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had to leave college before his senior year, final year. But he went back. He was very much of an intellectual, tremendously interested in history, literature and had strong political opinions.

Such as?

Well, in the late 1890s he left the Democratic party because of the silver issue. In fact, he was a delegate to the Democratic Convention of 1892 and became a so-called Gold Democrat when William Jennings Bryan was nominated for president on a Free Silver ticket in 1896. My father at that time became a Republican on the strength of the silver issue, free silver. He was fiscally, financially conservative, and he felt strongly enough about this to actually change party allegiance, on that issue, and remained a Republican the rest of his life.

When he was editor of the Public Ledger in Philadelphia he led a campaign to clean up the Philadelphia Republican machine, the municipal machine, and supported an independent candidate. And one of the great department store advertisers came to my father's office to threaten to take his advertising out of the Public Ledger if he continued to support the independent reformer. My father threw him out of the office. It was this sort of real independence and passion that he had.

When the First World War broke out my father became very pro-allied, very anti-German, partly on the basis -- I think largely, as I heard it, on the basis of the atrocities that the Germans were carrying out in Belgium, particularly the execution of Edith Cavell and the