LITMIR.BIZ

       Rob Scott

      Source of headshots from 1949 Olla Podrida: Berkeley Public Library, https://archive.org/details/ollapodridaunse_40

      Rob Scott, Fay’s first boyfriend at Reed, graduated from Berkeley High in the fall of 1948, six months before Fay. At Reed, Rob’s roommate nicknamed her “Twinkletoes” when she gave Rob dancing lessons. Fay often played classical music on the piano in a dormitory living room. She joked to Rob that she might end up playing tunes in a bar somewhere. Her prediction almost came true.

      Fay’s first boyfriend at Reed, Rob Scott, also graduated from Berkeley High. The two had first met on the eve of attending college. Fay and Rob spent many afternoons the fall of their freshmen year in the living room at Anna Mann, a dormitory furnished with a piano. Fay tried to teach Rob the Charleston, earning her the nickname “Twinkletoes” from his roommate George. More often, Fay played classical music from memory while Rob sat nearby, reading from a set of the collected works of Jules Verne. Rob asked her once how many compositions a concert pianist needed to know by heart. Fay replied with an impressive list he found hard to believe. Yet it did not even include the many popular tunes she had memorized from the radio. She joked that she might instead end up playing the big band song “Deep Purple” in a bar somewhere — a prediction that almost came true.

      * * *

      Fay’s time at Reed coincided with a new, frightening era, the unleashing of the atom bomb and the Cold War against Communism. She was in her second semester when the FBI arrested Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage by providing the Russians with top-secret information on nuclear weapons. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy then startled the nation in February of 1950 with claims that Communists had infiltrated the State Department, fueling a mounting national atmosphere of anti-Communist hysteria. Fay and her friends began to question government policies they had never before doubted, worrying about the dangers of nuclear weapons and radioactivity. Still, there was little political activism in those days. The only major urban issue Reed students tackled in Fay’s freshman year was a “Fair Rose” campaign to abolish discriminatory housing practices in the Rose District of Portland. It paralleled a “Fair Bear” campaign the same year at Cal.

      During Fay’s freshman year, her parents moved to Pennsylvania where Sam Abrahams had been offered a promising job in the asbestos industry. Lisie, then a high school sophomore, was desperately unhappy about the change. Fay flew East that summer to join her family. Shortly after she arrived, Communist North Korea launched an invasion across the 38th parallel. This time when the United States became embroiled in war, Sam remained uninvolved, saddled back East with three unhappy women. Lisie and Ruby pined for California as Fay yearned to return to the freedom of Reed.

      When Fay went back to Portland that fall, she continued dating Rob Scott, immersed herself in comparative literature courses and enjoyed ballroom, folk and square dancing — not politics yet. She joined the college’s music program and performed a solo concert. She also entertained friends on occasion. One of the gathering places for students was a student-owned and operated coffee shop on campus. In the fall of 1950, the coffee shop hired a transfer student named Bob Richter as a part-time cashier. He quickly became a celebrity in Fay’s small world.

      Bob Richter was a rare conscientious objector to the prewar peacetime draft of 1948. He had been convicted while attending junior college in Los Angeles; his service of the three-year prison sentence for refusing to register for the draft was delayed pending appeal. Chances of reversal were slim. Conscientious objector status was then limited to Quakers and others whose religious beliefs conflicted with military service. Bob’s opposition was personal; his parents were nonobservant Jews who had raised him as an atheist. In fact, his mother was a Communist who had been a teen-aged nurse in the Russian Revolution and considered religion the opiate of the masses.

      As a last resort, Richter’s attorneys sought review in the United States Supreme Court while Bob went back to visit his family in New York over the 1950 winter break. On Christmas Eve, Bob stood in the long line for the midnight mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and spotted Fay with a companion in the same queue. They exchanged pleasantries. Soon they ran into each other again heading back to Reed on the same $99 super-discount flight.

      Fay and Bob began talking as they boarded the plane to Oregon and found each other fascinating company through its many landings and takeoffs. Fay particularly enjoyed Bob’s attention because she had just been rebuffed by a new love interest. Bob confided that if the Supreme Court petition for review was unsuccessful, he likely faced prison time. Fay endeared herself to Bob even more when she fell asleep leaning against him. Then a passenger died en route to Portland and the pilot made an eleventh, unplanned, stop in Montana to unload the body. During the delay, the stewardesses herded the remaining passengers into a small wooden building that served as the Great Falls airport. Bob and Fay listened to the jukebox play the “Tennessee Waltz” over and over again, wondering whether it was broken or someone else there just really loved that song. By the time they arrived at Reed they were inseparable.