Carl Oglesby near death

[Dawn Meredith]

Yeah I fully credit Carl O his comments and wisdom sent me down the path I travel now. For good or ill. Sorry Dawn and its amazing you knew him for so long. Maybe when you get over this sad time you could do us the service of a run down on how you met and how his ideas evolved and so on. That would be great.

But till then. So long Carl!!!

I was very much missing Carl a couple of days ago and posted this on the Ed Forum:

I am really surprised that there is not more more commentary on this page than there is. Strange circumstances in my life today are causing me to really miss my dear friend. Carl and I literally had the most complicated relationship of anyone in my life. But the most important piece was that we were true family in every sense of the word. I still remember with awe the first time I was invited to his Cambridge MA apartment, in 1973.. Hearing him sing and play guitar, seeing his wonderful drawings, this on top of his incredible writings. The bounds to his talent were endless. His oldest daughter Aron would become my then young daughter's baby sitter and her life long "Fairy God mother". Divorced from the mother of his three kids, Carl and Beth and kids always had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner together. Christa and I were always invited. Since my entire bio family was in Canada, those family get dinners meant the world to me, as well as to Christa...
I don't think I have ever heard a better speaker than was Carl. He spoke just like he wrote: a brilliance and talent shared by few. His passion for this case burned as deeply as did mine. Other times we just enjoyed jamming together. I loved adding harmony to his beautiful tribute to Beth: "Lemon Light". So many wonderful memories spanning four decades.
I am feeling your spirit and voice today Carl and having a most difficult time believing that I cannot just hear your actual voice at the other end of the phone.
All my love forever.
Dawn..


To answer the question posed here as to how I met Carl: In the fall of 73 I was having a political conversation with my then next door neighbor- (who would become a lifelong friend)- David Skinner. We got to talking about Watergate, the specific issues of McCord and the tape as well as The United Airlines Crash. Upon hearing my CT views David insisted I must be reading Carl Oglesby in the local Boston Phoenix. I told him I was not, I had never heard of Carl O, let alone read him. A few weeks later David let me know that Carl would be speaking at Boston University, and asked me if I wanted to tag along and hear him. "Why not?" I decided.
The next part would remain a little joke between Carl and me the rest of our lives: I always remembered what he spoke about that day; he remembered what I wore.
The subject was lonliness: And for him it was when the SDS split and became violent. The story was heart wrenching. And told with still felt sadness. Very moving. We chatted after, he gave me a ride to class in Cambridge, and we exchanged phone numbers, as by then we discovered we had a mutual interest: The JFK assassination. The newly formed Assassination Information Bureau was just getting up and running.
Carl, like me, believed that JFK had been killed by the most powerful forces for evil on the planet. His thinking was peerless in my mind. And remained so through many many years. My one awful regret was that in 1987 I won a lawsuit that I should have lost. To celebrate I took my client, Sally, to hang out with the AIB. Never dreaming she and Carl would hook up. And marry. Sally wanted to be part of a Cambridge intellectual crowd and she saw Carl as her ticket. Carl had suffered through two painful divorces and was most leeary about a third marriage. For good reason it would turn out. The ugliness that ensued woudl casue Carl to drop into a deep depression which his close friends and family eronously believed to be early dementia. It was during this terrible period that he began making statements that The Mob had killed JFK. (A reliance on the writings of Robert Blakey). Once Carl was correctly diagnosed his depression lifted and the old Carl shone through once again. I have not ever forgiven Sally, to whom Carl dedicated his little red JFK book: "The JFK Assassination The facts and the Theories". Stealing a person's love is about as low as it gets. Eventually Carl would reunite with one of his pals from the SDS days, Barbara Webster, and lived out the rest of his years happily. Before his untimely death he was at work on a play. Still enflamed about the assassination and the descent into the national security state that this country had fallen.

We laughed a lot. Talked about our kids, their lives, our grandchildren and remembered all the happy times we had shared. Carl's second wife Ann and I also remain good friends.

We will have his spirit always. And his books. And the music. Thanks to Phil for putting up the clip of my favorite Carl song :Lemon Light. Hearing his voice just a bit ago made my heart smile.

Be with the angels dear friend.

Dawn