10-11-2014, 09:55 AM
Linda Minor is one of the better researchers, IMHO, and not known to many. This series of four posts from HERE on her blog, I think, are excellent! She is a lawyer, genealogist, and Deep Political researcher of high quality. [Original has many photos and hyperlinks that don't seem to post here]
PART I
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture
By Linda Minor
Ruth Hyde Paine
Ruth Paine has often been referred to as "Marina Oswald's babysitter" during the eight months preceding President Kennedy's assassination. She has been called other names as well, but mostly there has been a big question mark concerning (1) what role she really had and (2) which organization, among the plethora of intelligence groups active in those months, assigned her that role.
Ruth clearly was someone's tool. Was she merely an implement of care and compassion emanating from a woman who wanted to practice her Russian-speaking skills? Was she, as wife of Bell Helicopter design engineer, Michael Paine, working as an agent of death and deceit on behalf of her husband's employer?
Michael Paine
My goal as an objective researcher is not to find evidence that would answer those questions. Only you can answer them for yourself. My job as I see it is to explore whatever databases I have access to in order to make this woman a little less mysterious, to learn about her family dating back several generations, possibly discovering details she herself has never known, possibly some of which is irrelevant. However, when all the dots of her her life are pinpointed on her historical timeline, her place in history will fall into its proper context.
The HYDE family history
Sixty-one years before John Kennedy was murdered, Ruth Hyde's father was born in Palo Alto, California, and given the name of William Avery Hyde. The ancestry of his grandfather, William Penn Hyde, a Methodist minister who had been born in Mystic, Connecticut, has been traced back to his first American ancestor, William Hyde, born in 1583, who, with wife Anne Bushnell, had a son named Samuel, born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1637. Samuel married Jane Lee, and from their union sprang several distinct branches of the family, two of which eventually spawned Ruth Hyde.
Samuel Hyde's son Jabez, born 1677, descended through Phineas I, Phineas II, and John, down to William Penn Hyde. Jabez's brother John descended through Captain James Hyde (wife Martha Nevins), Rev. Charles Hyde (wife Mary Ludlow), and Peter Ludlow Hyde (wife Harriet Clapp), down to Charles Ludlow Hyde, the father of Carol Elizabeth Hyde, who married William Avery Hyde. Small world, as they say!
There is a third distinct line, seemingly unrelated at this point, that descended through Samuel's son Thomas down to Henry Baldwin Hyde, who in 1859 founded the Equitable Life Assurance Society in the United States, leaving the company's control in the hands of his son, James Hazen Hyde upon the older man's death in 1899. We will talk about that branch later as the research continues.
Reuben Hyde Walworth's book is online.
William Penn Hyde in California
William Penn (W.P.) Hyde, suffering ill health from which he hoped to recover in California, retired from his Methodist ministry which had sent him to Rhode Island after a variety of pastorates in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1859 he had married Seraphine Smith Carr with whom he had eleven children, and in 1881 the family moved to Santa Clara County, California, about 50 miles south of San Francisco.
Leland Stanford was also a transplant to California, having previously been in business in Albany before moving to California after the 1849 gold rush. As a supporter of Abraham Lincoln in the Republican convention in 1860, he attended the new President's inauguration and supported his plans for the transcontinental railroad. That same year he was elected governor of California, and in 1863 president of the Central Pacific Railroad, subsequently renamed the Southern Pacific. Made land-rich by the federal grants made to finance the construction of the railroad, by 1881 Stanford owned thousands of acres of land in Santa Clara County where William Penn Hyde settled that year with his large family.
334 Lincoln - Hyde residence
Stanford's teenage son, Leland, Jr. died of typhoid fever in 1884, and his father, former governor and future Senator, as a memorial to his only child, began creating a university--and a new town to house it--out of his acreage. Even before construction was complete, the Hyde family moved within the same county, settling permanently in Palo Alto.
Herbert Hoover, 1894
When Leland Stanford, Jr. University opened its doors in 1891, future president Herbert Hoover was among the ten or so students who would study geology and graduate in the class of 1894. The first campus bookstore was managed by William Fletcher (W.F.) Hyde, eldest son of W. P. Hyde, who would remain in that position for sixteen years. His sister, Bessie Hyde, had married in 1891 to a minister named William A. Kennedy, and moved to Denver. Rev. Kennedy did not live long, and Bessie and her daughter Laura eventually moved back to Palo Alto to live in the stately Lincoln Avenue residence with her maiden sisters, which they operated as a boarding house after W.P. died in 1919.
The Hydes lived in a three-story home at 334 Lincoln Avenue in the now historic area known as Professorville, where William Avery Hyde's uncle, James McDonald Hyde--thirteen years younger than W.F.--had grown up and where he lived while attending Stanford in the same class as Herbert Hoover's older brother Theodore, both of whom studied geology. James McD. Hyde later became a Stanford professor of metallurgy. Their sister,Mary Hyde, studied back east and became assistant librarian at Stanford, living with Lillian, a teacher, and Laura, who ran the boarding house. Their brother Edward L. Hyde, operated a stationery store at 160 University Avenue and lived with his wife, the former Lauretta Coe, at 381 Lincoln.
William Fletcher Hyde and Martha Smith
W.F. Hyde, who had been 20 when his family moved west, had not had the benefit of a formal college education, but he did well in business. He married Martha Constance Smith in 1900, and they proceeded to have three children--William Avery, Theodore, and Sylvia Alden Hyde, all born before 1910. In that year the census shows them living at 959 Bryant (also known as 301 Addison) in the Professorville section of Palo Alto, while W.F. managed the Stanford bookstore. Martha's mother, Elizabeth Avery Smith, widow of yet another clergyman, Rev. William Augustus Smith who died in 1887, lived in the same house.
It is not known how William Fletcher Hyde and Martha Smith met. Her family tree, surprisingly, also traces back to colonial Connecticut, her first American ancestor being Christopher Avery who arrived from Devon, England, to New London, Conn. in 1630 with his wife Margery Stephens of Exeter. The wife of John Foster Dulles (Janet Pomeroy Avery) was a member of that same Groton Avery clan, although the nearest common ancestor she shared with Martha was born around 1650, making them extremely distant cousins.
Nevetheless, there is another link through Martha's father which almost connects her to this other Groton branch. Her father's brother, Augustus Ledyard Smith (born 1833) was given the maiden name of his grandmother, Catherine Ledyard Childs, daughter of Benjamin Ledyard. Benjamin moved to the area now known as Aurora, New York from Groton, Connecticut in 1793, becoming one of its founders, and, intriguingly, his mother, Mary Avery Ledyard, descended from the same Avery line as Janet Pomeroy Avery Dulles, mentioned earlier.
Martha's maternal grandfather, Addison Avery married Sylvia Moseley in 1834 in Wilbraham, Mass., where his father, Abraham Avery, a dedicated Methodist, had helped in founding the Wesleyan Academy. Abraham also was instrumental in the establishment of Wesleyan University at Middletown, Conn., where he served as a trustee. A dealer in leather goods as a tanner and saddle maker, he taught this skill to his grandson, Addison Avery, Jr., who operated a leather shop in Denver in 1892, according to a listing in a Denver directory of that year.
Augustus William Smith was, like Abraham Avery, one of a handful of the men involved in the creation of Wesleyan University in 1831. One of sons, William Augustus Smith, married Abraham Avery's granddaughter, Ann Elizabeth Avery, in 1862 in Philadelphia. The newlyweds soon departed for the wilds of Illinois, where Rev. W.A. Smith died in 1887. About her father-in-law we learn as follows:
Augustus William Smith was born in Newport, New York on May 12, 1802. He attended Hamilton College, from which he graduated in 1825, and went on to teach at Oneida Conference Seminary in Cazenovia (located southeast of Syracuse). In 1831, Smith was among the founding faculty of Wesleyan University. He taught astronomy and mathematics at Wesleyan for twenty years before his selection as Fifth President of the university in 1851. After eight years at the helm of Wesleyan, Smith accepted a position as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. He remained in this post until his death on March 26, 1866.
Smith was an accomplished scholar. In 1860 he was selected by the U. S. government to be one of the corps of astronomers sent to Labrador to observe the annular eclipse of the sun. He was reputed to be an excellent mathematician, and authored of several textbooks, including an An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (New York, 1846). He married Catherine Rachel Childs, by whom he had several children including a daughter, Katherine Louisa. A convert to the Methodist-Episcopal Church, Smith also held a life-long interest in denominational affairs and was active in that capacity.
Addison's sister, Martha's Aunt Julia Avery, married Rev. John Roper in Boston in 1842. After only four years of marriage, Rev. Roper died in Ohio, and Julia returned to Massachusetts, where she married George Curtis Rand, owner and operator of a large printing firm in Boston. Addison Avery, who had been educated first to be a minister and then a lawyer, gave up both professions to become a partner with his brother-in-law, creating Rand & Avery. Rand died in 1878, and Addison Avery in 1893. Five years afterRev. Smith's death, Ann Elizabeth Avery Smith obtained a passport for herself and Martha to travel abroad. Martha's biography at Northwestern states she studied in Berlin and Paris that year, then did graduate work at the University Chicago in 1894 while she also taught Latin and English. In 1898 she attended Stanford, followed by a year at UC Berkeley, before marrying W.F. Hyde in 1900.
Northwestern University Alumni Records
This was the family of William Avery Hyde's mother, Martha Constance Smith, another of whose paternal aunts was Helen Fairchild Smith, mentor to the wife of President Grover Cleveland.
Stay tuned for next section of Ruth Hyde Paine's family connections.
PART II
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture
By Linda Minor
My project to tear down the veil that separates Ruth Hyde Paine from the mysterious array of skeletons in her past began in Part I with a trail that took us back to a group of America's first settlers. Surprisingly, both of Ruth's parents were discovered to have stemmed from Christopher Hyde, who stepped foot on American soil in 1630. We tracked the life of William Penn Hyde, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church during the civil war years until he left his Rhode Island pastorate to move to California in 1881. They initially settled near the University of the Pacific in Santa Clara.
William Penn Hyde move to California in 1881
At first I thought William Fletcher Hyde could not possibly have received a college education given these circumstances. Why, I wondered, did Martha Constance Smith, with all her degrees from Berlin, Paris, Chicago and Stanford marry him. Upon further research, it was discovered that in 1891, ten years after relocating to Santa Clara, California, not only did W.F. Hyde attend the University of the Pacific, but that he operated its bookstore as well.
Mrs. Leland Stanford's Hyde ancestry
Then I realized that Leland Stanford, who owned thousands of acres of land in Santa Clara County in 1881, had studied law at Cazenovia Methodist seminary, where Martha's grandfather had taught mathematics before he left there in 1831 to help establish the Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Was there a connection? After a year in Cazenovia Seminary, Leland Stanford served a legal apprenticeship in Albany, where he met and married Jane Lathrop.
Incredibly enough, Jane Lathop Stanford's heritage takes us back to Norwich, Connecticut. What a small world indeed!
So far it seems that everyone connected to Ruth Hyde Paine is a member of the Hyde extended family The list below, modified from an Ancestry.comfamily tree gives a whole new meaning to the term "elite class"!
Four Branches of Samuel Hyde Family
So what does all this mean in terms of the murder of John F. Kennedy, an upstart Irishman born into an immigrant Catholic family in Boston? Who REALLY wanted him dead in 1963?
How do we proceed at this point? I always remember the first rule of research, taught to me from repeatedly watching the movie "All the President's Men." Remember how Hal Holbrook's character "Deep Throat" whispered to Robert Redford through a haze of cigarette smoke: "Follow the money!"
Thus, I backed up the research to discover how Leland Stanford became such a wealthy man in only twenty years. One website succinctly summarized:
Stanford had joined with Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker to found the Central Pacific Railroad Company on June 28, 1861. Stanford was elected president of the company and used his position as Governor of California to further the railroad's interests. President Lincoln supported the concept of a transcontinental railroad as being another important link between the Union and California and important Federal assistance was made available. Construction of the line commenced in Sacramento on January 8, 1863. Charles Crocker directed the actual construction, C.P. Huntington handled relations with the Federal Government in Washington D.C. and with the Eastern financial community, and Mark Hopkins kept an eye on the company's finances. As president, Stanford was the public face of the company in California and usually took the lead in dealing with state politics.
C.P Huntington on railroad bonds
Who was this C.P. Huntington, who handled the land grants from the federal government, leveraged with investments from the "Eastern financial community?" I wondered. I learned that Collis Potter Huntington had been born to Henry Edward Huntington, whose ancestry tracks back to where else but Norwich, Connecticut, where Samuel Huntington had been born in 1665 to the first American in the tree, Deacon Simon Huntington who arrived from England in 1629. On a whim, based on years of research on Skull and Bones, I decided to check further back to determine whether William Huntington Russell had any connection to Deacon Simon.
William H. Russell was born in 1809 in Middletown, Connecticut to Matthew Talcott Russell and Mary Huntington, daughter of Rev. Enoch Huntington. Enoch was the son of Nathaniel (born 1691), grandson of Joseph Huntington (born in Norwich in 1661), who was son of this same Deacon Simon Huntington! The world is absolutely microscopic.
So let's return to Stanford. The same website quoted above brings us up to date:
Stanford and his Central Pacific Railroad partners completed the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad to Los Angeles in 1876 and linked it to New Orleans in 1883. Stanford was elected Senator in 1885 on the Republican ticket and he moved to Washington D.C. In 1885 the Central Pacific Railroad was leased to the Southern Pacific Railroad and the partners controlled a total of 4,711 miles of track from California through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas to Louisiana. During the 1870s and 1880s Stanford assembled a large estate south of San Francisco and began breeding horses. By the end of the 1880s the Palo Alto stock Farm amounted to more than 8,000 acres and was producing some of the very finest trotting horses in the nation. ... During this period Stanford also owned 55,000 acres of land in Vina, California where he unsuccessfully experimented in grape growing and champagne production.
The Stanfords' only son, Leland, Junior, died in Florence, Italy, on March 13, 1884, while the family was vacationing in Europe. The parents were heartbroken and decided to use their wealth to establish a university as a memorial to their son. On November 11, 1885, Mr. and Mrs. Stanford, established a board of trustees to govern the new university. Land from their Palo Alto Stock Farm and the Vina vineyard were deeded to the university and construction on the first buildings were begun in 1887. Stanford University opened in 1891 with David Starr Jordan serving as its first president. That same year Stanford was reelected to the Senate. Stanford's partner, C.P. Huntington, did not approve of Stanford's second candidacy having committed himself to support Aaron A. Sargent for the position. Relations between Huntington and Stanford deteriorated dramatically and resulted in a long bitter and very public fight between the two men.
Leland Stanford died in his sleep at home on June 20, 1893.
At this point we will resume with Part III.
PART III
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture
By Linda Minor
Ruth Hyde Paine's Grandfather
William Fletcher Hyde
Martha Constance Smith Hyde, described more fully in the previous segment, arrived in Palo Alto, California, in 1898 from Chicago. Although she had a Ph.D. and did additional graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley and at Stanford, she seems to have sacrificed all those years of education when she married William F. Hyde in 1900. Only a year after they married William Avery Hyde was born, and before long, another son, Theodore, undoubtedly named for President Theodore Roosevelt, who spent time in California. Sylvia Alden Hyde, the third child, was born in 1907.
Although W.F. Hyde seems to have tried to become a miner in 1896, it was short-lived, since he never completed an engineering degree. Instead, he relocated to Palo Alto, evidenced by a letter written to Mrs. Leland Stanford in 1898, as manager of the Stanford bookstore. He held a similar position at University of the Pacific before his attempt at mining. His move to Palo Alto occurred three years after future U.S. President Herbert Hoover had been in Stanford's first graduating class (1894).
W.P. Hyde moved to Lincoln Ave. residence in 1899.
Census records of William Fletcher Hyde family in Palo Alto: 1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930.
The Birth of Stanford and Palo Alto
Although George Washington had admonished his countrymen to "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," when he left office in 1796, he also advised that "just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated." Herbert Hoover, a member of Leland Stanford Junior University's first graduating class of 1894, embodied those feelings during his career. He studied geology under John Casper Branner, who was destined to become Stanford's second president in 1917.
Hoover family in 1917
As the Hoovers settled themselves into Palo Alto life, Herbert Hoover was contacted by President Wilson's Ambassador to the Court of St. James in London, Walter Hines Page, to assist Europe in finding gold to finance the war. He took his family with him briefly until Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914. Then theboys returned to school in Palo Alto (the 1920 census shows them living on Cabrillo Avenue, near Dolores Street, close to where they contracted to build their mansion at 623 Mirada).
South of the Stanford Quad, the Hoover home was about two miles from the new Palo Alto High School, which opened in 1918.Channing grammar school was less than a mile from the Hyde residence on Lincoln Avenue. Since these were the only public schools, it is impossible that William Avery Hyde, Ruth's father, eldest of the children of W.F. and Martha Smith Hyde, was not acquainted with both Herbert Hoover, Jr. and his younger brother, Allan H. Hoover, born in 1903 and 1907 respectively.
President Jordan
As the United States had grown, it experienced one financial panic after another--the result of not having a central bank in charge of monetary policy. Both the Bank of the U.S. and the Second Bank of the U.S., envisioned by Alexander Hamilton, had been killed by policies instigated by Andrew Jackson before the civil war. Hope had been renewed by discovery of gold in California and Colorado, but still investment in infrastructure required money, much of which was sought from Europeans who bought stocks and bonds issued by American banking houses.
Leland Stanford, one the "Big Four," who built Abraham Lincoln's Central Pacific Railroad, had become wealthy in California by the time his son died in 1884. He and his wife decided to create Leland Stanford Junior University in his memory and consulted Andrew Dickson White, who had built Cornell in Ithaca, New York, staffed with elite Skull and Bones graduates of Yale, White's alma mater. White highly recommended that the Stanfords offer the job as Stanford's first president to David Starr Jordan.
Leland Stanford did not live to see the first graduating class cross the podium. He died in 1893, and the endowment continued to be controlled by his wife, the former Jane Lathrop, with whom Jordan worked very closely to ensure the university would survive during the difficult years resulting from the financial panic of 1893. Working with them was Timothy Hopkins, appointed a trustee in 1885; he was the adopted son of Mrs. Mark Hopkins, wife of Stanford's former partner in the Southern Pacific Railroad, though he received no inheritance from her when she died in 1891.
Only in the new century did the assurance come that the university would survive, at the time of Jane's death (1905), when the endowment received the anticipated funds from her estate:
In June 1903, Jane transferred control of the university's endowment to the Board of Trustees, and she urged the board to increase graduate enrollment and support research and teaching. However, it was only with her death in February 1905 in Honolulu [allegedly from strychnine poisoning]# that the transfer of powers was legalized, and funds continued to flow to the construction of several significant buildings through 1905.
Stanford's "World View"
Jordan was a young man of 40 when he assumed the presidency. An ichthyologist (student of fish), he had studied at Cornell before assuming presidency of Indiana University at the age of 34.
Some of Jordan's papers, labeled "Peace Collection," note that he was president of the World Peace Foundation from 1910 to 1914 and president of the World Peace Conference in 1915; these papers were donated to the Quaker college atSwarthmore, Pennsylvania. Jordan retired from Stanford in 1916, remain in the public eye until 1925. His death in Palo Alto occurred in 1931, while his friend Herbert Hoover was U.S. President. An obituary referred to him as the "chief director" of the World Peace Conference. In 1922 Jordan dedicated his selected essays entitled War and the Breed: the Relation of War to the Downfall of Nations to Andrew Dickson White, "who taught me to see in history, not a succession of events but a segment of human life."
The World Peace Foundation was the American section of a broader movement for international peace at that time, one goal being the expansion of the league of nations and the Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration to settle international disputes. One advocate of this Court was the grandfather of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles--John Watson Foster--who was on the Advisory Council of the World Peace Foundation with David Starr Jordan. As Foster related in his history of the Hague Peace Conference, among the Americans present in 1899 was Jordan's mentor, Andrew D. White.
White, as first president of Cornell University, also acted as a behind-the-scenes mentor of the man given credit for putting together the coalition that in 1912 elected President Woodrow Wilson--"Colonel" Edward M. House of Texas, who attended Cornell in the mid 1870's but never graduated.
By the time Ruth Paine's grandfather moved to Palo Alto in 1897, Hoover had jumped into his mining career on the international stage, and was determined to assist his somewhat older brother, Tad, in completing his degree in mining engineering at the same college.
As his biographer Will Irwin reported, in 1899 Herbert married Lou Henry, and together they set out to the Far East, where they found themselves at Tianjin in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion in China. From there they would move to London where two sons would be born. By 1909 the Hoovers were able to return at least several months a year to the United States, much of it in Palo Alto, especially by 1912. As Europe became more involved in war, requiring gold as payment for arms, munitions and other necessities, Herbert Hoover remained on call for globe-trotting assignments in search of such gold, although in 1912 he became one of Stanford's trustees. The Hoover sons were enrolled in school in Palo Alto, undoubtedly the same school as the children of W.F. Hyde.+
Theodore Jesse (Tad) Hoover entered Stanford in the same class with W.F. Hyde's younger brother, James McDonald Hyde in 1897, and they not only graduated together in the class of 1901, but in 1919 both were named Stanford professors. They had spent the intervening years, much as Herbert Hoover had, traversing the world in search of gold and other precious metals. Dr. Branner continued to head the geology department until President Jordan's retirement in 1918, succeeding him in that position the following year. Tad Hoover got his place heading the geology department, with James Hyde as his chief associate.
Good Government and Career Changes
William Fletcher Hyde, father of W.A. Hyde
Like Forrest Gump, William Fletcher Hyde was in Palo Alto, California during the above events, though he was quite invisible to historians. A photograph of the Carnegie public library in Palo Alto can be seen online.
In addition to working with library and bookseller groups (see clipping to left), W.F. also was involved as a delegate to local and state Republican Party conventions as early as August, 1906, when he and Marshall Black were elected to attend the California state Republican convention. Black, head of Palo Alto Mutual Building and Loan Association, served as state senator, and was so wealthy by 1903 he built the historic mansion in nearby Menlo Park recently purchased by Mark Zuckerberg. By 1912, however, Black was accused of irregularities that led to his conviction and imprisonment. We can only wonder whether W.F. Hyde, who served on five grand juries over the years, had a role in seeing this associate sent to jail.
As elections rolled around in November 1906, Hyde helped towrite a constitution for the Palo Alto "Good Government League" with several men with strong business connections --Dr. Jefferson Elmore (Stanford Latin professor), Walter E. Vail (life insurance agent), Dr. C. W. Decker (physician), and Constable Fred B. Simpson. Various Hyde family members are listed on page 62 of the 1915 city directory, with W.F. Hyde being conspicuously absent at that time. We do, however, find him listed in 1918 as an employee of Underwood & Underwood in Los Altos under the heading "stereoscopic views." According to Taylor & Francis:
By 1900, Underwood and Underwood, the largest company in the United States, was turning out 35,000 stereograph cards daily and 10 million yearly (Darrah1977, 47). The large-scale production and distribution of stereographs enabled them to become a mass-distributed visual source of information consumed for a variety of purposes, such as entertainment, education and propaganda (Speer 1989, 301).
1922 ad
In about 1913, however, the Hyde Book Store in Palo Alto was operated by his brother, Edward L. Hyde and his wife, the former Lauretta Coe Foster. By 1920 William Fletcher had become an insurance agent and began to sell real estate as well. In fact, when the Hoover family in 1930 gave up their 15-room residence at Stanford's "San Juan Hill," the realtor who listed it for rent was none other than W.F. Hyde.
Carol Hyde Meets W.F. Hyde
As mentioned in Part I, Carol was descended from the original Hyde ancestor as William Avery, but from a different branch. Her parents entered the ministry when Charles Ludlow Hyde, her father, was 35 and graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. By 1916, however, after being sent to churches in Colorado and California, he had seemingly tired of the ministry. According to an item that appeared in several United Press news carriers in July 1916:
Another strange case is that of Rev. Charles L. Hyde of Niles, Cal., who wants to give up his pastorate at the First Congregational church there and go to work as a farm hand or on a poultry ranch.
Nevertheless, Rev. Hyde had the last laugh on the press, since the 1920 census finds him employed as the secretary of a poultry association in Palo Alto, California. As the item to the right shows, once they moved to the Palo Alto area, the Charles L. Hydes became acquainted with the W.F. Hydes at the local Congregational Church. Carol's mother played the organ, while Charles and William Fletcher sang bass in the choir. Carol was an alto, but William Avery was nowhere to be found. Most likely it was Carol Hyde Hyde who encouraged her youngest daughter Ruth to take up folk singing and dancing, where as it turned out she would meet her husband, Michael Ralph Paine in Philadelphia prior to their marriage in 1957.
Like his son's new father-in-law, William Fletcher Hyde would also experience an abrupt change in his career during the years prior to or during WWI, at a time the couple had three young children ranging in age from six to ten years old. He had served as president and trustee of the Palo Alto Public Library for many years, and his sisters were librarians, Mary at the San Francisco public library and Lillian at Stanford. W.F. also was a trustee for the California state library association. Though he could not have known then that Herbert Hoover would become U.S. President in 1928, he most likely knew that Herbert Clark Hoover was his younger brother's employer, and it is possible that, through that connection, W.F. felt greener pastures were in store for him.
James McDonald Hyde, had graduated from Stanford in 1901, and by 1903 had a teaching job at the University of Oregon. Then in 1910 he went to London to work for Herbert Hoover's brother Tad, whom James had known in college. Tad, actually Theodore Jesse Hoover, had been manager of Minerals Separation, Ltd., since 1907, but left soon after installing James at the company. While there, James had a disagreement with another Stanford geologist named Edward Nutter, but left within a year to work in Montana. Minerals Separated, Ltd. then sued James for infringing one of its patents. When the case came to trial in Montana in 1912, the Hoover brothers were the chief witnesses on James' behalf. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal in 1915. A portion of James' testimony is excerpted to the left.
The 1920 census record shown above indicates the W.F. Hyde family lived in Los Altos, Santa Clara County, that year, with W.F. engaged in insurance and real estate. He had also become involved with theLos Altos Improvement Club. The eldest child, William Avery, was 17 and looking forward to attending Stanford University soon--almost at the same time his father starting selling insurance and real estate. While he was a student, his mother died at the young age of 53.
In 1932 William Avery Hyde's aunt, Sylvia Hyde, was an art instructor at San Jose State College. She and Theodore Hyde, neither of whom had married, continued, after their mother's death, to live in the three-story residence at 334 Lincoln, even after their father's death in 1939. Sylvia most likely developed her interest in art from her aunt, Bessie Hyde Kennedy, who also lived in the large residence until her own death in 1944.
Sylvia worked from home as an artist and also worked in her father's insurance/real estate office, and at 310 University Avenue, Menlo Park. This address was the same as the University Realty Co., just a few doors from the Hyde Bookstore of Edward L. Hyde at 362 University (either the location or the street numbering changed). Edward's wife, Lauretta was the daughter of Harrison Streeter Coe, a 1903 Stanford mining graduate, who filed a patent for an invention like the one J.M. Hyde had been sued for infringing.
By 1943, she was hired as a teacher at Grant Union High School and had moved to Del Paso Heights north of Sacramento. Sylvia later married Otto V. [von Thulen] Rhoades at some point after he divorced in the 1930's, and she continued to correspond with her nephew and visit with him on infrequent visits in California; she only recalled meeting Ruth on two occasions. Theodore Hyde died in Walnut Creek, California in 1991. Nothing else about these siblings of William Avery Hyde has been discovered.
Part V
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture
By Linda Minor
One Memorandum Dredges Up Much History
Memo to Mr. Bielefeldt, C/FDD at CIA
Approximately six weeks after John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas, Lee H. Wigren of C/SR/CI/ Research section the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) typed a memo addressed to the attention of "Mr. Bielefeldt," in the CIA section called C/FDD -- the Foreign Documents Division.
Wigren's research department for counterintelligence (CI) was ultimately headed by Tennent "Pete" Bagley:
Bagley was the chief counterspy for the Soviet Russia [SR] division, and had been stationed in Switzerland (eventually to become station chief) during the time [March 1959] that Oswald was due to attend Albert Schweitzer College.[ 69 ] Bagley had been transferred from Berne to Langley where he gained a rapid promotion to become C/SR/CI.
Pete Bagley's Baggage: Uncle Josephus
Pete Bagley, CIA
In 1950, when he joined the CIA, Pete Bagley was a youthful 26 years old. He undoubtedly had been groomed from birth for the role he was to play in international spy games. His given names came from his mother's father,Tennent Harrington, cashier of the Colusa County Bank in California. As a teen, his mother, Marie Louise Harrington, traveled frequently with with her maternal aunt and uncle, Commander William D. Leahy, to Washington, D.C., and was introduced to an array of naval officers there.
Although she may have met Lieutenant Commander David Worth Bagley, whom she married in 1918, in Washington, one wedding announcement indicates they had in fact met in Newport, R.I., the upper crust resort to which Marie Louise had traveled with a paternal aunt and uncle, Admiral Albert Parker Niblack.
In Pete's parents' wedding announcement in the Washington Post (right) toward the end of WWI, the groom, David Worth Bagley, was revealed as a brother of Adelaide Bagley Daniels, wife of Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.
As a matter of fact, Daniels (editor of a Democrat-financed newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.) had published in 1898 a biography of his wife's older brother, Ensign Worth Bagley, the first Navy officer killed in action during the Spanish-American War, and Adelaide would name David's brother Worth Bagley Daniels after the war hero.
Secretary Daniels first entered appointive political office in 1893 when another southerner, M. Hoke Smith, a railroad reformer and champion of farmers, selected him to work in Grover Cleveland's Interior Department, a position he would hold for only a year. After purchasing controlling interest in the Raleigh News and Observer and in 1905, however, he perfected his political writing skill and was chosen in 1912 to head the "publicity bureau" of the Wilson campaign. Since Wilson's campaign was controlled by Edward M. House of Texas, Daniels no doubt had acquired the attention of the "Colonel" himself. After the campaign he was rewarded with the job as Secretary of the Navy, probably because of his wife's close ties to Naval officers.
Although Daniels left office in 1921, his propaganda efforts continued. His wife worked with Mrs. Robert Lansing, wife of the Secretary of State, in sponsoring the first National Conference of Church Women in Washington, D.C. in 1920. The Interchurch World Movement's division for "Women's Activities," organized by Adelaide Worth Daniels and Eleanor Foster Lansing and other wives in the administration of Woodrow Wilson, also had help from Mesdames John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Henry P. Davison. This "women's work" allowed their husbands to gather unofficial intelligence through the State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American and International Red Cross Societies, and Protestant church-related foreign missionary groups, which allied themselves with Friends' organizations, the YMCA, and "war work councils". There was no official civilian intelligence agency in those days.
This blog discussed the Dulles family's role in world missions a year ago, under the caption "John Birch Society Warning to JFK in 1958." It should be recalled that the wife of Wilson's Secretary of State, Mrs. Robert "Eleanor Foster" Lansing, was a sister of Edith Foster Dulles, whose sons John Foster and Allen Dulles were being trained to exert the same missionary zeal in the 1940's and 50's over world affairs and intelligence as these sisters' father, John Watson Foster, had done in the 1870's, 80's and 90's. Protestant fundamentalists were the original settlers of American colonies. Through their control of institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, they also controlled the purse strings of charitable and missionary efforts abroad. It was simple enough to set up front groups through which to spy on suspected dissidents.
Josephus Daniels returned to "public service" in 1933 to become President Roosevelt's Ambassador to Mexico, a post he held in Mexico City at the time Leon Trotsky was living in asylum at nearby Coyoacan. Did Daniels have a role in having Trotsky murdered in August 1940 by an "ice-ax-wielding assassin"?
Had young Pete Bagley ever heard stories told by his uncle about those days in Mexico? Daniels died in 1948. Pete was then 24 years old, but he would have been a teenager in 1940 when he read about Trotsky's death.The convicted assassin Jacques Mornard van den Dresch finished serving his prison sentence in 1960 and went to Cuba with a Czech passport. Mexican officials by then claimed he was a Spaniard, though he had earlier claimed to be Persian-born of Belgian parents. Pete Bagley must have wondered what his uncle had known. But we can no longer ask him. He died in March 2014.
Talbot Bielefeldt's Own Skeletons
By 1963, however, Pete Bagley was not looking back to Trotsky's murder in Mexico in 1940. He had a more current assassination to solve. Having been in charge of Soviet counterintelligence since 1959, it was his office which tasked Lee Wigren to obtain an "analysis of the Soviet press reaction" to the assassination of President Kennedy. Was there a reason Wigren addressed his questions to Talbot Bielefeldt, whose expertise was not Russian, but Japanese?
J. Bagnall
Exactly who was Talbot Bielefeldt? We do know from the above memo that he worked in the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA, and therefore his boss would have beenJohn J. Bagnall. who also seems to have something to do with "Project USJPRS".
In February 1962 E. Howard Hunt, who had been attempting to find work for his wife Dorothy, was advised to check with Bagnall to see if he could find work for her in JUSPB [sic]; the writer must have been referring to, USJPRS, the U.S. Joint Publications Research Service:
JPRS was established in March 1957 as part of the United States Department of Commerce's Office of Technical Services, about six months before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1.Acting as a unit within the Central Intelligence Agency, JPRS staffers prepared translations for the use of U.S. Government officials, various agencies, and the research and industrial communities. During the Cold War, the reports were primarily translations rather than analysis or commentary, with an emphasis on scientific and technical topics. Over time, however, that scope expanded to cover environmental concerns, world health issues, nuclear proliferation, and more.
Writer, Leo Sarkisian, who worked with Voice of America, was once photographed at a party with the Bielefeldts and other CIA officials who worked with foreign translations.
Nixons at Fullerton Union
Talbot's family in 1920 was living in Placentia, California, a Quaker community, the same small town where Richard Nixon's family lived at that time. Though Talbot was ten years older than Richard, he did have siblings the same age as the Nixon boys. Talbot and his younger siblings attended Fullerton Union High School, where Richard Nixon was a student in 1927-28, though the Nixons had moved to Whittier after 1920. Did they cross paths before Nixon came to prominence during the Red Scare wave?
Though Talbot's parents were born in Iowa, both sets of his grandparents immigrated to Iowa from Hanover, Germany. His father and grandfather tried their hands at mining near Silverton, Colorado for a time, but moved to Maryland after a scarlet fever plague killed several family members. Talbot and his two closest siblings were born while the Bielefeldts lived in a large house on the Miles River in the Chesapeake region, and his name likely came from Talbot County, where it was located.
When Talbot was five years old, his family had moved from the east coast to the west, settling in North Orange County, where three more children were born. Talbot's father turned to farming and by 1930 owned a prosperous citrus ranch in Placentia. It is likely Talbot's exposure to the German language stuck with him. Then, at Stanford in the early 1920's, he gravitated toward internationalism. The summer before his senior year, he spent a month in Japan with a group of young men his age. Although there is no independent evidence of the fact, his wedding announcement in 1936 revealed:
Mr. Bielefeldt, who is postmaster at Placentia, is a graduate of Stanford University. He was afaculty member of American schools in the Orient, in China and Japan.
Fernanda Eliscu in Winterset, 1936
His new wife, Eugenie Pfeil, was the daughter of two stage actors, who used the names Carl Anthony and Fernanda Eliscu (born in Romania). After Carl's death in 1930, Fernanda began making movies, her first being the "photoplay," Winterset, written and produced by Maxwell Anderson in 1936. Talbot took his new wife back home to Placentia, where he had been assigned a commission by the President as Postmaster of his hometown.
A week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Talbot enlisted in the Navy and served six years, first being assigned to the Japanese Language School on the campus of University of California at Berkeley. By September 1944he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Commander and there are indications he was involved in cryptology. From there it was only natural that he would join the Central Intelligence Agency when it was created in 1947.
Excerpt from Roger Dignman in Deciphering the Rising Sun: Navy and Marine Corps Codebreakers, Translators and Interpreters in the Pacific War.
As shown in the excerpt above, W. A. Talbot Bielefeldt was among the first men chosen for the Japanese Language School held in California, along with someone called "Gerald J. Bagnall". Could Gerald have been a disguised "John"? This first class preceded the selection of Roger Pineau, who attended the same school after it was moved to Colorado because of internment of Japanese taking place at the original location.
According to the CIA's website:
With the creation of the Central Intelligence Group there commenced a process of accretion of functions taken from the wartime agencies and from departments which were anticipating reductions in budget under peacetime conditions. The Strategic Services Unit was transferred from the Department of the Army and became the Office of Special Operations - charged with espionage and counterespionage functions. The Washington Document Center was taken over from the Navy and shortly after that the Army's German Military Documents Center at Fort Holabird joined this unit and together became the Foreign Documents Division. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an organization with worldwide bases for monitoring all non-coded radio traffic, which had originally been under the Federal Communications Commission, was transferred from the Army and became the Foreign Broadcast Information Division. During World War II the Army and Navy and OSS and occasionally other agencies had all approached US businesses and institutions in search of foreign intelligence information. An early agreement was reached that this domestic collection should be performed as a service of common concern by Central Intelligence with other agencies participating as they desired, and this became the Contact Division. Another illustration of the type of functions taken on is the division of responsibilities with the Department of State on biographic intelligence. The list would be much too long if we attempted to enumerate all of the functions acquired in this method.
In December 1953 Talbot was rated at the salary level GS-14 in the C.I.A., and his name appeared on a list of 96 CIA employees cleared for Top Security, who were "certified to meet the standards required" to attend lectures at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. On that list were also the names Thomas W. Braden, C. Tracy Barnes, E. Howard Hunt, and Cord Meyer, Jr., but many more names were redacted, even upon the list's release in 1998.
Two years after receiving clearance to attend the Industrial College, Talbot wrote the following memorandum to Bruce Solie of the CIA's Security Analysis Group (SAG):
click to enlarge
Re: Orr, Paul & Violet
William A. Hyde was in Washington this last week-end, visiting his daughter and son-in-law, Sylvia and John Hoke, 763 Kennedy, N.E. The latter invited [REDACTED] and me over to meet him on Saturday night, 17 December, since we three were friends at Stanford.
Why would Solie's security group have been curious about William Hyde and his eldest daughter, Sylvia Hyde Hoke? And who, pray tell, were Paul and Violet Hyde?
PART I
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture
By Linda Minor
Ruth Hyde Paine
Ruth Paine has often been referred to as "Marina Oswald's babysitter" during the eight months preceding President Kennedy's assassination. She has been called other names as well, but mostly there has been a big question mark concerning (1) what role she really had and (2) which organization, among the plethora of intelligence groups active in those months, assigned her that role.
Ruth clearly was someone's tool. Was she merely an implement of care and compassion emanating from a woman who wanted to practice her Russian-speaking skills? Was she, as wife of Bell Helicopter design engineer, Michael Paine, working as an agent of death and deceit on behalf of her husband's employer?
Michael Paine
My goal as an objective researcher is not to find evidence that would answer those questions. Only you can answer them for yourself. My job as I see it is to explore whatever databases I have access to in order to make this woman a little less mysterious, to learn about her family dating back several generations, possibly discovering details she herself has never known, possibly some of which is irrelevant. However, when all the dots of her her life are pinpointed on her historical timeline, her place in history will fall into its proper context.
The HYDE family history
Sixty-one years before John Kennedy was murdered, Ruth Hyde's father was born in Palo Alto, California, and given the name of William Avery Hyde. The ancestry of his grandfather, William Penn Hyde, a Methodist minister who had been born in Mystic, Connecticut, has been traced back to his first American ancestor, William Hyde, born in 1583, who, with wife Anne Bushnell, had a son named Samuel, born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1637. Samuel married Jane Lee, and from their union sprang several distinct branches of the family, two of which eventually spawned Ruth Hyde.
Samuel Hyde's son Jabez, born 1677, descended through Phineas I, Phineas II, and John, down to William Penn Hyde. Jabez's brother John descended through Captain James Hyde (wife Martha Nevins), Rev. Charles Hyde (wife Mary Ludlow), and Peter Ludlow Hyde (wife Harriet Clapp), down to Charles Ludlow Hyde, the father of Carol Elizabeth Hyde, who married William Avery Hyde. Small world, as they say!
There is a third distinct line, seemingly unrelated at this point, that descended through Samuel's son Thomas down to Henry Baldwin Hyde, who in 1859 founded the Equitable Life Assurance Society in the United States, leaving the company's control in the hands of his son, James Hazen Hyde upon the older man's death in 1899. We will talk about that branch later as the research continues.
Reuben Hyde Walworth's book is online.
William Penn Hyde in California
William Penn (W.P.) Hyde, suffering ill health from which he hoped to recover in California, retired from his Methodist ministry which had sent him to Rhode Island after a variety of pastorates in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1859 he had married Seraphine Smith Carr with whom he had eleven children, and in 1881 the family moved to Santa Clara County, California, about 50 miles south of San Francisco.
Leland Stanford was also a transplant to California, having previously been in business in Albany before moving to California after the 1849 gold rush. As a supporter of Abraham Lincoln in the Republican convention in 1860, he attended the new President's inauguration and supported his plans for the transcontinental railroad. That same year he was elected governor of California, and in 1863 president of the Central Pacific Railroad, subsequently renamed the Southern Pacific. Made land-rich by the federal grants made to finance the construction of the railroad, by 1881 Stanford owned thousands of acres of land in Santa Clara County where William Penn Hyde settled that year with his large family.
334 Lincoln - Hyde residence
Stanford's teenage son, Leland, Jr. died of typhoid fever in 1884, and his father, former governor and future Senator, as a memorial to his only child, began creating a university--and a new town to house it--out of his acreage. Even before construction was complete, the Hyde family moved within the same county, settling permanently in Palo Alto.
Herbert Hoover, 1894
When Leland Stanford, Jr. University opened its doors in 1891, future president Herbert Hoover was among the ten or so students who would study geology and graduate in the class of 1894. The first campus bookstore was managed by William Fletcher (W.F.) Hyde, eldest son of W. P. Hyde, who would remain in that position for sixteen years. His sister, Bessie Hyde, had married in 1891 to a minister named William A. Kennedy, and moved to Denver. Rev. Kennedy did not live long, and Bessie and her daughter Laura eventually moved back to Palo Alto to live in the stately Lincoln Avenue residence with her maiden sisters, which they operated as a boarding house after W.P. died in 1919.
The Hydes lived in a three-story home at 334 Lincoln Avenue in the now historic area known as Professorville, where William Avery Hyde's uncle, James McDonald Hyde--thirteen years younger than W.F.--had grown up and where he lived while attending Stanford in the same class as Herbert Hoover's older brother Theodore, both of whom studied geology. James McD. Hyde later became a Stanford professor of metallurgy. Their sister,Mary Hyde, studied back east and became assistant librarian at Stanford, living with Lillian, a teacher, and Laura, who ran the boarding house. Their brother Edward L. Hyde, operated a stationery store at 160 University Avenue and lived with his wife, the former Lauretta Coe, at 381 Lincoln.
William Fletcher Hyde and Martha Smith
W.F. Hyde, who had been 20 when his family moved west, had not had the benefit of a formal college education, but he did well in business. He married Martha Constance Smith in 1900, and they proceeded to have three children--William Avery, Theodore, and Sylvia Alden Hyde, all born before 1910. In that year the census shows them living at 959 Bryant (also known as 301 Addison) in the Professorville section of Palo Alto, while W.F. managed the Stanford bookstore. Martha's mother, Elizabeth Avery Smith, widow of yet another clergyman, Rev. William Augustus Smith who died in 1887, lived in the same house.
It is not known how William Fletcher Hyde and Martha Smith met. Her family tree, surprisingly, also traces back to colonial Connecticut, her first American ancestor being Christopher Avery who arrived from Devon, England, to New London, Conn. in 1630 with his wife Margery Stephens of Exeter. The wife of John Foster Dulles (Janet Pomeroy Avery) was a member of that same Groton Avery clan, although the nearest common ancestor she shared with Martha was born around 1650, making them extremely distant cousins.
Nevetheless, there is another link through Martha's father which almost connects her to this other Groton branch. Her father's brother, Augustus Ledyard Smith (born 1833) was given the maiden name of his grandmother, Catherine Ledyard Childs, daughter of Benjamin Ledyard. Benjamin moved to the area now known as Aurora, New York from Groton, Connecticut in 1793, becoming one of its founders, and, intriguingly, his mother, Mary Avery Ledyard, descended from the same Avery line as Janet Pomeroy Avery Dulles, mentioned earlier.
Martha's maternal grandfather, Addison Avery married Sylvia Moseley in 1834 in Wilbraham, Mass., where his father, Abraham Avery, a dedicated Methodist, had helped in founding the Wesleyan Academy. Abraham also was instrumental in the establishment of Wesleyan University at Middletown, Conn., where he served as a trustee. A dealer in leather goods as a tanner and saddle maker, he taught this skill to his grandson, Addison Avery, Jr., who operated a leather shop in Denver in 1892, according to a listing in a Denver directory of that year.
Augustus William Smith was, like Abraham Avery, one of a handful of the men involved in the creation of Wesleyan University in 1831. One of sons, William Augustus Smith, married Abraham Avery's granddaughter, Ann Elizabeth Avery, in 1862 in Philadelphia. The newlyweds soon departed for the wilds of Illinois, where Rev. W.A. Smith died in 1887. About her father-in-law we learn as follows:
Augustus William Smith was born in Newport, New York on May 12, 1802. He attended Hamilton College, from which he graduated in 1825, and went on to teach at Oneida Conference Seminary in Cazenovia (located southeast of Syracuse). In 1831, Smith was among the founding faculty of Wesleyan University. He taught astronomy and mathematics at Wesleyan for twenty years before his selection as Fifth President of the university in 1851. After eight years at the helm of Wesleyan, Smith accepted a position as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. He remained in this post until his death on March 26, 1866.
Smith was an accomplished scholar. In 1860 he was selected by the U. S. government to be one of the corps of astronomers sent to Labrador to observe the annular eclipse of the sun. He was reputed to be an excellent mathematician, and authored of several textbooks, including an An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (New York, 1846). He married Catherine Rachel Childs, by whom he had several children including a daughter, Katherine Louisa. A convert to the Methodist-Episcopal Church, Smith also held a life-long interest in denominational affairs and was active in that capacity.
Addison's sister, Martha's Aunt Julia Avery, married Rev. John Roper in Boston in 1842. After only four years of marriage, Rev. Roper died in Ohio, and Julia returned to Massachusetts, where she married George Curtis Rand, owner and operator of a large printing firm in Boston. Addison Avery, who had been educated first to be a minister and then a lawyer, gave up both professions to become a partner with his brother-in-law, creating Rand & Avery. Rand died in 1878, and Addison Avery in 1893. Five years afterRev. Smith's death, Ann Elizabeth Avery Smith obtained a passport for herself and Martha to travel abroad. Martha's biography at Northwestern states she studied in Berlin and Paris that year, then did graduate work at the University Chicago in 1894 while she also taught Latin and English. In 1898 she attended Stanford, followed by a year at UC Berkeley, before marrying W.F. Hyde in 1900.
Northwestern University Alumni Records
This was the family of William Avery Hyde's mother, Martha Constance Smith, another of whose paternal aunts was Helen Fairchild Smith, mentor to the wife of President Grover Cleveland.
Stay tuned for next section of Ruth Hyde Paine's family connections.
PART II
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture
By Linda Minor
My project to tear down the veil that separates Ruth Hyde Paine from the mysterious array of skeletons in her past began in Part I with a trail that took us back to a group of America's first settlers. Surprisingly, both of Ruth's parents were discovered to have stemmed from Christopher Hyde, who stepped foot on American soil in 1630. We tracked the life of William Penn Hyde, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church during the civil war years until he left his Rhode Island pastorate to move to California in 1881. They initially settled near the University of the Pacific in Santa Clara.
William Penn Hyde move to California in 1881
At first I thought William Fletcher Hyde could not possibly have received a college education given these circumstances. Why, I wondered, did Martha Constance Smith, with all her degrees from Berlin, Paris, Chicago and Stanford marry him. Upon further research, it was discovered that in 1891, ten years after relocating to Santa Clara, California, not only did W.F. Hyde attend the University of the Pacific, but that he operated its bookstore as well.
Mrs. Leland Stanford's Hyde ancestry
Then I realized that Leland Stanford, who owned thousands of acres of land in Santa Clara County in 1881, had studied law at Cazenovia Methodist seminary, where Martha's grandfather had taught mathematics before he left there in 1831 to help establish the Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Was there a connection? After a year in Cazenovia Seminary, Leland Stanford served a legal apprenticeship in Albany, where he met and married Jane Lathrop.
Incredibly enough, Jane Lathop Stanford's heritage takes us back to Norwich, Connecticut. What a small world indeed!
So far it seems that everyone connected to Ruth Hyde Paine is a member of the Hyde extended family The list below, modified from an Ancestry.comfamily tree gives a whole new meaning to the term "elite class"!
Four Branches of Samuel Hyde Family
So what does all this mean in terms of the murder of John F. Kennedy, an upstart Irishman born into an immigrant Catholic family in Boston? Who REALLY wanted him dead in 1963?
How do we proceed at this point? I always remember the first rule of research, taught to me from repeatedly watching the movie "All the President's Men." Remember how Hal Holbrook's character "Deep Throat" whispered to Robert Redford through a haze of cigarette smoke: "Follow the money!"
Thus, I backed up the research to discover how Leland Stanford became such a wealthy man in only twenty years. One website succinctly summarized:
Stanford had joined with Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker to found the Central Pacific Railroad Company on June 28, 1861. Stanford was elected president of the company and used his position as Governor of California to further the railroad's interests. President Lincoln supported the concept of a transcontinental railroad as being another important link between the Union and California and important Federal assistance was made available. Construction of the line commenced in Sacramento on January 8, 1863. Charles Crocker directed the actual construction, C.P. Huntington handled relations with the Federal Government in Washington D.C. and with the Eastern financial community, and Mark Hopkins kept an eye on the company's finances. As president, Stanford was the public face of the company in California and usually took the lead in dealing with state politics.
C.P Huntington on railroad bonds
Who was this C.P. Huntington, who handled the land grants from the federal government, leveraged with investments from the "Eastern financial community?" I wondered. I learned that Collis Potter Huntington had been born to Henry Edward Huntington, whose ancestry tracks back to where else but Norwich, Connecticut, where Samuel Huntington had been born in 1665 to the first American in the tree, Deacon Simon Huntington who arrived from England in 1629. On a whim, based on years of research on Skull and Bones, I decided to check further back to determine whether William Huntington Russell had any connection to Deacon Simon.
William H. Russell was born in 1809 in Middletown, Connecticut to Matthew Talcott Russell and Mary Huntington, daughter of Rev. Enoch Huntington. Enoch was the son of Nathaniel (born 1691), grandson of Joseph Huntington (born in Norwich in 1661), who was son of this same Deacon Simon Huntington! The world is absolutely microscopic.
So let's return to Stanford. The same website quoted above brings us up to date:
Stanford and his Central Pacific Railroad partners completed the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad to Los Angeles in 1876 and linked it to New Orleans in 1883. Stanford was elected Senator in 1885 on the Republican ticket and he moved to Washington D.C. In 1885 the Central Pacific Railroad was leased to the Southern Pacific Railroad and the partners controlled a total of 4,711 miles of track from California through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas to Louisiana. During the 1870s and 1880s Stanford assembled a large estate south of San Francisco and began breeding horses. By the end of the 1880s the Palo Alto stock Farm amounted to more than 8,000 acres and was producing some of the very finest trotting horses in the nation. ... During this period Stanford also owned 55,000 acres of land in Vina, California where he unsuccessfully experimented in grape growing and champagne production.
The Stanfords' only son, Leland, Junior, died in Florence, Italy, on March 13, 1884, while the family was vacationing in Europe. The parents were heartbroken and decided to use their wealth to establish a university as a memorial to their son. On November 11, 1885, Mr. and Mrs. Stanford, established a board of trustees to govern the new university. Land from their Palo Alto Stock Farm and the Vina vineyard were deeded to the university and construction on the first buildings were begun in 1887. Stanford University opened in 1891 with David Starr Jordan serving as its first president. That same year Stanford was reelected to the Senate. Stanford's partner, C.P. Huntington, did not approve of Stanford's second candidacy having committed himself to support Aaron A. Sargent for the position. Relations between Huntington and Stanford deteriorated dramatically and resulted in a long bitter and very public fight between the two men.
Leland Stanford died in his sleep at home on June 20, 1893.
At this point we will resume with Part III.
PART III
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture
By Linda Minor
Ruth Hyde Paine's Grandfather
William Fletcher Hyde
Martha Constance Smith Hyde, described more fully in the previous segment, arrived in Palo Alto, California, in 1898 from Chicago. Although she had a Ph.D. and did additional graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley and at Stanford, she seems to have sacrificed all those years of education when she married William F. Hyde in 1900. Only a year after they married William Avery Hyde was born, and before long, another son, Theodore, undoubtedly named for President Theodore Roosevelt, who spent time in California. Sylvia Alden Hyde, the third child, was born in 1907.
Although W.F. Hyde seems to have tried to become a miner in 1896, it was short-lived, since he never completed an engineering degree. Instead, he relocated to Palo Alto, evidenced by a letter written to Mrs. Leland Stanford in 1898, as manager of the Stanford bookstore. He held a similar position at University of the Pacific before his attempt at mining. His move to Palo Alto occurred three years after future U.S. President Herbert Hoover had been in Stanford's first graduating class (1894).
W.P. Hyde moved to Lincoln Ave. residence in 1899.
Census records of William Fletcher Hyde family in Palo Alto: 1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930.
The Birth of Stanford and Palo Alto
Although George Washington had admonished his countrymen to "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," when he left office in 1796, he also advised that "just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated." Herbert Hoover, a member of Leland Stanford Junior University's first graduating class of 1894, embodied those feelings during his career. He studied geology under John Casper Branner, who was destined to become Stanford's second president in 1917.
Hoover family in 1917
As the Hoovers settled themselves into Palo Alto life, Herbert Hoover was contacted by President Wilson's Ambassador to the Court of St. James in London, Walter Hines Page, to assist Europe in finding gold to finance the war. He took his family with him briefly until Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914. Then theboys returned to school in Palo Alto (the 1920 census shows them living on Cabrillo Avenue, near Dolores Street, close to where they contracted to build their mansion at 623 Mirada).
South of the Stanford Quad, the Hoover home was about two miles from the new Palo Alto High School, which opened in 1918.Channing grammar school was less than a mile from the Hyde residence on Lincoln Avenue. Since these were the only public schools, it is impossible that William Avery Hyde, Ruth's father, eldest of the children of W.F. and Martha Smith Hyde, was not acquainted with both Herbert Hoover, Jr. and his younger brother, Allan H. Hoover, born in 1903 and 1907 respectively.
President Jordan
As the United States had grown, it experienced one financial panic after another--the result of not having a central bank in charge of monetary policy. Both the Bank of the U.S. and the Second Bank of the U.S., envisioned by Alexander Hamilton, had been killed by policies instigated by Andrew Jackson before the civil war. Hope had been renewed by discovery of gold in California and Colorado, but still investment in infrastructure required money, much of which was sought from Europeans who bought stocks and bonds issued by American banking houses.
Leland Stanford, one the "Big Four," who built Abraham Lincoln's Central Pacific Railroad, had become wealthy in California by the time his son died in 1884. He and his wife decided to create Leland Stanford Junior University in his memory and consulted Andrew Dickson White, who had built Cornell in Ithaca, New York, staffed with elite Skull and Bones graduates of Yale, White's alma mater. White highly recommended that the Stanfords offer the job as Stanford's first president to David Starr Jordan.
Leland Stanford did not live to see the first graduating class cross the podium. He died in 1893, and the endowment continued to be controlled by his wife, the former Jane Lathrop, with whom Jordan worked very closely to ensure the university would survive during the difficult years resulting from the financial panic of 1893. Working with them was Timothy Hopkins, appointed a trustee in 1885; he was the adopted son of Mrs. Mark Hopkins, wife of Stanford's former partner in the Southern Pacific Railroad, though he received no inheritance from her when she died in 1891.
Only in the new century did the assurance come that the university would survive, at the time of Jane's death (1905), when the endowment received the anticipated funds from her estate:
In June 1903, Jane transferred control of the university's endowment to the Board of Trustees, and she urged the board to increase graduate enrollment and support research and teaching. However, it was only with her death in February 1905 in Honolulu [allegedly from strychnine poisoning]# that the transfer of powers was legalized, and funds continued to flow to the construction of several significant buildings through 1905.
Stanford's "World View"
Jordan was a young man of 40 when he assumed the presidency. An ichthyologist (student of fish), he had studied at Cornell before assuming presidency of Indiana University at the age of 34.
Some of Jordan's papers, labeled "Peace Collection," note that he was president of the World Peace Foundation from 1910 to 1914 and president of the World Peace Conference in 1915; these papers were donated to the Quaker college atSwarthmore, Pennsylvania. Jordan retired from Stanford in 1916, remain in the public eye until 1925. His death in Palo Alto occurred in 1931, while his friend Herbert Hoover was U.S. President. An obituary referred to him as the "chief director" of the World Peace Conference. In 1922 Jordan dedicated his selected essays entitled War and the Breed: the Relation of War to the Downfall of Nations to Andrew Dickson White, "who taught me to see in history, not a succession of events but a segment of human life."
The World Peace Foundation was the American section of a broader movement for international peace at that time, one goal being the expansion of the league of nations and the Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration to settle international disputes. One advocate of this Court was the grandfather of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles--John Watson Foster--who was on the Advisory Council of the World Peace Foundation with David Starr Jordan. As Foster related in his history of the Hague Peace Conference, among the Americans present in 1899 was Jordan's mentor, Andrew D. White.
White, as first president of Cornell University, also acted as a behind-the-scenes mentor of the man given credit for putting together the coalition that in 1912 elected President Woodrow Wilson--"Colonel" Edward M. House of Texas, who attended Cornell in the mid 1870's but never graduated.
By the time Ruth Paine's grandfather moved to Palo Alto in 1897, Hoover had jumped into his mining career on the international stage, and was determined to assist his somewhat older brother, Tad, in completing his degree in mining engineering at the same college.
As his biographer Will Irwin reported, in 1899 Herbert married Lou Henry, and together they set out to the Far East, where they found themselves at Tianjin in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion in China. From there they would move to London where two sons would be born. By 1909 the Hoovers were able to return at least several months a year to the United States, much of it in Palo Alto, especially by 1912. As Europe became more involved in war, requiring gold as payment for arms, munitions and other necessities, Herbert Hoover remained on call for globe-trotting assignments in search of such gold, although in 1912 he became one of Stanford's trustees. The Hoover sons were enrolled in school in Palo Alto, undoubtedly the same school as the children of W.F. Hyde.+
Theodore Jesse (Tad) Hoover entered Stanford in the same class with W.F. Hyde's younger brother, James McDonald Hyde in 1897, and they not only graduated together in the class of 1901, but in 1919 both were named Stanford professors. They had spent the intervening years, much as Herbert Hoover had, traversing the world in search of gold and other precious metals. Dr. Branner continued to head the geology department until President Jordan's retirement in 1918, succeeding him in that position the following year. Tad Hoover got his place heading the geology department, with James Hyde as his chief associate.
Good Government and Career Changes
William Fletcher Hyde, father of W.A. Hyde
Like Forrest Gump, William Fletcher Hyde was in Palo Alto, California during the above events, though he was quite invisible to historians. A photograph of the Carnegie public library in Palo Alto can be seen online.
In addition to working with library and bookseller groups (see clipping to left), W.F. also was involved as a delegate to local and state Republican Party conventions as early as August, 1906, when he and Marshall Black were elected to attend the California state Republican convention. Black, head of Palo Alto Mutual Building and Loan Association, served as state senator, and was so wealthy by 1903 he built the historic mansion in nearby Menlo Park recently purchased by Mark Zuckerberg. By 1912, however, Black was accused of irregularities that led to his conviction and imprisonment. We can only wonder whether W.F. Hyde, who served on five grand juries over the years, had a role in seeing this associate sent to jail.
As elections rolled around in November 1906, Hyde helped towrite a constitution for the Palo Alto "Good Government League" with several men with strong business connections --Dr. Jefferson Elmore (Stanford Latin professor), Walter E. Vail (life insurance agent), Dr. C. W. Decker (physician), and Constable Fred B. Simpson. Various Hyde family members are listed on page 62 of the 1915 city directory, with W.F. Hyde being conspicuously absent at that time. We do, however, find him listed in 1918 as an employee of Underwood & Underwood in Los Altos under the heading "stereoscopic views." According to Taylor & Francis:
By 1900, Underwood and Underwood, the largest company in the United States, was turning out 35,000 stereograph cards daily and 10 million yearly (Darrah1977, 47). The large-scale production and distribution of stereographs enabled them to become a mass-distributed visual source of information consumed for a variety of purposes, such as entertainment, education and propaganda (Speer 1989, 301).
1922 ad
In about 1913, however, the Hyde Book Store in Palo Alto was operated by his brother, Edward L. Hyde and his wife, the former Lauretta Coe Foster. By 1920 William Fletcher had become an insurance agent and began to sell real estate as well. In fact, when the Hoover family in 1930 gave up their 15-room residence at Stanford's "San Juan Hill," the realtor who listed it for rent was none other than W.F. Hyde.
Carol Hyde Meets W.F. Hyde
As mentioned in Part I, Carol was descended from the original Hyde ancestor as William Avery, but from a different branch. Her parents entered the ministry when Charles Ludlow Hyde, her father, was 35 and graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. By 1916, however, after being sent to churches in Colorado and California, he had seemingly tired of the ministry. According to an item that appeared in several United Press news carriers in July 1916:
Another strange case is that of Rev. Charles L. Hyde of Niles, Cal., who wants to give up his pastorate at the First Congregational church there and go to work as a farm hand or on a poultry ranch.
Nevertheless, Rev. Hyde had the last laugh on the press, since the 1920 census finds him employed as the secretary of a poultry association in Palo Alto, California. As the item to the right shows, once they moved to the Palo Alto area, the Charles L. Hydes became acquainted with the W.F. Hydes at the local Congregational Church. Carol's mother played the organ, while Charles and William Fletcher sang bass in the choir. Carol was an alto, but William Avery was nowhere to be found. Most likely it was Carol Hyde Hyde who encouraged her youngest daughter Ruth to take up folk singing and dancing, where as it turned out she would meet her husband, Michael Ralph Paine in Philadelphia prior to their marriage in 1957.
Like his son's new father-in-law, William Fletcher Hyde would also experience an abrupt change in his career during the years prior to or during WWI, at a time the couple had three young children ranging in age from six to ten years old. He had served as president and trustee of the Palo Alto Public Library for many years, and his sisters were librarians, Mary at the San Francisco public library and Lillian at Stanford. W.F. also was a trustee for the California state library association. Though he could not have known then that Herbert Hoover would become U.S. President in 1928, he most likely knew that Herbert Clark Hoover was his younger brother's employer, and it is possible that, through that connection, W.F. felt greener pastures were in store for him.
James McDonald Hyde, had graduated from Stanford in 1901, and by 1903 had a teaching job at the University of Oregon. Then in 1910 he went to London to work for Herbert Hoover's brother Tad, whom James had known in college. Tad, actually Theodore Jesse Hoover, had been manager of Minerals Separation, Ltd., since 1907, but left soon after installing James at the company. While there, James had a disagreement with another Stanford geologist named Edward Nutter, but left within a year to work in Montana. Minerals Separated, Ltd. then sued James for infringing one of its patents. When the case came to trial in Montana in 1912, the Hoover brothers were the chief witnesses on James' behalf. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal in 1915. A portion of James' testimony is excerpted to the left.
The 1920 census record shown above indicates the W.F. Hyde family lived in Los Altos, Santa Clara County, that year, with W.F. engaged in insurance and real estate. He had also become involved with theLos Altos Improvement Club. The eldest child, William Avery, was 17 and looking forward to attending Stanford University soon--almost at the same time his father starting selling insurance and real estate. While he was a student, his mother died at the young age of 53.
In 1932 William Avery Hyde's aunt, Sylvia Hyde, was an art instructor at San Jose State College. She and Theodore Hyde, neither of whom had married, continued, after their mother's death, to live in the three-story residence at 334 Lincoln, even after their father's death in 1939. Sylvia most likely developed her interest in art from her aunt, Bessie Hyde Kennedy, who also lived in the large residence until her own death in 1944.
Sylvia worked from home as an artist and also worked in her father's insurance/real estate office, and at 310 University Avenue, Menlo Park. This address was the same as the University Realty Co., just a few doors from the Hyde Bookstore of Edward L. Hyde at 362 University (either the location or the street numbering changed). Edward's wife, Lauretta was the daughter of Harrison Streeter Coe, a 1903 Stanford mining graduate, who filed a patent for an invention like the one J.M. Hyde had been sued for infringing.
By 1943, she was hired as a teacher at Grant Union High School and had moved to Del Paso Heights north of Sacramento. Sylvia later married Otto V. [von Thulen] Rhoades at some point after he divorced in the 1930's, and she continued to correspond with her nephew and visit with him on infrequent visits in California; she only recalled meeting Ruth on two occasions. Theodore Hyde died in Walnut Creek, California in 1991. Nothing else about these siblings of William Avery Hyde has been discovered.
Part V
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture
By Linda Minor
One Memorandum Dredges Up Much History
Memo to Mr. Bielefeldt, C/FDD at CIA
Approximately six weeks after John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas, Lee H. Wigren of C/SR/CI/ Research section the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) typed a memo addressed to the attention of "Mr. Bielefeldt," in the CIA section called C/FDD -- the Foreign Documents Division.
Wigren's research department for counterintelligence (CI) was ultimately headed by Tennent "Pete" Bagley:
Bagley was the chief counterspy for the Soviet Russia [SR] division, and had been stationed in Switzerland (eventually to become station chief) during the time [March 1959] that Oswald was due to attend Albert Schweitzer College.[ 69 ] Bagley had been transferred from Berne to Langley where he gained a rapid promotion to become C/SR/CI.
Pete Bagley's Baggage: Uncle Josephus
Pete Bagley, CIA
In 1950, when he joined the CIA, Pete Bagley was a youthful 26 years old. He undoubtedly had been groomed from birth for the role he was to play in international spy games. His given names came from his mother's father,Tennent Harrington, cashier of the Colusa County Bank in California. As a teen, his mother, Marie Louise Harrington, traveled frequently with with her maternal aunt and uncle, Commander William D. Leahy, to Washington, D.C., and was introduced to an array of naval officers there.
Although she may have met Lieutenant Commander David Worth Bagley, whom she married in 1918, in Washington, one wedding announcement indicates they had in fact met in Newport, R.I., the upper crust resort to which Marie Louise had traveled with a paternal aunt and uncle, Admiral Albert Parker Niblack.
In Pete's parents' wedding announcement in the Washington Post (right) toward the end of WWI, the groom, David Worth Bagley, was revealed as a brother of Adelaide Bagley Daniels, wife of Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.
As a matter of fact, Daniels (editor of a Democrat-financed newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.) had published in 1898 a biography of his wife's older brother, Ensign Worth Bagley, the first Navy officer killed in action during the Spanish-American War, and Adelaide would name David's brother Worth Bagley Daniels after the war hero.
Secretary Daniels first entered appointive political office in 1893 when another southerner, M. Hoke Smith, a railroad reformer and champion of farmers, selected him to work in Grover Cleveland's Interior Department, a position he would hold for only a year. After purchasing controlling interest in the Raleigh News and Observer and in 1905, however, he perfected his political writing skill and was chosen in 1912 to head the "publicity bureau" of the Wilson campaign. Since Wilson's campaign was controlled by Edward M. House of Texas, Daniels no doubt had acquired the attention of the "Colonel" himself. After the campaign he was rewarded with the job as Secretary of the Navy, probably because of his wife's close ties to Naval officers.
Although Daniels left office in 1921, his propaganda efforts continued. His wife worked with Mrs. Robert Lansing, wife of the Secretary of State, in sponsoring the first National Conference of Church Women in Washington, D.C. in 1920. The Interchurch World Movement's division for "Women's Activities," organized by Adelaide Worth Daniels and Eleanor Foster Lansing and other wives in the administration of Woodrow Wilson, also had help from Mesdames John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Henry P. Davison. This "women's work" allowed their husbands to gather unofficial intelligence through the State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American and International Red Cross Societies, and Protestant church-related foreign missionary groups, which allied themselves with Friends' organizations, the YMCA, and "war work councils". There was no official civilian intelligence agency in those days.
This blog discussed the Dulles family's role in world missions a year ago, under the caption "John Birch Society Warning to JFK in 1958." It should be recalled that the wife of Wilson's Secretary of State, Mrs. Robert "Eleanor Foster" Lansing, was a sister of Edith Foster Dulles, whose sons John Foster and Allen Dulles were being trained to exert the same missionary zeal in the 1940's and 50's over world affairs and intelligence as these sisters' father, John Watson Foster, had done in the 1870's, 80's and 90's. Protestant fundamentalists were the original settlers of American colonies. Through their control of institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, they also controlled the purse strings of charitable and missionary efforts abroad. It was simple enough to set up front groups through which to spy on suspected dissidents.
Josephus Daniels returned to "public service" in 1933 to become President Roosevelt's Ambassador to Mexico, a post he held in Mexico City at the time Leon Trotsky was living in asylum at nearby Coyoacan. Did Daniels have a role in having Trotsky murdered in August 1940 by an "ice-ax-wielding assassin"?
Had young Pete Bagley ever heard stories told by his uncle about those days in Mexico? Daniels died in 1948. Pete was then 24 years old, but he would have been a teenager in 1940 when he read about Trotsky's death.The convicted assassin Jacques Mornard van den Dresch finished serving his prison sentence in 1960 and went to Cuba with a Czech passport. Mexican officials by then claimed he was a Spaniard, though he had earlier claimed to be Persian-born of Belgian parents. Pete Bagley must have wondered what his uncle had known. But we can no longer ask him. He died in March 2014.
Talbot Bielefeldt's Own Skeletons
By 1963, however, Pete Bagley was not looking back to Trotsky's murder in Mexico in 1940. He had a more current assassination to solve. Having been in charge of Soviet counterintelligence since 1959, it was his office which tasked Lee Wigren to obtain an "analysis of the Soviet press reaction" to the assassination of President Kennedy. Was there a reason Wigren addressed his questions to Talbot Bielefeldt, whose expertise was not Russian, but Japanese?
J. Bagnall
Exactly who was Talbot Bielefeldt? We do know from the above memo that he worked in the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA, and therefore his boss would have beenJohn J. Bagnall. who also seems to have something to do with "Project USJPRS".
In February 1962 E. Howard Hunt, who had been attempting to find work for his wife Dorothy, was advised to check with Bagnall to see if he could find work for her in JUSPB [sic]; the writer must have been referring to, USJPRS, the U.S. Joint Publications Research Service:
JPRS was established in March 1957 as part of the United States Department of Commerce's Office of Technical Services, about six months before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1.Acting as a unit within the Central Intelligence Agency, JPRS staffers prepared translations for the use of U.S. Government officials, various agencies, and the research and industrial communities. During the Cold War, the reports were primarily translations rather than analysis or commentary, with an emphasis on scientific and technical topics. Over time, however, that scope expanded to cover environmental concerns, world health issues, nuclear proliferation, and more.
Writer, Leo Sarkisian, who worked with Voice of America, was once photographed at a party with the Bielefeldts and other CIA officials who worked with foreign translations.
Nixons at Fullerton Union
Talbot's family in 1920 was living in Placentia, California, a Quaker community, the same small town where Richard Nixon's family lived at that time. Though Talbot was ten years older than Richard, he did have siblings the same age as the Nixon boys. Talbot and his younger siblings attended Fullerton Union High School, where Richard Nixon was a student in 1927-28, though the Nixons had moved to Whittier after 1920. Did they cross paths before Nixon came to prominence during the Red Scare wave?
Though Talbot's parents were born in Iowa, both sets of his grandparents immigrated to Iowa from Hanover, Germany. His father and grandfather tried their hands at mining near Silverton, Colorado for a time, but moved to Maryland after a scarlet fever plague killed several family members. Talbot and his two closest siblings were born while the Bielefeldts lived in a large house on the Miles River in the Chesapeake region, and his name likely came from Talbot County, where it was located.
When Talbot was five years old, his family had moved from the east coast to the west, settling in North Orange County, where three more children were born. Talbot's father turned to farming and by 1930 owned a prosperous citrus ranch in Placentia. It is likely Talbot's exposure to the German language stuck with him. Then, at Stanford in the early 1920's, he gravitated toward internationalism. The summer before his senior year, he spent a month in Japan with a group of young men his age. Although there is no independent evidence of the fact, his wedding announcement in 1936 revealed:
Mr. Bielefeldt, who is postmaster at Placentia, is a graduate of Stanford University. He was afaculty member of American schools in the Orient, in China and Japan.
Fernanda Eliscu in Winterset, 1936
His new wife, Eugenie Pfeil, was the daughter of two stage actors, who used the names Carl Anthony and Fernanda Eliscu (born in Romania). After Carl's death in 1930, Fernanda began making movies, her first being the "photoplay," Winterset, written and produced by Maxwell Anderson in 1936. Talbot took his new wife back home to Placentia, where he had been assigned a commission by the President as Postmaster of his hometown.
A week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Talbot enlisted in the Navy and served six years, first being assigned to the Japanese Language School on the campus of University of California at Berkeley. By September 1944he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Commander and there are indications he was involved in cryptology. From there it was only natural that he would join the Central Intelligence Agency when it was created in 1947.
Excerpt from Roger Dignman in Deciphering the Rising Sun: Navy and Marine Corps Codebreakers, Translators and Interpreters in the Pacific War.
As shown in the excerpt above, W. A. Talbot Bielefeldt was among the first men chosen for the Japanese Language School held in California, along with someone called "Gerald J. Bagnall". Could Gerald have been a disguised "John"? This first class preceded the selection of Roger Pineau, who attended the same school after it was moved to Colorado because of internment of Japanese taking place at the original location.
According to the CIA's website:
With the creation of the Central Intelligence Group there commenced a process of accretion of functions taken from the wartime agencies and from departments which were anticipating reductions in budget under peacetime conditions. The Strategic Services Unit was transferred from the Department of the Army and became the Office of Special Operations - charged with espionage and counterespionage functions. The Washington Document Center was taken over from the Navy and shortly after that the Army's German Military Documents Center at Fort Holabird joined this unit and together became the Foreign Documents Division. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an organization with worldwide bases for monitoring all non-coded radio traffic, which had originally been under the Federal Communications Commission, was transferred from the Army and became the Foreign Broadcast Information Division. During World War II the Army and Navy and OSS and occasionally other agencies had all approached US businesses and institutions in search of foreign intelligence information. An early agreement was reached that this domestic collection should be performed as a service of common concern by Central Intelligence with other agencies participating as they desired, and this became the Contact Division. Another illustration of the type of functions taken on is the division of responsibilities with the Department of State on biographic intelligence. The list would be much too long if we attempted to enumerate all of the functions acquired in this method.
In December 1953 Talbot was rated at the salary level GS-14 in the C.I.A., and his name appeared on a list of 96 CIA employees cleared for Top Security, who were "certified to meet the standards required" to attend lectures at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. On that list were also the names Thomas W. Braden, C. Tracy Barnes, E. Howard Hunt, and Cord Meyer, Jr., but many more names were redacted, even upon the list's release in 1998.
Two years after receiving clearance to attend the Industrial College, Talbot wrote the following memorandum to Bruce Solie of the CIA's Security Analysis Group (SAG):
click to enlarge
Re: Orr, Paul & Violet
William A. Hyde was in Washington this last week-end, visiting his daughter and son-in-law, Sylvia and John Hoke, 763 Kennedy, N.E. The latter invited [REDACTED] and me over to meet him on Saturday night, 17 December, since we three were friends at Stanford.
Why would Solie's security group have been curious about William Hyde and his eldest daughter, Sylvia Hyde Hoke? And who, pray tell, were Paul and Violet Hyde?
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
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