 1961, to Queretaro, with my mother and Margaret Wheeler, to see “Black Orpheus”, and their pass-by of the chapel then on the outskirts of Queretaro, on the site of firing squad execution of Emperor Maximilian, reminds me of another potential link to history in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film, “Vertigo”.  In that movie, San Francisco socialite Madeleine Elster’s great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, came from the Spanish mission town of San Juan Bautista.  Carlotta is the Italian spelling of Spanish Carlota, the name that former Princess Charlotte of Belgium and wife of Emperor Maximilian, former Archduke of Austria, took when she was briefly Empress of Mexico in 1864-67, when the ‘Mexican Empire’ was propped up by the French Army occupying much of Mexico.  Although the Republic of Mexico government of President Benito Juarez fought persistently and eventually pushed the French out of Mexico.  In 1866 Empress Carlota returned to Europe to try, unsuccessfully, to persuade Emperor Napoleon III of France to stop withdrawing his troops from Mexico.  Carlota, who had spelled her name Carlotta in the 1850’s when she and Maximilian were the Virreine and Viceroy of Lombardy in northern Italy, then occupied by the Austrian Army, went to the Vatican, after failing with Napoleon III in Paris, to try to get Pope Pius IX to persuade Napoleon to stop bringing his troops out of Mexico.  Empress Carlota was also unsuccessful with Pius IX and reportedly at that time began to show signs of insanity as she wandered streets of Rome, with a distraught lady-in-waiting following her, using a bottle to draw water from fountains because, reportedly, she was afraid that agents of Napoleon III might try to poison her.  Of course the ‘mad’ woman wandering city streets, with water as a sub-text, harks back to main versions of the “La Llorona” legend and also of Madeleine-impersonator Judy Barton (Novak), in “Vertigo”, driving to Madeleine-associated sites in San Francisco before throwing herself into San Francisco Bay, at Fort Point, of the U.S. Civil War-era (partly overlapping years of the Maximilian/Carlota ’empire in Mexico), located under the Golden Gate Bridge.

My family has some indirect connections to Empress Carlota, mainly through my uncle’s father, Octaviano Larrazolo.  In 1919, eight years before Empress Carlota’s death, when she reportedly continued to drift between lucidity and insanity in a Belgian castle, Carlota’s nephew, Albert I, King of the Belgians, and his wife, Queen Elisabeth, and their son, Crown Prince Leopold (later Leopold III, King of the Belgians), were hosted at Albuquerque and nearby Isleta, New Mexico, by New Mexico Governor Larrazolo and First Lady Maria Garcia Larrazolo, a first cousin of my paternal grandmother, Francisca Rey Garcia Montes.

The Wikipedia pages of Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium include a photograph showing the Belgian royal couple and Governor and Mrs. Larrazolo at Isleta, NM on October 19, 1919.  In the photograph, French-born Father Anton Docher, longtime priest at Isleta, who, that day, received the Order of Leopold from Albert I for his service to the native Tewa people of Isleta, is, in sacramental vestments, walking alongside and speaking to Governor Larrazolo, in a top hat and formal dress.  Father Docher was fictionalized as Padre Jesus de Baca in Willa Cather’s 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, mentioned elsewhere here, and about the life of the French-born first Archbishop of Santa Fe, NM, Jean-Baptiste Lamy.  The immediate successor and longtime friend of Lamy was Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Salpointe, who, in the 1870’s as Bishop of Arizona, was the guardian of then-teenage, later Governor and U.S. Senator, Octaviano Larrazolo.

As noted elsewhere here, then former New Mexico and Arizona Governors, Octaviano Larrazolo and Thomas Campbell, traveled in about 1923-24 to Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Alvaro Obregon at the then-residence of Mexican Presidents, Chapultepec Castle, where Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota lived in 1864-67.  In about 1924, Governor Larrazolo, by himself, returned to Mexico City, again met with President Obregon and was photographed with him and Mrs. Obregon and members of the Mexican federal cabinet on a terrace of Chapultepec Castle.  In June, 1960 my sister and I, then 14 and 12, visited Chapultepec Castle with our third cousin, Patricia Larrazolo, then about 16, and a granddaughter of Governor/Senator and Mrs. Larrazolo through their son, Lolo (Heliodoro), who moved from New Mexico to Mexico in the late 1920’s and became very successful as owner of the largest? water heater companies in Mexico, Calentadores (Heaters) Hercules.  We saw in 1960 at Chapultepec Castle, the apartments and receiving rooms of Maximilian and Carlota and two, tall paintings of them in imperial regalia.

In about July, 1960 I first read Phantom Crown by Bertita Harding which is a very engaging although reportedly not completely accurate historical account of the short reign of Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota.  Towards the end of the book, Harding tells that Carlota, after apparently losing her sanity in Rome in 1866, placed a curse on all those who she believed were responsible for the downfall and death of her husband, Maximilian.  This is somewhat like some versions of the “La Llorona” legend, in which the wronged woman, now haunts many, and in some versions kills or threatens descendants of the man who jilted her, as portrayed in the above-discussed 1960 Mexican film, “La Llorona”, in which firstborn descendants in the Montesclaros/Montes (!) family are cursed and killed or threatened by “La Llorona”.  Bertita Harding points out that whether or not Empress Carlota of Mexico (not Carlotta of “Vertigo”!), placed a curse on those she felt responsible for the disasters that befell Maximilian and herself, the ones she blamed most did in fact come to unpleasant ends, including:

1) Napoleon III, Emperor of France, overthrown in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, who went into exile in England and died three years later;

2) Empress Eugenie, devastated by the death of her only child with Napoleon III, the onetime crown prince, Prince Imperial Louis Napoleon, killed in the Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa in 1879; and

3) Maximilian’s brother, Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austro-Hungary, who required Maximilian to give up his right of succession to the Austro-Hungarian throne upon becoming Emperor of Mexico, whose beloved, beautiful wife, Empress Elisabeth (‘Sisi’) was stabbed to death (shades of Luisa/Carmen!) by an anarchist while boarding a boat at Lake Geneva, Switzerland in 1898; whose son, Crown Prince Rudolph, committed suicide in 1889 with his mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, whom he could not marry because she was not royal; whose next heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914, which led to the outbreak of World War I, which, two years after Franz Joseph’s death in 1916, led to dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Empress Carlota outlived all the above calamities, dying in 1927 at age 87 at Bouchout Castle in Belgium.

Getting back to the Orpheus theme in the 1954 French novel, D’entre Les Morts (‘From Among the Dead’), upon which the 1958 film, “Vertigo”, is based, Orpheus comes up in some indirect, 1950’s associations of my family.  From about 1955 to 1959, my parents knew in Champaign/Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Music Professor Soulima Stravinsky and his wife, Francoise, one of the three sons and daughters-in-law of Russian-born composer, Igor Stravinsky, long living in France, who, in 1947 (my birth year), while living in Los Angeles during World War II, composed the music for the ballet, “Orpheus”, performed in 1948, with Stravinsky as first conductor, and George Balanchine as choreographer, in New York City by the Ballet Society, renamed later that year as New York City Ballet.  The set and costumes were designed by Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi who designed sculptures for the sunken courtyard of the 1963 Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale.  Noguchi also designed the Japanese Garden at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, completed in 1958, where Martin Hoffmeister’s uncle, Adolf Hoffmeister, was Czechoslovakian Ambassador to UNESCO in the 1960’s.

In researching more about Igor Stravinsky and the music he composed for the 1948 ballet, “Orpheus”, I was interested to come across a book, Encounters with Stravinsky (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1972), by Paul Horgan.  That caught my attention because around 1967-68 I met at Morse College dining hall, a Cuban-American student in Morse, whose first and last names I have now forgotten, who was, I think, in the Class of 1970 or 1971, who then worked part-time as a research assistant, perhaps either directly for Paul Horgan, perhaps when Horgan was a professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and/or in organizing the Paul Horgan Papers at Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale.

My mother took French lessons with Francoise Stravinsky in the mid- to late 1950’s in Champaign/Urbana, IL. I remember talking to the Stravinskys at parties given by my parents at our house in Champaign.  When I was about age 11, the Stravinskys, both short, were about my height.  We talked some while surrounded by taller adults at those parties.  When my mother, sister, a family friend and I visited Europe in 1959 we stayed in Paris at the Hotel Pas-de-Calais, on the Left Bank, recommended to my mother by Francoise Stravinsky.

I was interested to read that in some versions of the legend of Orpheus, before Orpheus marries Eurydice but loses her in death in the underworld of Hades, he joined Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece (highest imperial order of Austro-Hungary which Emperors Franz Joseph and Maximilian had received).  On that sea journey, Orpheus met and fell in love with another Argonaut, a young man, Calais.  In one version of the legend, Orpheus is killed by jealous women in his native Thrace because he prefers Calais to them.  I do not know if the name of the northwestern French port of Calais has any origin in the name of the Greek mythic figure, Calais.

In 1994 I came across information in the San Francisco Chronicle social column of Herb Caen (he said his family came from Caen near the French coast of the English Channel), that his friends, English-born Jessica Mitford and her American husband, attorney Robert Treuhaft, from Oakland, CA, had then recently stayed at the Hotel Pas-de-Calais in Paris.  Soon thereafter I looked at the book, Madame de Pompadour, mentioned elsewhere here, by Jessica’s sister, Nancy Mitford.  As I noted, I found in that book, mention of the secret, illegitimate son of King Louis XV of France, born in or about 1769, which reminded me of the family legend my grandmother, Francisca Rey Montes, told me in 1968 that her ancestor, Ysidro Rey, had been born in France as Ysidore Rey, and that he was said to have been a secret, illegitimate son of a French king.  Ysidro Rey was reportedly born in or about 1769.  I began to read more about Nancy Mitford and found that when she returned to live in Paris after World War II, she was often paired at British Embassy dinners with French artist and author, Jean Cocteau, who I knew had collaborated with Igor Stravinsky on production of an opera of the Greek mythic story of Oedipus Rex (‘Edipo? Rey’ in Spanish and Provencal!).  As I read more about Cocteau, I found that his non-fiction book, Las Reines de France (‘The Queens of France’—not the ones in drag that one would think Cocteau might have favored!), was published by a publisher/printer next door to the Hotel Pas-de-Calais on the Rue de Saint Peres (‘Holy Fathers’), on the Left Bank/’Latin Quarter’ of Paris.  in 2006 I emailed to the private secretary of the then-last surviving of the famous, six Mitford sisters, Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire.  I asked the private secretary to ask the Dowager Duchess if she thought that her sister, Jessica, might have learned about the Hotel Pas-de-Calais from Jean Cocteau, her sometime dinner partner in 1950’s Paris; and that Cocteau might have learned about it from his 1950’s collaborator and intermittent social contact, Igor Stravinsky.  I noted that in 1959 Igor’s daughter-in-law, Francoise, recommended the Hotel Pas-de-Calais, to my mother, and our family stayed there at various times between 1959 and the 1970’s.  The private secretary emailed back to me, told me she had discussed my question with the Dowager Duchess who said that she thought it was quite possible that her sister, Jessica, learned about the Hotel Pas-de-Calais from Nancy and that Nancy heard about it from Jean Cocteau.

Cocteau’s 1950, partly surrealistic film, “Orphee” (‘Orpheus’), is the middle of three films he wrote and directed in his “Orphic Trilogy”, with the others being, “The Blood of a Poet” (1930), and “Testament of Orpheus” (1960).  In 1950 “Orphee”, set in contemporary Paris, Orpheus, played by Jean Marais; the talented actor and very handsome, longtime lover of Cocteau; meets a Princess at Café des Poetes (‘of the Poets’), based on the Left Bank Café de Flore, famous as a gathering place, between World Wars I and II, of the ‘Lost Generation’ of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, discussed elsewhere here.  Martin Hoffmeister’s uncle, Adolf Hoffmeister, frequented Left Bank cafes, such as Café de Flore and Café Les Deux Magots, in the 1930’s/1930’s, and did drawings, portraits of many famous painters and writers he met there.  Café de Flore is at the corner of Rue Saint Benoit and Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the main Left Bank thoroughfare.  A block and half west of Café de Flore on Saint-Germain-des-Pres is the Rue de Saint-Peres, and in the first block of that street, south of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, on the east side of the street, is the Hotel Pas-de-Calais (so many hyphens in French!), next door to the 1950’s site of the publisher of Cocteau’s Las Reines de France.   In Cocteau’s “Orphee”, Orpheus and his wife, Eurydice, ultimately die, but a tribunal in the Underworld decides that they can return to the living so that Orpheus can be “an immortal poet”—at Café des Poetes, of course!

In the first film of the “Orphic Trilogy” written and directed by Jean Cocteau, “Le Sang d’un poete” (“The Blood of a Poet”), of 1930, the Poet, played by Chilean actor Enrique Riveros Fernandez, passes through various surrealistic experiences and scenes, interacts with a female statue, alternately smashed and reconstituted. which ultimately walks off with a lyre, the ancient Greek musical instrument that Orpheus played.  A character in the film is a “Louis XV Friend” (but not secret, illegitimate Louis XV son!).  Cocteau starred in the last film of his “Orphic Trilogy”, the 1960 “Testament of Orpheus”, in which he plays an 18th century poet, with cameo appearances by several of Cocteau’s famous 20th century friends, such as Pablo Picasso, a friend, as noted elsewhere here, of Czech artist and writer Adolf Hoffmeister, father of Prague hotelier Martin, and uncle of Yale graduate Martin Ivan Hoffmeister.

I have wondered if Alfred Hitchcock, director of the 1957 film, “Vertigo”, may have learned about my family, and in particular, June Stephens, the natural blonde with perhaps not well-known Spanish/Mexican (and French?) ancestry in her mother’s family, from playwright Thornton Wilder, when they worked together, with Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, and Sally Benson, on the screenplay for the 1943 film, “Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt”.  While I consider a number of possibilities of how Thornton Wilder (and/or potentially others in his Elizabethan Club and in at least some, somewhat-related senior (‘secret’) societies at Yale), might have learned about my family, one of them could have been through Thornton’s friend, Willa Cather, who spent time in Santa Fe, NM in the mid-1920’s, researching and writing her 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, about the first Archbishop of Santa Fe, French-born Jean-Baptiste (Juan Bautists!) Lamy, whose immediate successor and lifelong friend, Jean-Baptiste Salpointe, was guardian in 1870-78 of then-teenage Octaviano Larrazolo, who successively married, at San Elizario (formerly San Elceario), TX, in the 1880’s/1890’s, Rosalia Cobos Rey and Maria Garcia, both first cousins of my grandmother, Francisca Rey Garcia Montes, and of her sister, Isabel Rey Emery, June Stephens’ mother.   In 1891, Rosalia Cobos Rey died in childbirth of her third child with Octaviano Larrazolo, who married Maria Garcia about a year later.  In 1919-21 and 1928-29, Octaviano Larrazolo became so far (as of 2019) the only Hispanic in the U.S. to be elected and serve as a Governor and U.S. Senator, of and from New Mexico.  In 1947, Octaviano and Maria Larrazolo’s son, Paul, married my father’s only sibling and Paul’s second cousin, Eva Montes.

Thornton Wilder, son of a Skull and Bones/RTA member, was the uncle of fellow-Elizabethan Club member Tappan Wilder who interviewed me in 1964 at Omaha, NE for admittance to Yale College to which I was accepted in Spring, 1965.  Tappan Wilder went out of his way to interview me.  I had a test at Westside High School (then and now the largest high school in Nebraska), the only day that the Yale College Admissions Office representative, Mr. Wilder, would be there to interview students (male only then!) who might want to apply to Yale.  Nonetheless, Mr. Wilder left a note with the Westside High School counselor, asking me to call him and arrange to interview with him that night at the hotel where he was staying in Omaha, if my parent(s) could bring me there.  My father took me to the hotel, Tappan Wilder interviewed, and dare I say—the rest is history!

I told Tappan Wilder in Omaha in 1964 that I had then recently seen on television and been very affected by a presentation of his uncle’s (1927) novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  In 1968 I first learned from my grandparents in El Paso, TX that Luis Rey was one of the three sons of Ysidro Rey, last Spanish Commandant of Presidio de San Elceario—and in my grandparent’s telling, Luis Rey was born in France as Louis Rey, before his father, Ysidore, immigrated to Spain, and became Ysidro, before being sent to New Spain (later Mexico) to serve as First Lieutenant (second in command) and later as Commandant of Presidio de San Elxeario, founded in 1789 (beginning year of the French Revolution), and named after a 14th century saint and nobleman from Provence, now part of France.  (Some Rey family members believe that through ancestry.com research they have shown that Ysidro Rey was born in New Spain, not Spain or France.)

My grandmother, Francisca Rey Montes, also told me in 1968 that there was a legend in her Rey family that Ysidore/Ysidro Rey was a secret, illegitimate son of a French king!  I did not think much about that until 1994 when I learned, in Nancy Mitford’s 1954 book, Madame de Pompadour, that in or about 1759, a potential birth year of Ysidore/Ysidro Rey, a son, one of the 22 or so, secret, illegitimate children of King Louis XV of France, was born at the king’s private villa, “Parc aux Cerfs” (‘Stags Park’—for stag parties!) )in the town (not palace) of Versailles.  The boy was raised by his mother, an unknown young woman, in her unknown hometown, almost certainly away from Paris/Versailles.  Louis Rey means Louis King in Provencal, the language of Provence, now southeastern France, and Luis Rey means Louis King in Spanish.

Whether or not, by small chance, Ysidro Rey was the secret, illegitimate son of Louis XV born in or about 1769, above-mentioned June Stephens, my father’s first cousin, and thus apparently also a descendant of Ysidro Rey, had a taste for French culture, as did my father, a longtime member of the Alliance Francaise and longtime student of French, which he spoke daily when he lived and worked in Algeria in the first half of 1974.  June Stephens and her husband, Warren, owned and lived in a French Provincial style home in Hillsborough, about 25 miles south of San Francisco.  June survived previously married Dr. Warren Stephens by at least about 20 years.  When June wanted to give a large party, including costume parties, she rented a large mansion across the street from her smaller although attractive home, which on the garden side, was a full re-creation of the garden façade of the Grand Trianon Palace on the extensive grounds of the vast Palace of Versailles.

Hillsborough was developed as a small community of mansions in the early 20th century by William H. Crocker, a banker, and some relatives and associates of his.  William H. was a son of Charles Crocker, one of the “Big Four”, along with Leland Stanford (founder, with his wife, of Leland Stanford, Jr. University founded in memory of their son), Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington, who financed and built the western part of the Trans-Continental Railroad, completed in 1869.  Hillsborough is one of the few residential communities in the United States that has no commercial zoning and land uses.

William H. Crocker’s son, William Willard Crocker, was a 1915 graduate of Yale College and a member of Wolf”s Head/Phelps Trust Association (PTA)senior society.  W.W. Crocker’s nephew, Charles Templeton Crocker, was also a Yale/Wolf’s Head alumnus.

W.W. Crocker (1893-1964) and his wife long lived in the large Brocklebank Apartments, built in 1926 at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco, across a side street from the landmark Fairmount Hotel.  In 1957 filming of “Vertigo” (while W.W. Crocker was living there, I believe), socialite Madeleine Elster and her husband, Gavin, live in the Brocklebank. and Judy Barton (Kim Novak) impersonating Madeleine, already killed by Gavin for her money, leaves from the Brocklebank in her luxurious, dark green Jaguar.

My father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, told me that on a business trip to San Francisco, I think in the 1960’s for his then-employer, Northern Natural Gas Co. of Omaha, NE, he saw a woman being taken from the hotel on a stretcher to an ambulance on a side street, I think the street between the Fairmount and Brocklebank Apartments.  My father asked someone, perhaps a Fairmount doorman, if he knew what happened.  That person told my father that the woman, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, had become ill.  Because, more than despite, her great wealth, Hutton had a difficult personal life that included heavy drinking and drugs.  She died of a heart attack in 1979 at age 66.  Barbara Hutton was married seven times, mostly to various Europeans princes and other ‘nobles’ after her money, but also, in 1942-45, to Cary Grant, noted elsewhere here as the debonair. French and Monegasque Riviera jewel thief and suitor of nouveau riche heiress Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly) in the 1955 film, “To Catch a Thief”, and pseudo-CIA agent and actual U.S. Treasury Department agent in Paris, romancing an endangered heiress played by Audrey Hepburn in 1963 “Charade”.

In some of my writing since 1989, I have questioned whether Wolf’s Head, the Yale-related secret society to which W.W. and Templeton Crocker belonged, was founded in 1883 at secret behest of one or both of the two oldest Yale-associated senior or secret societies, Skull and Bones/Russell Trust Association (RTA) and Scroll and Key/Kingsley Trust Association (KTA), founded respectively in 1832 and 1843.  By the post-Civil War 1870’s, in the height of the (first) Gilded Age of the United States, when many fortunes were being quickly made in railroads, mining, communications, dry goods and other enterprises, some nouveau riche parents of Yale College students were complaining that their sons were not being admitted to either of the two prestigious senior societies which by their rules and structures, admitted only 15 members each year.  As I recall from my research since 1989, some parents threatened that if their sons were not admitted to prestigious senior societies, they would not donate substantially to Yale in the future.  Thus in 1883, a “Third Society” was formed, with substantial endowment from the outset, which was also prestigious, from the beginning.  Some years later the “Third Society” was named Wolf’s Head and incorporated as the Phelps Trust Association.

In turn, the Elizabethan Club, was founded in 1911, for Yale College students with a more cultural bent then the sports and fraternity jocks, from ‘good’ (families, who then mainly populated the three oldest, most prestigious senior societies.  The Elizabethan Club was founded by Alexander Smith Cochran, Class of 1896 and a member of Wolf’s Head, who was inspired and encouraged in the founding by his English literature professor at Yale, William Lyon Phelps.  Cochran donated to the Elizabethan Club, various Shakespearean folios and quartos and many other rarities of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, a $100,000 endowment for club operations and a clubhouse in a 19th century house adjacent to the Yale campus.

In early 1968 Yale Art History Professor George Kubler, mentioned elsewhere here,  recommended that I apply to Phelps Trust Association for a small grant to do library research at Yale in summer, 1968 on history and development of some major, Latin American capital cities.  I got the grant and did the research.  I did not learn until 1988-89, when I began research on some Yale-associated senior societies that Phelps Trust Association, which Mr. Kubler called “an alumni group”, which it is, is the incorporated entity of Wolf’s Head senior or secret society.  And I did not learn until 2004 in further research at Yale, that George Kubler was, since his Yale College days in the early 1930’s, a very active member of the Elizabethan Club and, in 1950-52, President of the club.  Also active in the Elizabethan Club and close friends of George Kubler since their late 1920’s/early 1930’s days in Yale College, were Sherman Kent, who served in the 1950’s/1960’s, as CIA Deputy Director for ONE (Office of National Estimates which produced annual assessments of Soviet nuclear and non-nuclear military capabilities, and apparently, regularly over-estimated such capacities, thus greatly and unnecessarily funding the vast U.S. ‘military-industrial complex’); and Richard Bissell, Jr., George Kubler’s brother-in-law since the mid-1930’s, and CIA Deputy Director for (Covert) Plans in 1959-62.

Wolf’s Head/PTA member Templeton Crocker had a major role in making the career and fortune of Skull and Bones/RTA member Samuel F. B. Morse, discussed elsewhere here as early to mid-20th century developer of the Monterey Peninsula golf courses, including Pebble Beach, and the adjacent Del Monte forest subdivision of large-lot luxurious homes. When Morse arrived in California in 1907, he worked for a power company in Visalia and did not seem to have great prospects.  He then contacted his classmate, Templeton Crocker, who got him a job as manager of the Crocker Huffman ranch in Merced County.  (In 1989 I interviewed in Merced, a then-100 year old man who, as a young man, had worked with Morse at that ranch.)  From my recollection of correspondence and papers I saw in about 1989-90, of and/or relating to Templeton Crocker,  Templeton had not socialized a great deal with Morse at Yale, seemed to be somewhat pained in having to deal with him in California and got him the job at Crocker Huffman Ranch mainly as a way to get Morse out of his hair and some distance from San Francisco.  I had the feeling, but could not be sure, that either: 1) Samuel F.B. Morse knew something personal about Templeton Crocker; and/or 2) because of a relationship between Skull and Bones/RTA and Wolf’s Head/PTA, not known to those outside of those clubs; Templeton Crocker was more or less obligated to help Samuel F.B. Morse begin his work career in California.  Whatever the lever(s) may have been in that matter, Morse apparently used them to his maximum advantage as quickly as possible.

In 1916, Samuel F. B. Morse made a big jump up from a ranch manager in the California Central Valley, when he was named Manager of the Pacific Improvement Company, the property company for the Southern Pacific Railroad, which “Big Four” member, Collis Huntington, built from Northern to Southern California and then eastward across the southern United States.  In real estate terms perhaps the crown jewel of Pacific Improvement holdings were its Monterey Peninsula and nearby land holdings.  In 1919 Sam Morse got Crocker family banker Herbert Fleishhacker to loan him much of the $1.34 million (a lot more millions today), Morse used to buy about 20,000 acres of the Monterey Peninsula and adjacent Carmel Valley.  On that vast reach of ocean-side land, that included the 1880 Del Monte (not Montes, thank you!) Hotel, Samuel F.B. Morse developed his golf courses, including Pebble Beach (with the Lodge at Pebble Beach), and the Del Monte Forest tract of luxury homes.  (I think that at least one member, and perhaps more, of our Yale Class of 1969, has/have studied at the Naval Postgraduate School housed in the third iteration of the former Hotel Del Monte.)  Through Morse and/or the Crockers, Herbert Fleishhacker was able to buy a lot and build a home in Del Monte Forest which otherwise excluded Jews, such as Fleishhacker, from owning land there.

In about 1975 I briefly spoke with Mortimer Fleishhacker, Jr. (1907-96), a nephew of Herbert, when the former was Chairman of the San Francisco Planning Commission.  I and another representative of a Mission District planning group talked to Mr. Fleishhacker and the then-San Francisco Planning Director, Allan Jacobs, as we walked from the then-City Planning Department office (now the site of the San Francisco Main Public Library), across Civic Center Plaza to San Francisco City Hall.  Some years later Mr. Jacobs was attacked and seriously hurt, perhaps by a homeless man, while walking the same route.

Allan Jacobs, in his book, Making City Planning Work (American Society of Planning Officials, 1978), praised a December, 1972 memo I wrote, in conjunction with a Mission District park planning committee, recommending improvement and creation of some parks and recreation facilities in the crowded Mission District, then with a large Hispanic population.  A park of about two acres, on former railroad land, that I first recommended was later built at the center of the one square mile Mission District, adjacent to 18th-20th century Mission Dolores and its graveyard, that Madeleine-impersonator Judy Barton (Kim Novak), visits in 1958 “Vertigo”.

At the beginning of the main body of this writing, I refer to “circularities”, such as those relating to: my talking, in 1968-69 at Yale, to Martin Hoffmeister at Morse dining hall about: HemisFair ’68;  the HemisFair leadership roles of the related Steves and Galt families ;  Gloria Galt’s and my family’s friendships with Barclay Ferguson; and Barclay’s friendship with Jack and Virginia Morse; lead back, both to Morse College, named after the namesake and cousin of Jack Morse’s father, where Martin and I lived in 1966-69 and talked about art, architecture and history while we earned our B.A. degrees; and to Yale Art and Architecture Building, where Martin and I earned our Master of Architecture degrees in 1969-72.  And Morse and adjacent Ezra Stiles College were designed by Argentine-born Cesar Pelli when he was a designer for Eero Saarinen, before he became a professor at Yale Architecture School where I, and I think also Martin Hoffmeister, studied with him, before Pelli became Yale Architecture School Dean in 1977-84.

Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges were paid for by Pittsburgh-born philanthropist Paul Mellon, member of the Yale Class of 1929 and a member of Scroll and Key/Kingsley Trust Association senior society and the Elizabethan Club, to which Mr. Mellon was a major donor.  Mellon also donated funds for the Louis Kahn-designed Yale Center for British Art, and much of the art now in that museum.  Similarly, Andrew W. Mellon and his son, Paul, gave funds for construction of the National Art Gallery (1937) and its East Building (1978), on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and much of the art in those buildings.

Clinton Sheerr, Yale College ’70? ((a roommate of cartoonist Gary Trudeau, as I recall), and a member of the Yale School of Architecture M. Arch. class of 1973, the year after the class that Martin Hoffmeister and I belonged to, was, as I recall, a designer of the National Art Gallery East Building when he worked for I.M. Pei, designer of the famous glass pyramid new entrance to the Louvre Museum in Paris.  Clinton Sheerr died of non?-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in or about 1997.  His widow established the annual Clinton Sheerr Award for Excellence in New Hampshire Architecture, awarded by the American Institute of Architects New Hampshire chapter.

Another or additional route by which Alfred Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder may have learned about my Hispanic family, with naturally blonde 1950’s San Francisco socialite June Stephens among its members, and with the so-far, only U.S. Hispanic Governor and U.S. Senator, Octaviano Larrazolo, among its in-laws, may have been through above-mentioned Paul and Andrew W. Mellon, with Paul Mellon and Thornton Wilder both being very active and/or key Elizabethan Club members in the 1920’s to 1970’s.  Pittsburgh financier/industrialist Andrew W. Mellon was a leading mentor of Herbert Hoover, political leader of conservative Republicans in the 1920’s/early 1930’s United States.  Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, daughter of a Monterey, CA banker, were close social friends of 1919-23 Arizona Governor Thomas Campbell and his wife, Eleanor, even though Governor Campbell was a Progressive Republican and close political associate of fellow Progressive Republican and 1919-21 New Mexico Governor and 1928-29 U.S. Senator, Octaviano Larrazolo, my uncle’s father.  In the early 1930’s, when Herbert Hoover was U.S. President (and Andrew W. Mellon was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, subsequently appointed by Hoover as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom), Governor and Mrs. Campbell’s son, Alan, lived at the Palo Alto, CA private home of President and Mrs. Hoover (not the Stanford University President’s house, now Hoover House, on the Stanford campus),, then in the White House, while he and his good friend, Allan Hoover, one of the First Couple’s two sons, attended Stanford.

Conservative Republicans Andrew W. Mellon and his protege, Herbert Hoover, and also Herbert’s non-relative protege, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director in 1924-72, were very opposed to ethnic’racial minorities serving in high elective or appointive positions in government in the United States.  When my uncle, Paul Larrazolo, ran unsuccessfully in 1950 for Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico, his Republican running mate, who was elected Governor, was a former FBI agent, Edwin Mechem, nephew of Governor Merritt C. Mechem, who succeeded Octaviano Larrazolo in 1921,   Governor Edwin Mechem went on to serve as a U.S. Senator (where he voted against the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, mentioned elsewhere here), and Federal District Judge.  Paul Larrazolo served as New Mexico U.S. Attorney and New Mexico State District Judge.  It is probably safe to say that Paul Larrazolo was more moderate on various political and social matters than was his fellow Republican, Edwin Mechem.  In the early 1970’s, when Hispanic activist Reies Tijerina was on trial, in court presided by Judge Larrazolo, for having made citizens arrests in his push to assert Hispanic rights with regard to Spanish Colonial land grants in New Mexico, Judge Larrazolo instructed the jury that in fact citizens’ arrests are legal in some situations.  Tijerina was acquitted in that case, although later convicted in another case.  Tijerina, with some prison sentences behind him, died at El Paso, TX in 2015 at age 88.

In about 1923 Governors Thomas Campbell and Octaviano Larrazolo, then both out of office in Arizona and New Mexico, traveled together by train from El Paso/Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Alvaro Obregon to discuss ways to encourage more trade and tourism between Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.  Shortly after being elected to a second presidential term in 1929, President Obregon was assassinated, as depicted in the play, “El Atentado” (‘The Assault’), by Mexican author Jorge Ibarguengoitia, mentioned elsewhere here, killed in the 1983 Colombian Avianca Boeing 747 crash, on a flight from Paris to Madrid.  As discussed elsewhere here, Jorge Ibarguengoitia’s wife as of 1973, Joy Laville,who introduced me to Jorge in 1966, worked and painted at Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende in the mid- 1950’s to early 1960’s, when she knew there, fellow artist from Britain via Canada, Barclay Ferguson, before he knew Gloria Galt and later moved to Monterey/Carmel, CA.

In 1987, on my 40th birthday (as I did on my 30th birthday), I visited San Juan Bautista, in Benito County adjacent to Monterey County, and saw a crew filming in front of the Spanish mission church on the town plaza.  (In “Vertigo”, fictionally already dead socialite Madeleine Elster is thrown from the non-existent church tower which Alfred Hitchcock had built at a Hollywood studio for his film; and later, Madeleine-impersonator Judy Barton, played by Kim Novak, accidentally falls to her death from the tower.)  I asked the film crew in front of San Juan Bautista mission church in 1987 what film they were making.  They told me that they were filming a commercial for Colombian Avianca Airlines to encourage tourism from Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America to California Spanish mission towns such as San Juan Bautista.  I forewent the opportunity to tell the film crew that someone I knew had been killed and incinerated in the crash of an Avianca jumbo jet in Spain, not quite four years earlier.

In 1996 the San Francisco International Film Festival celebrated and screened then-recently restored “Vertigo”.  Kim Novak came down from her Oregon home to attend the screening in one of her rare public appearances in recent decades.  When I went to see the screening shortly after Ms. Novak’s gala appearance, I saw in the 1996 San Francisco International Film Festival brochure that the two,  central, facing, full pages of the brochure discussed only two films: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film, “Vertigo”, on one side, and on the other, “Dos Crimenes” (‘Two Crimes’), a then-recently released Mexican film based on the 1979 novel of the same title by Jorge Ibarguengoitia, husband, in 1973-83, of above-mentioned artist Joy Laville, friend of Barclay Ferguson since 1956 when she moved from Canada to Mexico.

Appendix 4

Academician Assassination?

Since 1989 I have studied known and potential links and coinciding memberships of the Elizabethan Club and the oldest Yale=associated ‘senior’ or secret societies, such as Skull and Bones/Russell Trust Association (RTA); Scroll and Key/Kingsley Trust Association (KTA) and Wolf’s Head, Phelps Trust Association (PTA), some of which are mentioned in the main body of this essay.  I have considered whether some of the Elizabethan Club leadership and/or membership, at least at times, may have functioned as one of the ten or so long-reported, ‘underground’ or ‘secret, secret’ society, known only to its members (and closely affiliated organization(s)?),  to communicate some political, governmental and/or other goals or directives from one or more of the oldest, known secret societies at Yale.  I have especially studied Yale Art History Professor George Kubler, Elizabethan Club President in 1950-52 and other Elizabethan Club members such as his brother-in-law and confidant, Richard M. Bissell, Jr., Executive Assistant (not a typist!) to CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1954-59 and CIA Deputy Director for (Covert) Plans in 1959-62, fired by President Kennedy, along with Dulles and CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell (brother of Earle Cabell, Mayor of Dallas, TX in 1963), for their leading roles in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  President Kennedy had vowed that upon his re-election in 1964, which he and many others expected (after weathering the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and having reached, by July, 1963, agreement on  the partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, among several major accomplishments), he would “break the CIA into a thousand pieces”.  Instead President Kennedy’s brains ended up in many small pieces at Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The decision for President Kennedy to visit Dallas on November 22, 1963 was made, as depicted in the 2013 television film, “Killing Kennedy” (based on the 2012 book of that title, by former Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, and Martin Dugard), by Texas Governor John Connally and others on June 5-6, 1963 (five years to the day before the assassin shooting and death of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles), at or very near a meeting/dining room of the historic Hotel Cortez at El Paso, TX, where my paternal grandparents, parents, sister, I and other members and friends of our family celebrated, in October or November, 1962, the 50th wedding anniversary of my grandparents.  As noted in the main body of this essay, five years after Governor Connally barely survived the 1963 shooting at Dallas in which President Kennedy was killed, Connally, with U.S. First Lady, Lady Byrd Johnson, opened HemisFair ’68 international exposition at San Antonio, accompanied by HemisFair President Marshall Steves and his wife, Patsy Galt Steves, who became a close friend of Lady Byrd and who was a sister of Gloria Galt, whom my family had known in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in the early 1960’s, when she dated Scots-born artist Barclay Ferguson, who, as of 1970, lived on the Monterey Peninsula where he befriended Yale College alumnus and RTA member John Boit Morse, whose wife, Virginia, painted a portrait of Barclay. 

At the Fall, 1962 50th wedding anniversary celebration of my grandparents at the Hotel Cortez in El Paso, my grandfather, Elceario M. Montes, and my father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, introduced me to a man who would gain a footnote in history, in addition to his ground-breaking career, with regard to a key figure in the Warren Commission investigation of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Dallas.  My grandfather and father introduced me at the Hotel Cortez ballroom, where an orchestra was playing dance music for our guests, to Raymond Telles, 1957-61 two-term Mayor of El Paso and the first Hispanic Mayor of a major American city.  Telles was then visiting El Paso from Costa Rica where he was U.S. Ambassador (the first Hispanic U.S. Ambassador), appointed by President Kennedy.  The Hotel Cortes ballroom was next to the dining/meeting room where we ate later that day in Fall, 1962, at or near where, as noted above, the decision was made, the following June, for President Kennedy to visit Dallas, the following November, of 1963. 

Earlier in 1962, before I met Ambassador Telles in El Paso, he met and was photographed in San Jose, Costa Rica with George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian-born petroleum geologist (he earned his Master’s degree at University of Texas, Austin, the year my father earned there his Ph. d. in chemical engineering, although I do not know or think they ever met each other—although my father later learned some Russian!).  George De Mohrenschildt and his wife, also of Russian parentage, befriended (?) in 1962-63, Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian-born wife, Marina.  De Mohrenschildt, who some believe provided information to the CIA about his knowledge and travels related to international oil and gas explorations and reserves (areas in which my father also had a lot of knowledge), found Oswald a job at a Dallas firm, Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, where he worked from October, 1962 to April, 1963. that, among various things, processed films from the U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union.  The U-2 plane design and flight programs, as noted in the main body of this essay,  were supervised in 1954-61 by CIA Deputy Director Richard M. Bissell, Jr.  Lee Harvey Oswald, in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1956-59, served in 1957 at U.S. Naval Station, Atsugi, Japan, where he reportedly assisted in runway operations involving U-2 landings. 

In another case of ‘circularities’ I refer to at the beginning of the main body of this essay; in about Spring, 1961 my mother and I attended a party at the San Miguel de Allende, Mexico home of retired U.S. Marine Corps Brigadier General Benjamin (‘Bim’) Graham who introduced us to his visiting friend, Lieutenant General David M. Shoup, then-USMC Corps Commandant, in 1959-63.  I doubt that General Shoup ever heard of Lee Oswald until the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, although he might have, by small chance, in one of his previous postings, such as USMC Inspector General in 1956-57.  I remember at the 1961 party in San Miguel(when I was 13 years old), General Shoup and General Graham expressed the view that diplomacy should be used to avoid war as much as possible, while retired USMC Brigadier General William J. Fox, who also retired to San Miguel de Allende and, during World War II, had designed and commanded USMC Air Station El Toro in Orange County California, before Oswald was briefly stationed therein 1957 and 1958-59, had more the outlook that war is rich with history and war strategies can be carried out almost as a work of art.  Oswald received his hardship discharge, to help care for his reportedly ill mother, on September 11, 1959—memorable future anniversary! 

After Lee Harvey Oswald was fired from Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall in April, 1963, he spent time in New Orleans, trying to generate interest in opposing U.S. policies against the Communist government of Cuban President Fidel Castro, that the CIA had failed to overthrow through the CIA-sponsored 1961 Bay of Pigs landing coordinated by Richard Bissell, Jr.  From September 25 to October 2, 1963, Oswald was in Mexico City, trying at the Cuban and Soviet consulates to get visas to visit Cuba on his way back to the Soviet Union where he lived in 1959-61 and met and married his wife, Marina.  I do not know if the Soviet consulate was then located in the fenced Soviet Embassy compound outside of which I and thousands of others protested the August, 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which, as noted in my Martin Hoffmeister remembrance essay, I told Martin about in Fall, 1968, when I also told him about my visit to HemisFair ’68 and the two venues there which showed Czechoslovak avant-garde films.

My parents and I stayed in Mexico City in August, 1963 for a few days at the Hotel Geneve (as in Geneva, Switzerland), which years later I learned was a reported hangout of international spies.  Usually my parents stayed at two other hotels, including the Hotel Montejo, on the nearby main boulevard of Mexico City, Paseo de la Reforma.  I wonder if the Hotel Geneve was recommended to my parents by Northwestern University (Evanston/Chicago) Professor Russell Johnson and/or his wife Helen, as their middle son, Kurt, then my age of 15, stayed with us at the Geneve in 1963.   We first met the Johnsons in San Miguel de Allende.  In the 1950’s/1960’s, Russell Johnson, a professor in industrial relations, worked in India and Indonesia on grants from the Ford Foundation.  In 1952-54, Richard Bissell, Jr. worked at the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York City, before he went to work for the CIA.  Bissell worked again, at times, for the Ford Foundation, as a consultant, after he was fired by President Kennedy in 1962.  I have read that the Ford Foundation has long had association with various CIA operatives and programs.

In November, 1964 my parents and I flew from Omaha to Chicago on an airplane of Northern Natural Gas Company, for which my father worked in 1959-70, for a visit of a few days in Chicago.  (While we stayed in Chicago, the Northern Natural plane (with capacity for about 12 passengers, although I recall only the three of us besides the pilot and co-pilot),  was parked at Midway Airport, where, as noted in the main body of this essay, a United Airlines Boeing 737 crashed on landing approach in 1972, on a flight from Washington, D.C., killing 43 people, including the Northern Natural Counsel and Deputy Counsel, and Dorothy Hunt, wife of former CIA agent and June, 1972 Watergate break-in co-leader, Howard Hunt, who some Kennedy conspiracy theorists long asserted might have been one of three ‘hoboes’ who might actually have shot President Kennedy and Governor Connally from the famous ‘grassy knoll’.  In a court case decided that the assertion could not be proven or disproven.  As noted in my Martin Hoffmeister remembrance essay, Dorothy and Howard Hunt married while they were, in the late 1940’s, secretary and press secretary, in Paris, for W. Averell Harriman, Yale College alumnus and RTA member, when he was head of the European office of the Economic Cooperation Administration (Marshall Plan), of which Richard Bissell, Jr. was then Deputy Director in Washington, D.C.)  While my parents stayed at a hotel in the ‘Gold Coast’ section of Chicago, near Lake Michigan, during our November, 1964 visit, I stayed then in Evanston with Kurt Johnson, his parents, Russell and Helen, and his younger and older brothers, Keith and Cliff.  One day Kurt Johnson and I went to some of our favorite locales in downtown Chicago, such as the Museums of Science and Industry and Natural History and the Shedd Aquarium.  On our way back from there, we saw a large crowd in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, opposite Grant Parik.  We heard that President and Mrs. Johnson would arrive there soon.  We waited and soon the President and First Lady arrived by motorcade.  As they entered the hotel, Kurt and I joined hundreds of others in cheering them on, when President Johnson, within days of election in his own right, was at the height of his popularity, before George McBundy, Walt Rostow and other Yale worthies led him down the Vietnam War path.  After President and Mrs. Johnson entered the Hilton Hotel, Kurt Johnson and I walked over to the presidential limousine.  In those days one could still do that.  We asked a Secret Service agent if that was the car in which President Kennedy had been killed just about a year earlier.  The Secret Service agent said that it was.  We asked him if we could touch the car.  He said that we could, and we did. 

Above-mentioned Richard M. Bissell, Jr., Yale 1932, and CIA Deputy Director for (Covert) Plans in 1959-62, had both the motive and the means to secretly commission the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  In November, 1961-February, 1962, when President Kennedy effectively fired Bissell, CIA Deputy Director/U.S. Air Force General Charles Cabell and Allen Dulles, CIA Director in 1954-62, for their leading roles in the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs landing aimed at overthrowing Communist Cuban President Fidel Castro; Dulles was 68 years old (he would die only six years later), and, by standards of that time, overdue for retirement.  Pre-Bay of Pigs Richard Bissell, Jr. had been in line to succeed Dulles as CIA Director, in what would have been the pinnacle of his career.

Also, one should consider that Richard Bissell, Jr., as the CIA Deputy Director for (Covert) Plan in 1959-62, and Allen Dulles, as CIA Director in 1954-62, with Bissell as his Executive Assistant in 1954-59, had, according to subsequent research and inquiries by historians and government investigators; direct experience in ordering, planning, assisting, attempting, encouraging and/or covering up their involvement in secretly commissioning assassinations of some political leaders, including: first Premier of independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba (1961), Dominican President/dictator Rafael Trujillo (1961), Cuban President/dictator Fidel Castro (attempted, 1961 and later), U.N. Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold (in 1961 plane crash, with potential shoot-down and CIA involvement),  and Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and associates (1954; planned assassinations during CIA-staged coup made unnecessary by Arbenz’s resignation and exile in Mexico; but about 100,000 Guatemalans died in the ensuing 1954-90 civil war in Guatemala).

In some writings of mine since 1989, I question whether Yale Art History Professor George Kubler and/or his brother-in-law/confidante, Richard M. Bissell, Jr., perhaps with secret involvement of  then-former CIA Director Allen Dulles and/or ex-CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell; either: 1) was or were original, intellectual author(s) of a plan to secretly commission the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, to retaliate for Kennedy’s 1962 firing of Bissell, Dulles and Cabell, over the 1961 Bay of Pigs failed invasion of Cuba to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro, the planning of which Bissell had led; or 2) had secret knowledge of; and/or coordinated with other individual(s), one or more of whom may also have been Yale College graduate(s), and perhaps also, like Bissell and Kubler, Elizabethan Club and/or ‘senior’ society member(s), who secretly commissioned the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Dallas, TX, possibly working to that end through some secret intermediary(ies) which may have included above-mentioned Elizabethan Club member, Russian-born Dimitri von Mohrenschildt (who used the original, Germanic form of the name), and/or his brother , Dallas-based international petroleum geology consultant and potential CIA ‘asset’, informant and/or operative, George De Mohrenschildt..

George DeMohrenschildt befriended? Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald in 1962-63, and arranged the party, in February, 1963, where the Oswalds first met Ruth Paine, then studying Russian, who later provided in her home, a ‘safe’ place for Russian-born Marina to live and escape intermittent abuse from Lee, until the day after the assassination of President Kennedy.  In October, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald returned from Mexico City, in a then-failed effort to get transit visas to Cuba and the Soviet Union, Mrs. Paine told Oswald about the job he soon got at Texas Book Depository, and from which, the following month, he shot and killed President Kennedy and seriously wounded Texas Governor John Connally.  Then-former CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell’s brother, Earle, then Mayor of Dallas, may have caused, perhaps at Charles’ request, and/or had pre-knowledge, that Dallas Police would not line the presidential motorcade route at Dealey Plaza, on which the Texas Book Depository faced on one side.  Thus there were no stationary police at that point who might have looked up and seen Oswald aiming his rifle at the President from a sixth floor window.

George De Mohrenschildt shot himself to death in 1977 at age 69, shortly after a Congressional committee advised him that it wanted to question him again in the matter of President Kennedy’s assassination.  Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, after retirement as a longtime Russian language and studies professor at Dartmouth and Stanford, moved to an ashram in India and lived to 2002, to age 100!  Reportedly (see: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/160216520/dimitri-serge-von_mohrenschildt) , Dimitri von Mohrenschildt was “one of the late 1940’s founders” of Radio Free Europe, discussed in the main body of this essay with regard to William Durkee III, President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, father of William Durkee IV, who chose or was assigned a drafting table next to me at Yale Architecture School when he was one or two years behind me and Martin Hoffmeister, central figure in the main body of this essay. when we earned there our Master of Architecture degrees in 1972.

In my view, the question arises of whether Ruth Paine, an avowed Quaker learning Russian in Dallas in 1962-63, and/or Mrs. Paine’s husband, Michael, a Bell Helicopter employee (Michael’s step-father, Arthur M. Young, invented the Bell Helicopter), served as informant(s) of the FBI, CIA and/or other intelligence organization(s), civilian or military.  Thus George De Mohrenschildt may have known, from source(s) in the CIA and/or FBI, that there was more to Ruth Paine than just someone wanting to learn Russian in early 1960’s, ultra-conservative Dallas.  FBI Director of 1924-72, J. Edgar Hoover, almost certainly wanted to have informants within Quaker meetings because of their long dedication to pacifism, opposition to war and wish to interact peacefully with people worldwide, including in Communist-ruled nations.

Michael Paine’s father, Lyman, was a Harvard-trained architect and leftist political activist, and his mother, Ruth Forbes Paine (later Young), was a member of the prestigious, wealthy Boston family that also included Rosemary Forbes Kerry, the mother of former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Yale and Skull and Bones/RTA, Class of 1966.  In the 1920’s in New York City, Lyman and Rosemary Paine hosted parties attended by political activists and cultural figures, including Mary Bancroft, a novelist who, during World War II, worked  for the Office of Strategic Services, and had an affair with the head of the OSS office in Switzerland, above-discussed Allen Dulles, later CIA Director, fired by President Kennedy in 1961 over the Bay of Pigs debacle.  After the war, Mary Bancroft lived again in New York and became a close friend of Henry Luce, who, with his fellow-Yale College/RTA senior society Class of 1920 member and Delta Kappa Epsilon (‘Deke’) ‘brother’, Briton Hadden, founded Time Magazine.   Thus the question arises of whether Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Jr. and/or Charles Cabell knew about George De Mohrenschildt and/or Michael and Ruth Paine, well before De Mohrenschildt threw the party where Ruth Paine met Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald and Ruth subsequently led Lee Oswald to his job at the Texas Book Depository.

In the mid- to late 1930’s, Richard Bissell, Jr., George Kubler and their fellow, active Elizabethan Club member, Sherman Kent, all then junior faculty at Yale, in economics, art history and history, socialized in New Haven with their wives, which included the Bushnell sisters, Betty and Anne, who married Kubler and Bissell.  During World War II, Sherman Kent worked in the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA predecessor.  In 1952-67, as mentioned earlier here, Sherman Kent served as CIA Deputy Director for ONE. the Office of National Estimates that provided annual reports on Soviet Union military capabilities.  Kent provided the advantage that he was not fired by President Kennedy and he may have been able, in 1963-66, to  report to Bissell about investigation within the CIA, and perhaps some other U.S. intelligence organization(s), such as the FBI, about the President’s assassination.

One can probably safely say that it was a mistake of President Lyndon B. Johnson to include Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy.  As Dulles had been fired by Kennedy, he probably could not have passed jury selection in a federal court, as being unbiased or not potentially connected to the case, in any trial that might have taken place, but did not (except for the trial of Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby who fatally shot Lee Oswald two days after he apparently killed President Kennedy), with regard to that presidential assassination.  I would be interested to know if some person(s) recommended to President Johnson to include Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission, and if so, who such individual(s) was/were.

I wonder if the 1961-66 National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Yale and Skull and Bones/RTA, 1940, discussed elsewhere here, had any role in recommending inclusion of Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission and/or had access to any of the commission’s investigations and/or deliberations before they became public, if in fact they have become or will become public in the future.

If Allen Dulles had involvement in and/or secret knowledge, before or active the fact, about secret commissioning of the assassination of President Kennedy, he could, directly or through intermediary(ies), warn the individual(s), such as Richard Bissell, Jr., who may have been involved in such commissioning, about where the Warren Commission investigation was going.  If McGeorge Bundy had access to reports of Warren Commission closed door proceedings, I wonder if he could have passed on such information through some fellow member(s) of Skull and Bones/RTA, perhaps including or solely, William T. Bissell (1902-84), Yale, 1925, and from William to his  only brother, Richard M. Bissell, Jr.  Some men, such as William Bissell’s close friend, William Townsend Lusk, Yale ’24, were members of both RTA and the Elizabethan Club. 

Although I never met Richard M. Bissell, Jr., I studied some years with his brother-in-law and confidant, George Kubler.   I wonder if, in the wake of Bissell’s 1962 firing by President Kennedy, Bissell, well-known for being very self-contained, may have been willing to just simmer and stew about that firing, but Kubler, known to some academic colleagues as sometimes inclined to do battle with them, may have secretly recommended to Bissell to terminate President Kennedy for terminating Bissell’s government career, then just short of its long-anticipated peak in becoming CIA Director.  Professor Kubler was always cordial to me.  But I have read about academicians who got into protracted battles with him.

In the early 1940’s, British archaeologist Sir Eric Thompson, strongly denounced Kubler for his scathing criticism of Hungarian-born Pal Kelemen, for writing extensively about pre-Columbian art, but not being a trained art historian with an M.A. and Ph.d.  Yale Anthropology Professor Michael D. Coe, wrote in his autobiography, Final Report, about a long, bitter conflict he had with Kubler about the validity of anthropological versus art historical interpretations of pre-Colombian artifacts.  (Before he earned his Ph. d. in anthropology at Harvard, Michael Coe was a CIA officer in Taiwan in 1950=52.  As noted earlier here, William F. Buckley, Jr. worked in those same two years at the Mexico City CIA station under Howard Hunt.  In my freshman year in Yale College, in 1965-66, the Yale administration assigned Michael D. Coe to be my faculty advisor.)  A great historian of Latin America, Richard M. Morse, with whom I studied at Yale, said to me privately once about Professor Kubler: “When George hands you a cupcake, you can’t be sure if it’s just a cupcake, or if it’s a cupcake with a grenade inside!”  I would guess that George Kubler was one who, as the saying goes, wanted, in any conflict, to not only ‘get back’, but to ‘get even’.

Whether or not George Kubler secretly joined with his brother-in-law and confidant, ousted CIA Deputy Director for (Covert) Plans, Richard Bissell, Jr., and perhaps led Bissell, in 1962-63, in conceptualizing and secretly commissioning the assassination of President Kennedy, I think that some historical investigators within and beyond the United States should look at the possibility of whether George Kubler—before, during and/or after 1954-62 when Richard Bissell, Jr. served as a high-level CIA official, and may have done consulting work for the CIA, and did consult for the Ford Foundation, with long-alleged CIA ties, until not long before his death in 1994, two years before Kubler’s in 1996 (although Kubler reportedly began to show Alzheimer’s symptoms around 1993)—(Kubler) may have served at times or continuously, and been very valuable, as a CIA ‘asset’ (informant), and perhaps even operative, during his extensive travels in Latin America and Europe, with his contacts with many leading cultural and some political figures; his multi-lingual abilities (fluent at least in German, French, Spanish and Portuguese); and the possibility that he reported information through Bissell to the CIA.

I would guess that if in fact Richard Bissell, Jr. and/or George Kubler, conceived the idea to secretly commission the assassination of President Kennedy, he or they would have wanted to minimize the number of individuals involved in conceptualizing, carrying out and/or knowing about that plan.  But if Bissell and Kubler involved any other individual(s) in thinking up and/or knowing about that plan, besides above-mentioned, potential co-conspirator(s) and CIA veterans, Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell and/or Sherman Kent, I wonder if they also involved Herman W. Liebert.

Liebert, another close friend of Richard Bissell, Jr. and George Kubler at Yale since the early 1930’s, was, like them, deeply involved in the Elizabethan Club, was the best man at Kubler’s mid-1930’s wedding and, may, like Bissell and Kubler, also have had, at least at times, a hard edge.  Herman Liebert, like Sherman Kent, served in the Research and Analysis Branch (in Washington, D.C.?), of the CIA predecessor, the OSS, during World War II; worked with Richard Bissell, Jr. on preparing and/or recommending the Marshall Plan (European Recovery Plan of the Economic Cooperation Administration), and later became longtime Director of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale.  As I recall, Liebert harshly criticized 1960’s ‘hippies’ and ‘flower children’, and considered that their ‘flower power’ movement against the U.S. governmental/financial ‘Establishment’ had failed.

My mother, and our family to some degree, seemed to have some date or other intersections with executed and attempted presidential assassinations.  President Kennedy was assassinated on my mother’s 44th birthday.  On March 30, 1980, my mother suffered a major stroke (breaking of an arterio-vernous malformation or AVM, which may have grown in her brain since birth; in about 1981-82, when I had some chronic headaches, my brain was scanned to check that I did not have the same type of growth, and I did not); one year to the day before the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. (obsessed with then-Yale College student Jody Foster), firing in front of the Washington Hilton Hotel restaurant where my Hungarian-born aunt, Marianne Vass, mentioned in the main body of this essay, had worked some years as hostess. Apparently the Zsa Zsa accents have been considered an advantage for some upscale and would-be upscale restaurant hostesses to have!  (‘May I show you to your table, dahling?’)

If the March 30, 1981 attempt on President Reagan’s life had been successful, George H.W. Bush, Yale and Skull and Bones/RTA/’Deke’, 1948 (father of U.S. President George W. Bush, with the same Yale-associated private club memberships in the Class of 1968), would have become U.S. President about eight years sooner than he became by his election in 1988 to one term, in significant part, due to President Reagan’s popularity/’coattails’.  The Bush family also have had their coincidences (?) vis-à-vis attempted presidential assassination.  Scott Hinckley, brother of would-be assassin John, Jr., was due to have dinner in Denver with fellow oilman Neil Bush, son of George H.W. and brother of George W., on what became the day after the attempted assassination.

Neil Bush lived in Lubbock, TX in 1978, during George W.’s unsuccessful run for Congress, before his two elections to Governor of Texas, and John Hinckley, Jr. lived in Lubbock in 1974-80.  After the 1981 attempt on President Reagan’s life, Neil and George W. Bush said they did not recall ever meeting John Hinckley, Jr. in Lubbock.  I guess that Lubbock (population about 170,000 in the late 1970’s), has had so many Republican, well-funded oil families that it’s hard to keep track of whom one has or has not met in that crowd!

When my father, Dr. Gustavo Montes, from El Paso, TX, worked as Petrochemical Advisor to the Nigerian Ministry of Industries in 1970-72, my parents wrote to me in San Francisco where I was looking for work in early September, 1972 (and soon found work as a neighborhood urban planner), that if I did not find work in San Francisco, they had close friends in Lagos, from Lubbock, who could probably find work for me there.  I wrote back to my parents a few weeks before I got my San Francisco job that I had recently read in a San Francisco newspaper that the 800th? and something person had jumped to his or her death off the Golden Gate Bridge since its 1937 opening, and that I would rather be the next one in that morbid line than live in Lubbock!   In 1970 I had briefly been at Lubbock Airport on my way from Omaha and Dallas to El Paso, to visit my grandfather, and that was as much of Lubbock as I wanted to see.  I imagine that many people love living in Lubbock.  I would not be one of them.

Although the most highly qualified, widely respected historians apparently will not go near re-investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, because of the many ‘conspiracy theories’ that have followed the official, U.S. Government Warren Commission investigation of that world-famous, terrible event, I hope that sooner or later some well-trained, well-qualified historian(s) will investigate whether one, two or three of the CIA high officials fired by President Kennedy for the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle who were: CIA Deputy Directors Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and USAF General Charles Cabell and CIA Director Allen Dulles, who had both the motive and means to secretly commission the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, did in fact seek and achieve that goal, perhaps with Bissell’s confidant/brother-in-law, Yale Professor George Kubler, encouraging him in that endeavor, and perhaps having been the one to first secretly press for that action.  If such re-investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy is ever done, perhaps it can be done as part of, or in some conjunction with investigations I recommend in the main body of this essay, that could be could carried out by what I call a Truth and Transparency Commission that could be established by Yale University to enlist highly qualified people from and beyond Yale to look in depth at how and to what degree some graduates, faculty and administrators of Yale University have been involved, since is 1701 founding, not only in great public and private sector achievements which have benefited people and the environment worldwide, but in some cases have also been involved in civilian and military governmental decisions and events, political activities and socio-economic and environmental activities which have led to unnecessary and widely destructive wars and socio-economic and environmental results in the United States and around the world which have caused various forms of wrongful, unnecessary, long-term suffering to many people and many environments, while frequently benefiting the ‘one percent’ of highest income people worldwide, many of them associated with Yale University and other elite universities worldwide.