The Investigations – Page 3 – A Good Man Is Hard to Find

FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Ron's Missing Person File

Walking tour stop #4: You guys, I think we’ve been hacked (in a good way!)

Let’s see…so far, we’ve been discussing the FBI’s Security Index, the notorious list of so-called dangerous people whose rolls included Ronald Tammen and Richard Cox, but curiously enough, excluded Lee Harvey Oswald, at least at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, even though they knew all about his activities with Cuba and the Soviet Union. We also were able to guesstimate that someone from the FBI had written “see index” on the front page of Ron’s missing person documents in or around 1973, since it was written in the same handwriting, and therefore by the same person, as the same phrase that appears on a document from July 30, 1973. We didn’t discuss the content of the July 30 document…just the “see index” part and its date.

So let’s briefly discuss the content of the July 30, 1973, document.

In the “from” line is “Director, FBI,” who by then was Clarence Kelley. The person in the “to” line was the SAC (i.e., special agent in charge) of the FBI’s Las Vegas Field Office, who was Vern Loetterle. The subject is lengthy and in all caps: ALLEGED PLANNED BURGLARY OF THE OFFICE OF HENRY GREENSPUN, A LAS VEGAS PUBLISHER, IN EARLY 1972 (INTELLIGENCE DIVISION).

There’s quite a bit to unpack here at some point, but let’s not do that now. Let’s simply start by saying that Clarence had gotten Greenspun’s first name wrong. It was actually Herman, but everyone called him Hank. Hank Greenspun owned the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, and he used its editorial page like a weapon to wield his power and advance his political views, which evidently is a practice that hasn’t changed at all, especially since social media has entered our lives. (Hi, Elon! Hey, Zuck!)

Here’s the story in a nutshell, which I’ve gleaned from several FBI reports on this topic: In early 1972, E. Howard Hunt—yes, THAT Howard Hunt—approached a security guy employed by Howard Hughes’ Tool Company—yes, THAT Howard Hughes—and told him about a robbery that he and his friends were planning to pull off. What friends, you ask? Oh, just G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord, both of Watergate fame, to name two. There were likely others involved as well. The reason for the robbery was to steal some documents that were in Greenspun’s safe that Hunt said could be used against Edmund Muskie, should he become the Democrat’s nominee for president. Hunt told the security guy, named Ralph Winte, that it was his understanding that Hughes could benefit nicely from the burglary as well. As they were rifling for the Muskie documents, the burglars would take the documents benefiting Hughes and hand them over to Winte, who could get them to Hughes. The only thing they were asking for in return was to have one of Hughes’ planes sitting at the ready to fly the burglars to a Central American country of their choosing.

Here’s my favorite part of the story: when Winte asked Hunt what would happen if they got caught, Hunt’s response was “We’ll shoot them.”

I know. Wild, right?? Winte asked his immediate boss, William Gay, what he thought about the plan, and his boss ethically replied, “Not just no, hell no!” or something along those lines. So ostensibly the crime was never committed.

But here’s what I want to show you today: the July 30, 1973, document in its entirety. Look at the righthand side, in the white space near the first sentence: it says “Hac,” just like the ones on Ron’s missing person documents. (The letters “ac” are concealed by the letters JFK, which are written over them.)

Ron’s Hacs vary somewhat from page to page and may be written by two different people—I’m not entirely sure. However, here’s one version that in my view closely matches the July 30 document.

Let’s do a couple more! Here’s a Hac from Hank Greenspun:

And here’s a similar Hac from Ron’s missing person docs:

Therefore, the announcement for today is:

I think the same person(s) who wrote Hac on Ron’s missing person records wrote Hac on the Herman Greenspun burglary documents. What’s more, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think the two cases may be related in some way.

Coming next: What the phuh do all these ph’s mean?

Cincinnati Field Office, FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Ron's Missing Person File

Walking tour stop #3: When was Ronald Tammen added to the FBI’s Security Index?

I think I’ve found a clever little way to tell us roughly when Ron—or whatever his new name turned out to be—was added to the FBI Security Index. Was it 1953? 1973? After that?

I think we can tell by the handwriting.

I’m not talking about handwriting analysis, for which I don’t hold a license and am completely unqualified. I’m talking about the side-by-side comparison of two signatures or initials or phrases to see if they look as if they were written by the same person. Unlicensed people with two good eyes have been asked to compare signatures in a variety of important ways over the years, not the least of which is when we go to the voting booth, or to a bank deposit box, or remember traveler’s checks? That’s how businesses could tell if the check you handed them was yours or if it had been stolen—by comparing your signature while you were buying your traveler’s checks to your signature while you were on vacation.

I’ve gotten to know an awful lot of FBI initials and signatures in this exercise, and I’ve also seen a lot of ways that someone might write the words “See index” in the lefthand margins. Here are just a few of the ways.

As a reminder, here’s how “See index” is written in the left margin of the first page of Ron’s missing person documents.

Now, look at this “See index,” which is written on a document that was created on July 30, 1973.

They look the same, don’t they? (The ‘s’ is the giveaway.) This tells me that they were written by the same person, likely at roughly the same time.

So here’s today’s announcement:

I think Ronald Tammen was added to the FBI’s Security Index sometime after the Cincinnati Field Office had sent in the Welco guy’s fingerprints for comparison to Ron’s in May 1973.

If you’re wondering why we’re only looking at the left side of the document, it’s because I’m saving the right side for our next announcement.

Coming next: you guys, I think we’ve been hacked…in a good way.

FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Richard Cox, Ron's Missing Person File

Walking tour stop #2: An unapologetic communist who was an obvious contender for the Security Index didn’t make it on the list. Guess who it was.

We’re still talking about the FBI Security Index, as denoted by the “See index” notation in the left margin of page one of both Ronald Tammen’s and Richard Cox’s case files.

The first page of Ron Tammen’s missing person documents. “See index” is written in the left margin. Click on image for a closer view.

The first page of Richard Cox’s file. “See index” is clearly visible in the left margin. Click on image for a closer view.

Being on the Security Index meant that the FBI and Department of Justice considered you to be a dangerous person—someone who needed to be rounded up and incarcerated in the event of a national emergency, which was a term that was left up to everyone’s imaginations. (I’m thinking bursting powerlines, people running amok in the streets, every other building on fire…that sort of thing. But that’s just my idea of a national emergency. The FBI and DOJ may have a different view.)

As far as we know, the FBI had no idea where Ron Tammen and Richard Cox were. Why would our nation’s lead law enforcement agency jump to the conclusion that either of them was dangerous? And incidentally, if a person is missing, how would the FBI even go about rounding them up?

As it turns out, it’s probably not so surprising that Cox made it to the Security Index, since he was considered a deserter and fugitive from the Army, even as a cadet at West Point, and, for this reason, he was breaking the law. But Tammen? Good heavens. Not in a million years would one of his friends or family members have ever called him dangerous.

Today I’m going to announce someone who wasn’t on the Security Index who probably should have been, at least based on the FBI’s and DOJ’s criteria. One of the main reasons for the Security Index was for the FBI to keep track of communists and other subversives to prevent their wreaking havoc during our aforementioned national emergency. So keeping that in mind, would you be surprised to learn that:

Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t on the FBI’s Security Index at the time of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963.

For real. Lee Harvey Oswald, who’d defected to the Soviet Union in November 1959, who’d changed his mind and returned to the States with his Russian wife Marina and baby daughter in June 1962, who’d made headlines in New Orleans in August 1963 while advocating for the pro-Castro organization Fair Play for Cuba Committee—Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t considered communist enough to get his name onto the FBI’s Security Index. What’s more, according to government records, he’d taken a bus to Mexico City in late September 1963 and had stopped in to visit both the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban Consulate. Again, no red flags.

I’m pretty sure that the FBI caught some heat for that.

Immediately after the assassination, James H. Gale, who’d headed up the FBI’s Inspection Division at that time, conducted an evaluation of the investigative deficiencies leading up to JFK’s assassination. Oswald’s not making it to the Security Index was at the top of his list of oversights. He also said that they should have interviewed Marina in the months before the assassination, which they had not done. He told the House Select Committee on Assassinations as much in 1978 as well. You can read his December 10, 1963, report and 1978 HSCA testimony on this website. (See Vol. III of the HSCA hearings.)

But here’s the rub—and I’m not sure this has ever been said out loud ever before: Lee Harvey Oswald had indeed been on the Security Index at an earlier point in his past. I’m truly, truly serious. It was in November 1959 at the time of his defection to the Soviet Union. Here’s the document, dated November 9, 1959, where you can see the words “See index” in the left margin.

Lee Harvey Oswald was included on the FBI Security Index in November 1959 as he was defecting to the Soviet Union. Click on image for a closer view.

What this means is that officials at the FBI and DOJ must have changed their minds about Oswald’s Security Index designation somewhere along the way.

As further proof of the FBI’s mindset, on September 10, 1963—shortly before Oswald’s trip to Mexico City—an FBI report was written on both Lee and Marina by the Dallas Field Office. Lee’s report is clean—all of the available options regarding the Security Index are free of checkmarks. He isn’t on it.

Lee Harvey Oswald was not included on the Security Index in September 1963. Click on image for a closer view.

But Marina? Oh, there’s definitely a checkmark—more like the number 1—next to the line “The Bureau is requested to make the appropriate changes in the Security Index at the Seat of Government.” (The Seat of Government is FBI lingo for its headquarters in DC.)

Marina Oswald is included on the Security index in September 1963. Click on image for a closer view.

There’s also a date beneath the number 1, which was July 24. The year isn’t visible, but I know what it was—it was 1962. I know this because of the below document, dated the very next day, in which Marina is the subject.

Marina Oswald is on the Security Index on July 25, 1962. Click on image for a closer view.

To summarize, Marina Oswald was added to the Security Index—or her designation was somehow changed—on July 24, 1962. And in a document written about her on July 25, 1962, the words “See index” appear in the lefthand margin. The words are smeary, possibly as if there was an attempt to erase them, but the “d” and slash of the “x” in the word index are unmistakable.

So you see, the issue was more nuanced than what James Gale had described to his bosses at the FBI in 1963 as well as to the HSCA in 1978. Lee Harvey Oswald had been on the Security Index, but he’d been taken off sometime between November 1959 and September 1963. In addition, his wife Marina had also been on the Security Index, ostensibly at the time of JFK’s assassination, though it’s possible that she’d been removed by then.

But for James Gale to say all of that? Yikes. That would have sounded way worse than just telling them that the FBI agents didn’t feel Oswald had met the criteria and, in hindsight, they should have interviewed Marina.

I mean, think of the follow-up questions.

Coming: When was Ron Tammen added to the Security Index?

Cincinnati Field Office, FBI Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Richard Cox, Ron's Missing Person File

The official Ronald Tammen FBI doc walking tour —stop #1: Guess who else was listed on the FBI’s Security Index?

OK, I think I’m ready. I’ve been reading and reading and OMG perusing so many FBI documents like crazy and comparing them to Ron Tammen’s missing person records, trying to make sense of it all. And even though I don’t have the end-all, be-all answer for us as to what it all means (and I don’t), I think I have enough information to share with you to get this conversation going.

Plus, if I don’t spill some of this now, I’m going to forget it. I swear I will.

So here’s what’s going to happen: over the next several…let’s say weeks…I’m going to pop into your inbox every once in a while with an announcement. Do NOT plan your days around these announcements. That’s way too much pressure. They will be appearing at random times of the day, when I’m feeling at my creative best, which obviously can vary. One thing is certain: it will NOT be before I’ve fed Herbie his breakfast and had my coffee, so nothing before 8 a.m. Eastern time. Cool? Cool.

The announcement will be something to the tune of “I think blibbidy blah,” and then I’ll be providing documentation in the form of scribbles on FBI records as to why I think that. Or I may not phrase it so tentatively. I might state outright that “I’m 100 percent positive that so-and-so did such-and-such,” and that’ll be pretty much it.

In essence: I’ll be saying something and then showing you the documentation, and then we’ll all get on with our day. Some announcements will be illuminating, others will be confounding, while others may make you go “meh.” But make no mistake: all announcements will be very, very short.

Before I make the first announcement, I need to thank two people, without whom we could never conduct this exercise. They are: 1) the anonymous caller who called in a tip to the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office in April 1973, saying that they felt Ron Tammen was working at Welco Industries in Blue Ash, Ohio. Thank you, anonymous caller!! Though some might consider you a snitch or a tattletale, I think of you as a patriot and a hero! If not for you, Ron’s missing person documents probably wouldn’t have been retrieved from their hiding place in the Missing Person File Room, and passed around from one division to the next, gathering a bunch of new stamps and jottings in the process. And 2) John Edgar Hoover. Without your legendarily iron-fisted style of micro-management in which anyone having to do with a case had to initial the memos and scrawl in other coded messages, we wouldn’t be privy to details concerning who saw Ron’s missing person documents and what they did with them. Thank you, Edgar!!

And now, the announcement that is stop #1 on our tour:

Richard Cox was on the FBI’s Security Index too.

The words “see Index” written in the left margin tell us that Richard Colvin Cox, who went missing from West Point Academy in January 1950, was listed in the FBI’s Security Index in addition to Ron Tammen. If you don’t know who Richard Cox is or what the Security Index is, you can run a search on my blog to catch up. I consider it a big deal that two missing persons who the FBI ostensibly had no idea where they were made it onto their Security Index.

(Coming next: So Richard Cox and Ronald Tammen were both on the FBI’s Security Index. Guess who WASN’T on the list.)

CIA, Cincinnati Field Office, FBI Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Ron's Missing Person File

Ronald Tammen’s FBI documents have been put in the same category as 1) an alleged plot to assassinate Spiro Agnew and 2) an alleged plot to assassinate Sirhan Sirhan

By now, I think we’ve all come to terms with the notion that Ronald Tammen in his adult years wasn’t the same person everyone had known when he was in his teens. Mind you, we still don’t know Ron’s whole story. We don’t know what predicaments he experienced after he disappeared, nor do we know the sorts of things he did when presented with said predicaments. But judging by his surviving FBI documents, we can see that Ron’s life after his disappearance was wildly different from his days as the solemn and studious business major from Maple Heights, Ohio. It was almost as if the day he went missing, he’d entered a bizarro world where up became down, where dull became exciting, where cash-strapped became cash-solvent, where good became, well…I’m not quite ready to go there.

At least for now, let’s cut him some slack and leave it at this: after Ron Tammen disappeared, his life had grown complicated.

Someday, in the not-too-distant future, I plan to share with you just how complicated his life had become. We already know that the FBI had added him to their infamous Security Index. That alone would complicate matters for any person.

When I started researching Ron’s disappearance, I can remember reading about some of his attributes, and someone close to him would sometimes be quoted saying that he’d been on the Dean’s List or that he’d been asked to join Phi Beta Kappa or something like that as examples of how smart he was. To date, I’ve found no evidence of either of those things being true. For Ron to be listed on the FBI’s Security Index, which is something for which we do have evidence, is the bizarro opposite of Phi Beta Kappa times 100.

Hopefully soon, I’ll be providing a grand tour of every stamp and squiggle on his missing person documents and giving you my most educated guess of their meaning as well as some of the people in our country’s history who shared those same marks with him. And trust me, you will be surprised—even those of you who feel that nothing more can surprise you about Ron Tammen. But I want to be 100% certain I’ve done my due diligence, which is why I’m being so slow and methodical before writing that post.

In the meantime, I want to discuss a couple dots that are easier to connect. They have to do with the following stamps on Ron’s records, two of which we’ve already discussed somewhat in prior posts:

ST-102, REC-19, and MCT-49.

I’m still not sure what most of these letters and numbers stand for, and it’s not because I haven’t tried. I’ve shown Ron’s records to every FBI contact I’ve ever met over the past 14 years, and no one has offered an explanation. As I mentioned in the comments section on my last post, recently, I asked an online history group from the National Archives, and they kindly consulted with their contacts at the FBI. Their response was that they were likely the stamps of the Records Division to help with indexing and serialization.

I respectfully disagree. The Records Division may have had a say in assigning the actual case numbers, but they wouldn’t have been involved in assigning these stamps, which were repetitive and erratically placed and which seemed to convey coded information about the case itself. And so, using my eyes and my ability to compare and contrast one FBI document from another, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

ST stamp

The ST stamp appears on some the most sensitive FBI documents I’ve found online. Not all documents that share the same ST number are on the same topic, but they all seem to be a bigger deal than a run-of-the-mill FBI record. Here’s what I’ve ascertained:

They seem to deal with serious crimes or highly sensitive topics.
They deal with topics that pertain to the FBI’s former Domestic Intelligence Division and specifically with internal security, which is why I think they were assigned by people in that division.
The lower the number, the more important they seem to be, starting at ST-100. Therefore, ST-101 appears to be more sensitive than ST-141, and so on. Ron’s number, ST-102, seems to have been assigned to some of the steamiest hot-potato cases in the eyes of the FBI.
The ST numbers are invariably accompanied by a stamp with the letters REC.

I’ve come to notice that earlier intelligence documents didn’t use the ST designation. They started with the letters SE instead of ST. This makes sense since, before the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division came to be, there was the Security Division. SE could be short for Security. So far, the documents that I’ve found that started with SE did so from around 1946 through the late 1950s. To the best of my knowledge, the documents with ST designations were date-stamped from the early 1960s through 1974, or thereabouts.

REC stamp

I now know that the letters REC stand for RECORDED, and they include a number to the right of them. In Ron’s case, that number is 19. According to the book “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been In the FBI Files?”, to be recorded means that “a document has been placed in the appropriate file, and has been given a case and a serial number.” But, in my view, the REC number can’t just mean that alone. Otherwise, why would there be different numbers—why not a little box to check? And why would they always accompany an ST number? From what I can tell, the REC numbers seemed to provide additional info about a given case. For this reason, I believe that the FBI viewed documents with the same ST/REC numbers as somehow similar or related and ostensibly that they should be grouped together. More on this in a second.

MCT stamp

From what I can tell, the MCT numbers are tied to the Security Index. If a person was listed in the Security Index, it was extremely likely they had an MCT number. Ron was in the Security Index and his MCT number was 49. One thing I’ve noticed is that if a person was on the FBI’s radar in the early 1950s, around the time that the Security Division was handing out SE’s and not ST’s, they didn’t appear to be assigning MCT numbers. Even if a person was of extreme interest to them in the area of internal security, they didn’t have an MCT number.

So keeping all of the above in mind, do you know what I think about Ron’s missing person documents? I think the FBI stamped his pages in June 1973 after the Cincinnati Field Office had sent the guy from Welco’s fingerprints to FBI Headquarters for comparison to Ron’s prints. The reason is that they weren’t using either the ST or the MCT stamps in 1953. To date, the earliest MCT stamp that I’ve found was assigned in 1958 and the earliest ST stamp was in 1962. I think Ron’s papers had been languishing for decades in the Missing Person File Room, room number 1126 of the Identification Building, and were only known to a chosen few, J. Edgar Hoover being one of them. After Hoover died in 1972, and after the Cincinnati Field Office had inquired about Ron’s prints on May 9, 1973, other staffers had to come up to speed on Ron’s case which is when I believe he received his steamy stamps of the hot-potato variety.

This information is especially useful to us as we compare Ron’s documents to other records from 1973, which is why I’ve called all of us together at this time when many of you would like to get back to watching the Olympics. (P.S. Weren’t the Opening Ceremonies amazing last night? Wasn’t Celine Dion INCREDIBLE??)

Here’s a document with an MCT-49 stamp from February 1973. The document has to do with the Black Panthers and an alleged plot to assassinate Vice President Spiro Agnew.

Here’s an ST-102, REC-19 stamp on a document from August 1973. The document has to do with an alleged plot to assassinate Sirhan Sirhan. To see the full report, click on the below image.

And here’s page one of Ron’s FBI docs, for comparison.

What I’m trying to say here is that Ron was given his MCT-49 stamp four months after a document telling of a potential assassination plot against Spiro Agnew had been given the same stamp. He was given his ST-102, REC-19 stamps a mere two months before someone who was given the same stamps, a guy named Vladimir Zatko, claimed to have been paid $25K in advance to assassinate Sirhan Sirhan.

Incidentally, I found the Sirhan Sirhan/Vladimir Zatko documents tucked inside some of the James W. McCord records, the former CIA operative and Watergate burglar about whom I’ve written before. We’re interested in McCord because he and Ron both have ST-102, REC-19 stamps, though McCord’s extensive FBI file has other ST/REC stamps as well. But here’s what’s interesting about Zatko and McCord: James McCord’s name isn’t listed anywhere in the Vladimir Zatko letter, yet they were assigned the same ST-102, REC-19 stamps and someone from the FBI felt that McCord and Zatko should be filed together. E. Howard Hunt, a fellow CIA operative and mastermind of the Watergate burglary, is mentioned, but not McCord. (Apparently anything or anyone having to do with Watergate was filed under McCord, which doesn’t exactly seem fair.)

I just thought this development was important enough to warrant putting the TV on pause for a second.

Have a good weekend.

Cincinnati Field Office, FBI Records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Records, J. Edgar Hoover/FBI Investigation, Ron's Missing Person File

Ron Tammen was listed in the FBI’s infamous Security Index…

That means that the FBI has had all sorts of intel on him that they’ve been pretending not to know about

For weeks, I’ve been going through Ronald Tammen’s missing person documents with a 2mm-aperture lab-grade sieve (I find it works way better than the toothy comb method) and focusing on the stamps and scribbles that I’d been ignoring for—ay yi yi 🤦🏻‍♀️—around 14 years. In my last post, I discussed the “Hac” notes that are written on top of 10 out of 22 pages of his records and how I’ve come to believe that it was an abbreviation for the House Assassination Committee, which is admittedly shocking if you say it out loud. I have an update on that theory that I plan to discuss very soon. (Spoiler alert: there’s a lot to say.) Today, however, I’d like to discuss a notation that we don’t even have to try to decode. It’s written in the king’s English on the very first page of Ron’s records.

On page one of Ron’s missing person documents, written vertically in the left margin, is a two-word sentence: “See index.” You have to look hard. It’s almost as if they tried to erase it so that we wouldn’t be able to make it out. But, yes indeed, that’s what it says: See index.

“See index” is written in the left margin of the first page of Ron’s missing person documents.

Here it is, blown up and turned on its side. Look closely. The s is obvious. The two ee’s are almost ghostlike, but you can see them if you look closely at their outlines. Then there’s the dotted i, the scribbly n, d, and e, and the prominent slash in the x.

It sounds so vague and benign, but let me tell you, those two words wielded serious firepower.

There’s only one index that they could be referring to: the Security Index, an index so fiercely defamatory that its mere mention could make a G-man of yore’s eyes go wide and his mouth suddenly silent. In a 1971 Washington Post article that was written when the Security Index was first exposed to the public, ex-agents referred to it as “‘a taboo subject’ or ‘super-secret’ or ‘super-skittish.’” (“Super-skittish” was a weird way for someone to describe an inanimate object, but I think the ex-agent meant that he and his coworkers had felt that way if the topic was broached.)

The FBI has dozens of indices, which at that time were maintained on actual index cards, but the Security Index was its most notorious. Originally, it was called the Custodial Detention List, and it was developed—I kid you not—so that the FBI could round up all of their suspected spies and saboteurs and other would-be subversives in the event of some sort of national emergency. We’re not even talking about bona fide criminals. We’re talking about people whom the FBI had labeled as being potentially dangerous in some way based on three priority levels, with level 1 being (potentially) the most prone to violence. Some people were thought to have leaned too far to the left or right politically (usually left), at least in the Bureau’s estimation. Of course, anyone with real or imagined ties to the communist party were on the list. But if you had a friend who’d attended a CPUSA meeting once or if a group that you belonged to was, in the FBI’s view, at risk of being somehow infiltrated by communists, you’d probably wind up on the list too. It’s called pre-emptive policing—surveilling people whom the FBI had deemed potentially dangerous before a potential crime had been committed or even considered—and J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t have been more gung-ho.

This is probably the perfect time to remind readers that this is America we’re talking about, whose forefathers famously wrote on July 4, 1776, that all individuals are endowed with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (which would be rather tough to accomplish if you happened to be pre-emptively detained). If you plan to be setting off bottle rockets as part of your Independence Day celebrations, please be careful, and don’t forget to wear your earplugs!

OK, so let’s get back to discussing the list of Americans whom the FBI was fully prepared to incarcerate for no reason other than it seemed to be the right thing to do if the situation had presented itself. This wasn’t just the perspective of the FBI—it was the Department of Justice’s too, whose approval was required before anyone’s name could be added to the list. However, in 1943, then Attorney General Francis Biddle decided that he wasn’t on board with the program. He called the Custodial Detention List “inherently unreliable,” adding:

“The evidence used for the purpose of making the classifications was inadequate; the standards applied to the evidence for the purpose of making the classifications were defective; and finally, the notion that it is possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is in the abstract and without reference to time, environment, and other relevant circumstances, is impractical, unwise, and dangerous.”

Biddle shut it down and ordered that his memo along with stamped verbiage stating that the program was unreliable and “hereby canceled” should be put in each listed person’s file.

Edgar’s response was: “You present a compelling argument, boss. What were we thinking?”

Just kidding! Hoover changed its name to the Security Index, and it was off to the races once again. Still, Hoover knew he was playing fast and loose with Biddle’s orders. He commanded his agents to make sure that the Security Index be “strictly confidential and should at no time be mentioned or alluded to in investigative reports or discussed with agencies or individuals outside the Bureau”—with the exception of Army and Navy intelligence, that is—“and then only on a strictly confidential basis.” That’s undoubtedly when the Security Index developed its menacing mystique.

Actors, musicians, politicians, writers, and various rando people whom FBI field offices had identified for one reason or another with the aid of a large network of informants…these were all added. According to the FBI’s criteria, the Security Index was for nabbing communists and subversives, from the hard-core revolutionary leaders (Priority #1) to your second-tier worker-bee types (Priority #2) to everyone else (Priority #3). But let’s be real. They gave those criteria a LOT of latitude and people who had zero connections with communists or subversives were among the indexed. Of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference—neither communist nor subversive—were in the Security Index. I’ve found evidence that future Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, clearly a democrat and not a communist, had secured a place in the Security Index in 1955, prior to a trip he made to Russia. In another example, a young man who was intellectually disabled and lived with his mother was added to the index, ostensibly because he’d expressed dislike for the U.S. government, and his neighbors had reported him acting suspiciously—leaving by way of the back door and through the neighbor’s yard if someone was standing in front of the apartment and whatnot. Another guy was added because he wouldn’t open his door to FBI special agents after they’d gone to the trouble of making a surprise wellness visit. So apparently, being socially awkward or standing up for one’s constitutional rights counted too. (As I write this, I suspect that, had I been an adult at that time, and if blogging were a thing back then, there would have probably been an index card with my name on it. If they thought someone going out of their way to avoid the neighbors was bad, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have liked…you know…this.)

Fortunately for Hoover, Biddle’s successor, Attorney General Tom Clark, was far more accepting of the FBI’s Security Index, and attorneys general during the Cold War could also see its merit, a view that was bolstered by the Internal Security Act of 1950, which permitted the detention of certain citizens during a national emergency. In May 1951 there were a little over 15,500 names in the Security Index and it was growing at a rate of about 100 people a week.

In 1971, after the FBI office was burglarized in Media, PA, by eight courageous patriots and the Security Index was exposed, the FBI changed its name to the Administrative Index, or ADEX, because of course they did. However, it, too, was discontinued, this time forever, in 1976, after the Privacy Act of 1974 was passed and as the House and Senate intelligence investigations called for changes.

So yeah. Ronald Tammen was ostensibly deemed dangerous or subversive enough to be listed in the FBI’s Security Index. As for his priority level, I don’t know, but I have a theory and a plan to try to find out.

I’m thinking let’s do the rest as a Q&A. Cool? Cool.

Are you sure? If the FBI had dozens of indices, how do you know they were referring to the Security Index?

Let’s take a quick minute to review the FBI’s record-keeping system. The FBI stores and accesses its entire collection (for the most part) of investigative, administrative, personnel, and other records through its Central Records System. Today the Central Records System is digitized, but before computers, it occupied a sea of square footage in the form of actual file folders filled with copious amounts of paper that could be rifled through and scribbled upon.

Also, as we’ve discussed in the past, FBI cases are categorized numerically according to designated classifications, not by the name of a person or organization. Therefore, FBI officials needed a search tool—which, before computers, was based on index cards—to find out where to look for a person’s case file or files. It’s just like at the library, and how we used to consult a piece of wood furniture that held skinny long drawers filled to capacity with little white cards before we could locate a book.

If an FBI agent back then wished to conduct a check on Ronald Tammen, they’d have to first walk over to their ocean of index cards—called the General Index—to learn which case number or numbers applied to him. The index card carrying Ron’s name would have directed them to case numbers 79-31966 (his missing person case) and 25-381754 (his Selective Service violation case) and probably his fingerprint file over in the Identification Building. What I’m getting at is that FBI officials wouldn’t need to write “See index” on page one of his missing person records if they were referring to the General Index because that index had already been “seen.” The General Index was always stop number one. But what if for some crazy reason that was their protocol? Well, we’d be seeing the words “See index” on the first page of pretty much every file in the Central Records System, and that most definitely is not the case.

As for the other indices, there have been quite a few. In a 1978 review of the FBI’s record-keeping system, the General Accounting Office said that the FBI kept 239 special indices in addition to 28 classified indices at that time to aid in their investigations. They had indices for bank robbers and people who’d undergone background checks and car theft rings and people in organized crime and criminal informants, and so on, and so forth…and that’s just up through the C’s.

Was there an index for Selective Service violators? Sure there was. But we know that that’s not the index Ron’s missing person documents were referencing. How do we know this? We know this because his Selective Service case had been canceled in 1955 (we’re still trying to get someone from the DOJ to tell us why), at which point they should have scribbled out the “See index” notation. No one did that. More importantly, to the best of my knowledge, no other index was specified in people’s FBI records. Granted, I have no idea how FBI personnel would have known to check those other indices. Maybe “See car theft ring index” was written on a person’s General Index card, or better yet, maybe if a person had been arrested for stealing a car, an agent would instinctively check the “car theft ring” index to see if his or her name was on it. Obviously, I don’t have all the answers.

But this much I do know: the words “See index” were purposely vague and benign-sounding and they were surreptitiously scrawled in the left margins of the records of a large number of people who were on the FBI’s radar for a variety of alleged infractions having to do with domestic security. Here’s a sampling of the ones that I found, some of whom will be familiar to you and others who will be new. (Apologies in advance for what I’m about to share with you about beloved comedian Bud Abbott.)

Frank Chavez, Puerto Rican head of Teamsters, friend to Jimmy Hoffa

Jewish Defense League

Bud Abbott

Harry Hay (typo in subject line), gay activist and member of CPUSA

Robert F. Kennedy (His is the toughest to see. The giveaways are the S and the slash of the x.)

Nicole Salinger, wife of Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary

Ruth Alscher, sister-in-law of witness in Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell cases

Morton Sobell, engineer and Soviet spy

Thomas Peasner, Jr., POW from Korean War who’d been interrogated after his return because of his conversion to communism; Army Intelligence said that he’d been brainwashed by Chinese

Edward R. Moss (sic; should be Edward K. Moss), p.r. person with close ties to the CIA and organized crime

What types of information was on the Security Index card?

A Security Index card was a bare-bones, cut-to-the-chase distillation of how a person was viewed in the eyes of the Bureau. It would include the person’s name, aliases, date of birth, most current address (which they kept close tabs on), occupation, and case numbers, plus a string of abbreviations that were typed along the top. The abbreviations might include NB for native born, NA for naturalized, or AL for alien; COM for communist party USA, ISL for Independent Socialist League, or one of several abbreviations for certain non-democratic countries; KF for key figure in whatever communist or subversive organization they tied you with; DC for Detcom, which meant priority detention in the case of emergency; CS for Comsab or communist saboteurs; and so on.

There was also a designation of SP, which meant that your card would be placed in the Special Section. People in the Special Section were in the following demographic groups: espionage (designated as ESP), prominent persons, government employees (federal), foreign government employees, United Nations Secretariet employees, and Atomic Energy Program employees.

An ordinary FBI employee couldn’t just saunter over to wherever the Security Index cards were stored and have himself a look-see. There was a Security Index desk, and a full-time desk man to oversee this highly sensitive area. From 1950 through 1968, that man was Paul L. Cox, the number one man in the FBI’s Subversive Control Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division. It would have been his job to oversee the elaborate process by which cards were added or subtracted from the Security Index, as well as to coordinate with the DOJ in obtaining approvals, among other important duties.

Here’s a dummy sample of what a typical Security Index card looked like. Again, it looks pretty tame. But the fact that someone had one at all means that there was ostensibly sufficient evidence in that person’s investigative records in order for the DOJ to provide their approval.

How exactly did the approval process work?

If a special agent thought that a person of (in their view) questionable character was a perfect fit for the Security Index, they’d fill out an FD-122 form, a sample of which I’ve included below. That form would make its way to wherever it needed to go around the Bureau, and once signed off, would be sent to the DOJ for its approval.

Things didn’t just end there, however. Once a person’s card had been added, it was the responsibility of the designated field office to keep tabs on that person and to submit updated FD-122s if changes needed to be made. In other words, if a tax-paying citizen had the sneaky suspicion that they were being monitored by the FBI before they were assigned a Security Index card, they could rest assured that they were most definitelybeing watched after getting one.

The FD-122 for Representative Bella Abzug of New York. Her Security Index card was approved. Click on image for a closer view.

It seems so weird that Ron’s case would warrant a Security Index card based on the measly smattering of records the FBI had on him.

That’s just it. Based on the documents that we have, there isn’t any reason for it. It only makes sense that he would have a Security Index card if there were other records, especially records of a derogatory nature, which we haven’t seen. Another possible scenario I suppose would be if Ron’s card was in the Special Section, and he were a federal employee of some sort engaged in, oh, I don’t know, espionage perhaps? I’m just speaking hypothetically, of course. Clearly, I’d need to see Ron’s Security Index card in order to get a better idea of why he had one.

Can you do that?

I can try. But bear in mind that I’d be submitting a FOIA to the FBI, who has made it crystal clear that, after my lawsuit settlement, they will never, ever entertain another FOIA request having to do with Ronald Tammen. So even though my original complaint never mentioned the Security Index and the FBI’s FOIA staff ostensibly never consulted it, they would very likely tell me to take a lengthy stroll off a short pier.

That said, do you know who I didn’t sue for Ron Tammen’s records? The DOJ. And do you know what document the DOJ might still have? Ron Tammen’s FD-122. That would be even better than his Security Index card, since it would contain the FBI’s reasoning behind their need for a Security Index card for Ron. And that, my friends, is the document I’ll be seeking.

Do you really think Ron might have had a Security Index card on file because he was a spy?

Believe it or not, I actually think there may be a stamp that says ESP on one of Ron’s documents that we already have, but it’s been crossed out. The stamp appears at the bottom right of the 1973 memo that had been written by the Cincinnati Field Office requesting a comparison of the Welco employee’s fingerprints with Ron’s fingerprints. The stamp is immediately above the one that says NINE, which represents the FBI’s Special Investigative Division. (We’ll talk about that another day.) I have two versions of the Cincinnati memo: a light version, which had been sent to me by the FBI, and a dark version, which had been sent to me by the Butler County Sheriff’s Office, who’d gotten their version from the Cincinnati Field Office. If you zoom in on both stamps, you can make out the roof and bottom of an E, though the center line appears to be whited out. Beside the E is a curvy letter that looks a lot like an S. The third letter is harder to make out, but there aren’t many other options for it to be. So currently, I’m entertaining the notion that there’s an ESP on one of Ron’s documents. If we could get our hands on Ron’s FD-122 in order that we can verify that theory, I’d be stoked.

And if we can’t verify that he was a spy?

That’s OK. As you can imagine, verifying that someone was a spy is really hard to do. Plus, maybe he wasn’t a spy, in which case we may be able to at least get our answer to that question.

At the very least, we can now say with 100% certainty that the FBI has a lot more information about Ron’s case than they were ever willing to disclose to anyone—to you, to me, to Miami University officials, to news reporters, to the Butler County cold case detective, and to Marjorie and Ron Tammen, Sr., along with the rest of the Tammen family, whom they knowingly deceived for decades.

Better late than never, I guess.

************

On this, the 58^th birthday of the Freedom of Information Act, I’d like to extend a very big thank you to the researchers who, through their tireless FOIAing, have made FBI records and other government documents available to all of us and made this current research endeavor possible. These include:

The Black Vault

Mary Ferrell Foundation

Government Attic

That 1 Archive

Joe Cella, Miami University, Potential Tammen Sightings, Ron Tammen's Personal Life, The Investigations

A deep dive into what Carl Knox, Doc Boone, H.H. Stephenson, and others said about Ron’s disappearance in ‘The Phantom of Oxford,’ circa 1976

After my most recent blog post about when Carl Knox stopped investigating Ron Tammen’s disappearance, a reader and I were discussing the 1976 documentary produced and narrated by Ed Hart of Dayton’s Channel 2. For those people who haven’t watched it yet, I encourage you to do so. It isn’t very long—less than 1/2 hour total. I’ve embedded the two parts on my home page, but you can also link to them here:

The Phantom of Oxford

Part 1

Part 2

What’s special about this documentary is that key people tied to the investigation in 1953 have given on-camera interviews in 1976, and what they say is revealing. This got me to thinking that I should transcribe their quotes and post them online. That way we won’t forget the things they said in light of any new information that we’re able to uncover.

As it turns out, creating a transcript of their quotes wasn’t that time-consuming. I recalled that I’d found a transcript of the program in Miami University Archives early in my investigation and had filed it away. I’ll discuss that transcript in more detail a little later, since I believe it reveals something about the person or persons who created it. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t Ed Hart.)

And so, here you go…the quotes from The Phantom of Oxford along with my thoughts below several of them:

Quotes from The Phantom of Oxford

PART 1

Joe Cella, Hamilton Journal News reporter [0:06]

[Opening]

“I believe Ron Tammen voluntarily walked off campus. I believe he’s somewhere out in the world today…alive, under an assumed name. Everything has been…erased with him…uh…and I believe he’s still out there.”

Oh, man, me too, Joe, with one slight difference: I think Ron was driven off campus. But other than that, I totally agree with you, 100 percent, that Ron Tammen was still very much alive in 1976.

Charles Findlay, Ron Tammen’s roommate [5:40]

[Describing his return to his and Ron’s room in Fisher Hall on Sunday night, April 19, 1953]

“I came back to campus, to Fisher Hall, and went to my room as normal and the light was on in the room. And in the room, the door was unlocked, and Ron’s book was open on his side of the desk. And uh…the desk chair was pulled back as though he got up and went somewhere. So I thought not too much about that and I studied I think till eleven o’clock that night. I got back to school about nine o’clock, went to bed as usual, and got up the next morning and didn’t see Ron in his bed. I still wasn’t too excited about it because I thought he might have spent the night at the fraternity house.”

For the life of this blog, I’ve been reporting that Chuck had arrived back at Fisher Hall at around 10:30 p.m. I’ve reported that time because A) that was the time reported by Joe Cella in his one-year anniversary article in the Hamilton Journal News on April 22, 1954, and B) Carl Knox had written the time 10:30 on one of his note pages along with the words “Light on – Door open but he never returned.” Carl didn’t say what happened at 10:30, but I presumed that’s when Chuck had arrived at the room, as corroborated by Cella. I’m now wondering about that time. This has nothing to do with Cella, by the way, who was an excellent reporter. But it might have something to do with what someone had told Cella when he was writing his one-year anniversary article.

In the video, Chuck says that he returned to Miami at 9 p.m. I figured that, with 23 years having transpired since he’d recounted the story, that detail may have become a little fuzzy. However, when I went back to read the earliest news articles, I found this in the April 28, 1953, Miami Student, which was overseen by journalism professor Gilson Wright, who also reported on the case: “Tammen, a counselor in Fisher Hall, disappeared sometime between 8 and 9 on a Sunday night.” How do they know it was before 9 p.m.? It may just be sloppy reporting, but could Chuck Findlay have arrived at 9, which is how they would have been able to provide that timestamp? And if that’s the case, what would the 10:30 signify in Carl Knox’s note? Of course, it may indeed be the time of Chuck’s arrival, but what if it was something else—such as the time Ron had walked back to the dorms with Paul (not his real name) and Chip Anderson or the time someone may have spotted Ron sitting in a car with a woman before driving off? Something to ponder…

Addendum: I’ve added Carl Knox’s note to the bottom of this post.

Charles Findlay [6:36]

[Describing the next day, Monday, April 20…]

“And it was sometime later that afternoon, the evening, we had a counselors meeting. And that’s when I think we discussed a little more, a little further, as to what, where Ron was and what the situation was.”

Charles Findlay [7:40]

[Describing when it first hit him that Ron probably wasn’t coming back]

“I think probably the first three or four days I wasn’t concerned. But I really realized he wasn’t coming back, he wasn’t coming back as he normally would, when the ROTC was out and they were dragging the pond, I get concerned. Cause I remember sitting at my desk and looking out the window and watching them drag the pond…and that was kind of an eerie feeling.”

Ed Hart: Someone must have thought that there was foul play involved. Did you?

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t think so because at that time, even now, you go back and you think about a college student, what 19, 20 years of age. How do you make an enemy? And who would think that a college student would have much money?”

As we’ve discussed in the past, if Ron was gay, then there was a chance that he could have been the victim of a hate crime. However, because we now have evidence that the FBI expunged Ron’s fingerprints in 2002 due to the Privacy Act, that tells us that Ron was still alive in 2002. (Per the FBI: only the subject of the record can request an expungement of that record.) Therefore, I don’t believe Ron was a victim of foul play.

Jim Larkins, fellow sophomore counselor in Fisher Hall [8:40]

[Describing why he felt it didn’t make sense for Ron to run away]

“He is just the last person that you would ever expect just to merely take off uh… for as far as I was concerned there would be no reason for his having done it. From all that we could…all that we knew about him and could learn about him he just seemed to have everything going for him.”

Carl Knox, dean of men at Miami University, who oversaw the university’s investigation into Ron’s disappearance [9:33]

[Describing students in the 1950s and a little about Ron as a person]

“Much more it was known as the apathetic period of time. It was certainly uh…far different from the Sixties but uh…it was generally a fairly happy time, sort of normal activities taking place. This young man was uh…well appreciated around campus because of his musical talent. He played bass with the Campus Owls uh…he did and was one of few people on campus who had a car permit in order to transport that bass viol around. And one of the oddities of the thing because he prized it so highly was the fact his car was found locked up with the bass inside and uh…no Ron.”

In his role as the dean of men, Carl Knox was responsible for all male students on campus. He made a point of knowing the students, especially the ones who were most active. I’ve been told that he likely knew Ron Tammen, though probably not very well. H.H. Stephenson, who was an employee of Carl’s, would have known Ron a lot better. We’ll get to H.H. in a minute.

Ronald Tammen, Sr., Ron’s father [10:52]

[Describing his perceptions of the last time he saw Ron, who’d been in Cleveland playing with the Campus Owls the weekend before he disappeared]

“He just seemed to have fun the whole time he was there. There was never anything at all that would indicate there was a (laugh) he had a problem or a thing was bothering him. Nothing at all.”

That’s how Ron’s father may have perceived his son, but there was obviously a lot more going on inside that “fun” veneer. If something was bothering Ron, especially if he was dealing with the sorts of stresses that I think he was dealing with—his grades, his finances, his sexuality—I doubt that he would have gone to his father, who was known to be decidedly not fun in certain situations.

Joe Cella [11:25]

[Describing his impression of how the investigation into Ron’s disappearance was conducted]

“I wasn’t too keen on the initial investigation that went on. It was very abruptly done. To me there was no thorough investigation. And that’s the reason I stayed with it. Over a period uh…of years that followed, we were able to accumulate a lot more, much more, than we ever had initially.”

THANK YOU, Joe, for sticking with it! It’s because of the leads you chased down that we’ve been able to get to the place we are now.

PART 2

Dr. Garret Boone, physician and Butler County coroner [0:16]

[Describing his experience when he tried to notify Miami officials at that time about Ron’s visit to his office in November 1952 to have his blood type tested]

“On one occasion…uh…led to some uh…sharp words between a…uh…between me and two Miami University personnel who did not appreciate uh…my uh…being concerned about the problem of his disappearance.”

Ed Hart: Why?

“Well, I really don’t know. Uh…they might have been bored with me and maybe they got fed…been fed up by reporters and TV men, I’m not sure…which.”

Wouldn’t you love to know who the two Miami personnel were? Doc Boone may have given us a couple clues. What I’m getting from his comment is A) he went to the university in person, since he was ostensibly talking with two people at the same time; and B) the personnel seemed to be the types of people who frequently dealt with “reporters and TV men.” Therefore, it sounds as if one of the two persons handled media relations. Was the other person Carl Knox? It’s my understanding that he was a soft-spoken man who employed a velvet-hammer type of leadership style. For this reason, it’s difficult to imagine him engaging in “sharp words” with a public official who was offering to lend his assistance in the investigation.

Ronald Tammen, Sr. [1:20]

[Describing his impressions of the investigation]

“I was happy that we got the FBI to be involved because of the broad coverage. But uh…I can’t say that I’ve ever been happy about anything that’s happened in the case, because nothing’s ever happened.”

Ronald Tammen, Sr. [1:51]

[Describing the effect Ron’s disappearance had on Mrs. Tammen]

“So much with the wife that uh…big problems occurred with her health. It was just beyond her…she just couldn’t take care uh she couldn’t take it and her health started failing and that was…that was the cause, I believe, of her death was his disappearance and no evidence or solutions at any time.”

This is probably Mr. Tammen’s most revealing statement. First, he refers to Mrs. Tammen as “the wife,” which is about as impersonal as he could be. Maybe it was how they talked in the 1950s, but in the ’70s? I’d think he could have spoken more affectionately…how about “my wife,” or “Ron’s mother,” or, best of all, “Marjorie”?

Mr. Tammen’s biggest slip was when he said “she just couldn’t take care uh she couldn’t take it.” As we’ve discussed, Marjorie was an alcoholic for years before Ron disappeared. As you can imagine, his disappearance didn’t help in that regard. When Mr. Tammen said she “couldn’t take care,” I believe he was about to give away too much information about her condition. Was he going to say that she couldn’t take care of herself? Their two younger children, Robert and Marcia? I don’t know. But he caught himself just in time.

Carl Knox [2:40]

[Describing why Ron’s disappearance had stood out for him throughout his career]

“On other campuses where I’ve been located there have been disappearances and there have been tragedies, but nothing which has sort of popped out of…

No background of explanation, no way of reasonable…uh anticipation, but just suddenly happening and there you were with uh…uh…egg on your face, deepfelt concerns and yet uh…no answers for any part of it.”

Ed Hart: And yet something tells you Ron Tammen is alive?

“Yes, I feel this. I feel it…keenly.”

I believe Carl Knox had discovered information about Tammen’s life and disappearance that he was not making public, likely after having been told by someone in a position of authority. Remember how he’d had a buzzer installed on his secretary’s desk for Tammen-related calls? Or how his secretary was given a list of words that she was instructed not to say to reporters? And we’ve since learned that he’d discovered that Dorothy Craig of Champion Paper and Fibre had written a check to Ron shortly before he disappeared. When asked 23 years later if Ron Tammen was alive, he said, “Yes, I feel this. I feel it…keenly.” This tells me that Carl had some indication that Ron was in ostensibly trustworthy hands when he left Miami’s campus. Like the U.S. government’s perhaps?

Barbara Spivey Jewell, daughter of Clara Spivey, who was at her mother’s house in Seven Mile, Ohio, when a young man who looked like Tammen showed up late at night on Sunday, April 19, 1953 [3:33]

[Describing when her mother and she notified the Oxford police about the young man’s visit]

“Well, we saw his picture in the paper about a week afterwards and my mother said, well that’s the boy that was here at our door. And so we went to Oxford to the police station and talked to them. But uh…I was at the door with my mother also and I’m um…positive it was him.”

It was actually two months later, not a week. Also, a third person in the room, Barbara’s eventual second husband, Paul Jewell, told Detective Frank Smith in 2008-ish that he was “absolutely confident” it wasn’t Ron. He thought it was a local ruffian.

Barbara Spivey Jewell [4:07]

[Describing whether she’s still convinced that it was Ron]

“I would still say that it was him. I’m positive. I can still see his dark eyes and his dark hair.”

H.H. Stephenson, Miami housing official who saw a young man who looked like Ron dining in Wellsville, NY, on August 5, 1953 [4:44]

[Describing his experience in the Wellsville, NY, restaurant]

“When my eyes would look toward him I would find he was looking at me. And I had that feeling that uh… that he was sort of looking right through me. Uh… for some reason uh… that I’ll never know I said nothing about uh… the fact that I thought maybe this young man was Ron Tammen. I didn’t speak of it to my wife during the meal. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

H.H. Stephenson (he went by Hi, short for Hiram) knew Ron Tammen, whereas Mrs. Spivey didn’t. In 1953, Hi was the director of men’s housing and student employment. He would have interviewed Ron for his counselor’s position. He also gave Ron his permit to have a car on campus. Most of us wonder why Hi didn’t walk up to the young man when he had the chance, and he obviously would agree. But Hi told his boss, Carl Knox, the next day. Why didn’t the university follow up on that potentially big lead?

Sgt. Jack Reay, Dayton Police Department, Missing Persons [6:30]

[Describing his check on Ron’s Social Security number in 1976]

“When I checked with the state, this uh…Social Security came back negative. There was no record of it, which would indicate that, in the past few years, since we’ve had the computer, uh…and things have been entered into the computer, there’s been no activity with that Social Security number.”

The fact that Ron never used his Social Security number again is incredibly important. This means that he didn’t just run away to be with some forbidden love interest, be they female or male. If he lived—and we have evidence that he did until at least 2002—then he had to have gotten a new Social Security number, which is extremely difficult to do. There is a list of circumstances for which a person can request a new Social Security number and running away to become a new person isn’t on the list.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a transcript of The Phantom of Oxford in Miami’s University Archives. I’m missing the first page, but I have the rest of the pages, which end at 23. The transcript appears to be written by someone in the business. It’s typewritten in two columns. On the lefthand side is a description of each video clip (photos, videotaped interviews, B-roll, and reenactments) and on the righthand side is a description of the audio (narration and interviews) that accompanies that clip. I’d always thought that the transcript was provided by someone with the TV station to the university, but now I don’t think so. I think someone affiliated with the university typed it up because they only cared about the narrative and the interviews with people tied to the university. There is one person whom they didn’t care about—Sgt. Jack Reay. Even though he wasn’t involved in the Tammen investigation, he was a great resource and had a lot to say about missing person cases. The only words typed on page 21 are “MISSING PERSON THEORY,” which covers all of Sgt. Reay’s air time. I feel that his comments are elucidating too, which is why I’ve included them here.

Sgt. Jack Reay [7:16]

[Describing how rare it is for a person to disappear completely without a trace]

“It’s very difficult for a person to just drop completely out of uh…civilization and not somebody else know who he is or where he is or something about him…or him to relate back to some of his early childhood. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying that, percentage-wise, for someone to just completely drop out would be very small in comparison with the missings and runaways.”

Agree. I think it would have been impossible for Ron to have carried it off without A LOT of help.

Sgt. Jack Reay [8:00]

[Describing what kind of person would voluntarily leave family and friends forever]

“If somebody is really set on…getting lost, I think that they can, but they’re going to have to be a very strong individual. And as far as a 19-year-old…I don’t know. It takes an awful lot of willpower to sit back and say, there’s nothing back there that you ever want to be related to again.”

Also agree. But, as we’ve discussed numerous times, the 1950s were different. If Ron was gay, it would have been extremely difficult for him, especially if he was at risk of being outed. I honestly think that, in his 19-year-old brain, he decided that his family would be better off thinking that he was dead as opposed to being gay.

Sgt. Jack Reay [8:29]

[Describing the potential of identifying Ron’s remains decades later if he’d been a victim of foul play]

“If he was a normal individual and never really had any contacts with any type of…law enforcement or any type of identifying thing [mumbled], it would be a little bit difficult to identify that individual today. In fact it would be very difficult.”

Marcia Tammen’s DNA is on file in CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System. If there is ever a discovery of unidentifed human remains, law enforcement should be able to ascertain if it’s Ron. But, as discussed above, I also don’t think he was a victim of foul play.

Ronald Tammen, Sr. [8:42]

[Describing his thoughts with regard to ever seeing his son again]

“I…I have uh…have never lost hope that sometime, somehow something would come up so we’d have some evidence of either his death or his disappearance or the reason, reasons for it or…I’ve never given up. In fact a lot of times I’ve thought that uh…you know, he’s gonna show up. He’s gonna show up here pretty soon.”

😔

Joe Cella [9:20]

[Describing his thoughts with regard to ever finding Ronald Tammen]

“I don’t know whether I would recognize him today if…if I saw him, but uh… Richard gave me a photograph of Ron and uh…he gave it to me 23 years ago, believe it or not. I’ve been carrying it in my wallet…hoping some day in my travels around the country that, you know, who knows…it might be him coming down the street.”

I have it on excellent authority that Joe carried Ron’s photo in his wallet for the rest of his life.

**********

ADDENDUM

Carl Knox’s note in which he’s written the time of 10:30 but doesn’t mention Chuck Findlay’s name

Carl Knox Investigation, Joe Cella, Miami University

When did Carl Knox stop looking for Ron Tammen?

You guys, I’ve had a serious change of heart about something pertaining to the Ron Tammen case. It has to do with the length of time that had transpired before Carl Knox, Miami’s dean of men who was tasked with conducting the university’s investigation into Ron’s disappearance, stopped looking for him. This was despite the fact that Ron’s family and friends, not to mention Miami students, faculty, and staff; alumni; people living in the tri-state area; and anyone else who might have happened upon Ron’s story, were still devouring any piece of information the university could provide.

Recently, I had an email conversation with a reader on the topic of Dorothy Craig, and it occurred to me that, even though I’ve probably alluded to my evolved feelings on this website, I hadn’t really put them into actual words. It’s time to fix that.

What I used to think

In the past, I’ve cited two occurrences that enabled us to establish a before/after timeframe to delineate when Carl Knox had stopped looking for Ron. Mrs. Clara Spivey of Seven Mile, Ohio, provided the “before” date, the latest date on record when I believed Carl was still looking for him. Two months after Ron had disappeared, Mrs. Spivey had contacted investigators with the claim that a young man matching Ron’s description had shown up on her doorstep late at night on April 19, 1953, looking disheveled and confused and seeking directions to a nearby bus stop. At first, the time was reported as being around 11 p.m., but then the reporter, Miami journalism professor Gilson Wright, had changed it to midnight for subsequent articles. Mrs. Spivey had come forward shortly after June 20, 1953, after having read a recent article in the Hamilton Journal News in which Wright had basically retold the story and said there were no new leads. Oscar Decker of the Oxford Police had embraced Spivey’s story and the media were thereby alerted.

“It was a blustery night, with some snow flurries, and traffic was light,” Decker said. “He could have easily walked the 11 miles from Oxford to Seven Mile in two and a half or three hours.” (I beg to differ, chief, but please, do go on.)

The paper then paraphrased him saying that “If the youth in question was Tammen, it reinforces the theory that he suffered a sudden attack of amnesia.”

Because the university was publishing this new development in the Miami Student, it appeared to me as if Carl was still looking for clues as late as June 29, 1953.

The “after” date, the earliest date on record when we could conclude Carl was not still looking, was, in my view, one day after Miami housing official H.H. Stephenson had returned from his vacation in upstate New York. On August 5, 1953, Stephenson was having lunch in a hotel restaurant with his wife, in Wellsville, NY, when he was convinced that he spotted Ron, whom he’d actually known at Miami, eating at a table with several other young men. Weirdly enough, H.H. didn’t approach the young man at that moment, and by the time he returned to the dining room to find out if it was indeed Ron, he was too late. The young men had left.

According to a 1976 article by Hamilton Journal News reporter Joe Cella, Stephenson had told university officials—probably Carl himself—about his experience the next day, on August 6. However, as far as I can tell, Carl didn’t follow up on this lead. He didn’t call the hotel in Wellsville or notify the FBI or anything else he might have done to see if he could track down the young man. Likewise, unlike their reaction when Mrs. Spivey had stepped forward, university officials had kept H.H.’s potential sighting away from news reporters. Joe Cella had to chase that lead down himself 23 years later.

As a result, my earlier hypothesis was that Carl Knox had stopped looking for Ron Tammen sometime between June 29 and August 6, 1953, which I felt was surprisingly soon after Ron had disappeared.

What I think now

I think it was way sooner.

Why I’ve changed my mind

Carl was doing all the right things early in his investigation—conducting interviews, compiling notes, coordinating a campus search, talking to bank officials, and working with law enforcement. Best of all, he was following leads. If someone gave him the name of a person who might know something—someone like, oh, I don’t know…Doc Switzer, for example?—Carl would dutifully write down that person’s name on his pad of paper and contact them.

Another example was when Carl had jotted down the name of a girl Ron used to date as a freshman, Joan Ottino, along with the names of two of her family members. Joan had moved to Denver, Colorado, to attend nursing school over one year earlier, but Carl was undeterred by the distance. A week and a day after Ron disappeared—April 27, 1953—Carl had sent a telegram to Joan, asking “SHOULD YOU HEAR FROM, OR SEE, RONALD H. TAMMEN, PLEASE WIRE OR PHONE COLLECT.”

See what I mean? He’s not simply going through the motions to make it appear as if he’s doing something. He’s really doing something.

On May 4, 1953, an article appeared in the Hamilton Journal News informing readers that several of Ron’s fraternity brothers had recently traveled to Cincinnati in response to a landlord who thought her new tenant looked like Ron’s photo. Unfortunately, she was mistaken. Although the article doesn’t say this, I have it on excellent authority that the person driving those Delts to Cincinnati was Carl Knox. This means that, shortly before May 4, 1953, Carl Knox had been accepting phone tips and contacting his back-up witnesses and hitting the road in search for Ron. I’ve also learned that he was gathering info from his passengers on the drive to Cincy and back as well. It was on that car trip that Carl Knox learned of Paul’s (not his real name) and Chip Anderson’s late-night walk home from the Delt house to Symmes and Fisher Halls after song practice the night Ron disappeared.

But do you know what? That’s also roughly the point in time when the urgency in finding Ron Tammen seemed to wane for Carl. And it wasn’t as if he wasn’t discovering new information. Although we don’t know precisely when he discovered the information about Dorothy Craig’s check, I think it had to have been early in his investigation. Dorothy’s name is written at the top of a page of scribbled notes that establish what Ron was doing before he disappeared. It’s the sort of info an investigator would collect on day one—the condition of the room, an hour-by-hour breakdown of where he was, that sort of stuff. It could be that his note about Dorothy’s check was added at the top on a later date, though, even if that were the case, I’d still think it would have been early on.

I think Carl was instantly intimidated by Dorothy Craig’s check. Something about it—Was it the amount? Was it her powerful employer?—may have astonished him so much that he immediately stopped putting any further details into writing. I’ve thought for some time that as Carl was being informed by the bank official about the check, it was the pivotal point in which he’d halted his investigation. Now I’m thinking: if Carl had learned about Dorothy Craig’s check before May 4—and my hunch is that he had—maybe he did look into it, and someone else had put a stop to that part of his investigation. Maybe they said something like: “Look, Carl, if you want to drive to Cincinnati to check out the landlord’s tenant, fine, knock yourself out, but don’t go near Dorothy Craig.” No matter what happened or how, I think that Dorothy Craig’s check factored heavily into the reason the university soon lost interest in Ron’s case.

And let’s not forget about Dr. Garret Boone, the cranky Hamilton physician whose office Ron visited in November 1952 to have his blood type tested. In 1973, reporter Joe Cella had revealed that Boone had attempted to notify university officials about Ron’s visit but had been rebuffed. Although we don’t know exactly when Dr. Boone attempted contacting the university, I think it was also early.

An excerpt from the 1953 Hamilton, Ohio, telephone directory with Garret Boone’s entry in bold and all caps; click on image for a closer view

As Boone told Cella, “I offered the information (the medical file card contents) to local authorities at the time, but it was always discounted.”

His use of the phrase “at the time” sounds as if he didn’t wait around for two months until approaching them, as Mrs. Spivey had done. Mrs. Spivey attributed her tardiness to the fact that she hadn’t seen the story in April and had only been reminded of her front-porch visitor after reading Gilson Wright’s June 20 article stating Tammen was still missing and there were no new leads. Dr. Boone’s situation was different though. In addition to being a practicing family physician, Boone was the county coroner, which means that he was an elected official. It was his job to keep up on the news of Butler County, especially anything having to do with a potentially life-and-death matter regarding one of its citizens. He would have seen the April news articles and he knew the importance of stepping forward as early as possible in such cases.

But when he did, university officials—I’m guessing Carl was one of them—had zero interest in what he had to say. That doesn’t sound like the old Carl—the one from before May 4. This tells me Doc Boone likely contacted them shortly after that date, after he’d had time to rifle through his files for Tammen’s medical card.

By then, Carl Knox was assuming a more passive role in the investigation and letting Oxford police chief Oscar Decker take over. When Mrs. Spivey’s potential Tammen sighting was announced on June 29, 1953, it was Decker who was the spokesperson ballyhooing the news.

And so, at the moment, I think Carl Knox and Miami University were no longer investigating Ron’s case by May 4, 1953—two weeks and a day after Ron went missing. Of course, if we ever find evidence that Doc Boone had reached out to university officials earlier than that day, we’re going to have to push our date up even further.

Carl Knox Investigation, Champion Paper & Fibre, Miami University

Part 4: Was someone from Champion Paper and Fibre helping support St. Clair Switzer’s research activities in 1953?

The last time we talked (which could be 5 minutes ago, 5 days ago, or 5 weeks ago—it’s totally your call), we were discussing the life of Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., the president of Champion Paper and Fibre Company from 1950 to 1955 and from 1957 to 1960. During the interim two years, Robertson was deputy secretary of defense under Secretary Charles Wilson.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that the part about his being the deputy defense secretary is impressive and all, but that was two years after Ron Tammen disappeared. Come to think of it, all of those hires he’d made of top-tier military and intelligence personnel happened during or after his Department of Defense (DoD) gig. What was he doing on a national level in the spring of 1953?

You make a good point. In the spring of 1953, Reuben Jr. had just returned from a trip. In February, he’d been named by President Eisenhower and Harold Stassen, director of the Mutual Security Agency, to lead a team of businessmen on a tour of Germany to assess the effects of U.S. spending there. The Mutual Security Agency was created in 1951 to facilitate the military and economic recovery of America’s allies after WWII. As director of the MSA, Stassen was a member of the National Security Council. He was also a member of Eisenhower’s cabinet. For this trip, 55 businessmen traveled to 14 Western European countries, and Reuben Jr. had led the German contingent, which included six other men. After two days of training, they arrived in Germany on February 16, 1953. Although news articles that I’ve read don’t state how long the trip lasted, I’m guessing that they were back by the end of February or early March.

One month earlier, in January 1953, Reuben Jr. had been elected to serve as one of four vice chairmen on the executive committee of the Business Advisory Council. The Business Advisory Council, now called the Business Council, was, at that time, an esteemed advisory group to the U.S. Department of Commerce, which was headed by the newly-appointed Secretary Sinclair Weeks. President Eisenhower had selected a number of his other cabinet posts from individuals who sat on the BAC, including Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, who was formerly president of General Motors.

So, in a nutshell, in the spring of 1953, Reuben Jr. was in Hamilton, while he was also helping out two of President Eisenhower’s cabinet members when he was asked, which seemed to be on a regular basis. He was traveling in powerful circles and making headlines while doing so.

Because I’m writing this on a deadline, and because much of this post involves speculation, I think we’ll go back to a Q&A format. Hope you’re cool with that?

Yeah, that’s fine. So you say he was making headlines. Is that how Miami University officials came to know him?

Headlines and word of mouth certainly contributed to his visibility in southwest Ohio. If you have a strong business school—and Miami University certainly does—you’re going to notice the most successful businesses in your area, especially if the company president’s network of friends and associates extends as broadly as Reuben Jr.’s did. People in the business school did take notice. In May of 1951, the School of Business Administration sponsored an industrial management conference and Reuben was the luncheon speaker. He spoke on wage stabilization, a topic he knew well, since his appointment on the federal Wage Stabilization Board was coming to an end in June.

Max Rosselot, an assistant professor of secretarial studies and office management in Miami’s School of Business Administration, spent the summer of 1952 working with Champion’s pool of stenographers, immersing himself in the company’s business practices to enhance his courses for future stenographers and secretaries. Rosselot would later go on to become Miami’s Registrar in the early- to mid-1960s.

Champion had noticed Miami too. In 1947, a staff member in Miami’s Psychology Department, R.C. Crosby, director of student counseling, taught a course in business psychology to 24 Champion employees. According to the December 1947 issue of The Log, “This course deals with some general principles of the psychology of human relationships and their application to business and industrial groups.” If you’re wondering why St. Clair Switzer wouldn’t be teaching the course—after all, business psychology was his baby—this was at a time when Switzer was still counseling veterans after the war and he hadn’t yet gone back to teaching courses at Miami. I’m sure he would have been interested though.

Another way that Miami officials would have known about Reuben Jr. was through his aunt.

His aunt? Who was Reuben Jr.’s aunt?

Reuben Robertson, Jr.’s aunt was Mary Moore Dabney Thomson, wife of Alexander Thomson, who, in turn, was Reuben Robertson, Sr.’s brother-in-law. (If you need to work that through your heads a minute, I can wait.) Alexander Thomson was a longtime executive with Champion Paper and Fibre, and was chairman of the board from 1935 until his death in 1939.

But Mary Moore Dabney Thomson did stuff too. From 1933 to 1941, she was a member of the Western College for Women’s Board of Trustees, and during the years 1941 though 1945, she was president of the college. As many of you know, Western College for Women was across the street from Miami University and, in 1974, it became part of the university. In fact, Thomson Hall was named for Mary Moore Dabney Thomson.

Credit: Miami University Special Collections
https://spec.lib.miamioh.edu/home/western-college-presidents/

But here’s the rub: you know how I discussed in part 2 that women in those days tended to relinquish their first names when they got married? One case in point is Mary Moore Dabney Thomson, who was often referred to in the press as Mrs. Alexander Thomson. Seriously. She was president of a prestigious women’s college, and people still referred to her by her husband’s name, even when he was no longer alive. I say this with all due respect, but what the bloody hell is up with that, members of the 1930s…’40s…and ‘50s press?

Mary Moore Dabney Thomson was well-known in the Oxford community before the Champion Coated Paper Company merged with Champion Fibre Company in 1935, and well before her nephew Reuben Jr. arrived in Hamilton in 1937. I’d even bet that it was through her that some Miami officials became familiar with the Thomson and Robertson names.

In what can only be described as pure coincidence, Mary Moore Dabney Thomson’s portrait was revealed on April 18, 1953, in Western’s Clawson Hall, the day before Ron Tammen disappeared.

You mentioned previously that Reuben Robertson, Jr., sat on Miami’s Board of Trustees from 1957 until his death in 1960. Did Miami officials seek his input on anything earlier than that, such as when Ron was still a student?

Yes, they sure did. Shortly after President Ernest Hahne died in November 1952, Reuben Robertson, Jr., was asked by the vice president of Miami’s Board of Trustees to sit on the committee that would select the next president. Reuben Jr. represented the public on the six-member committee, which included the president of the Board of Trustees as an ex-officio member. Several months later, that committee decided upon John D. Millett, who was affirmed by the 27-member board in March 1953.

President Millett must have been equally impressed with Reuben Robertson, Jr. In 1956, he would invite him to be a commencement speaker, and, at that time, Reuben was bestowed an honorary law degree.

So…what’s your theory?

I’m thinking that someone contacted Lt. Col. Reuben Robertson, Jr., for help in funding research that was being conducted by Lt. Col. Switzer in Miami’s Department of Psychology. (Using military rank might go a long way when making the ask.) The asker might have come from Miami University, from the military, or from somewhere else. Reuben Robertson, Jr., knew a lot of people.

The reason that someone may have asked for his help is that universities are usually strapped for cash and the restrictions placed on the government’s spending of taxpayer dollars are tight. Perhaps they asked Reuben Jr. if he’d be willing to support students taking part in a university study that would benefit national security. That doesn’t sound too different than asking him if he’d be willing to buy a box of cookies to support the Girl Scouts. Reuben Robertson, Jr., believed strongly in education and national security. He was also a busy man. Maybe that’s all he felt he needed to know.

How might Dorothy Craig have fit into the picture?

Dorothy Craig was a loyal employee of Champion Paper and Fibre Company. In 1953 she’d been working there for 16 years as an order clerk, a job that carried a lot of weight. She was well-liked, and, like Reuben Jr., she treasured her family. Her main activity outside of work was church.

Even though Dorothy Craig dropped out of high school after her sophomore year, she still attended her alumni reunions—that’s how much of a people person she was. In a Hamilton Journal-News photo of their 45^th class reunion, which took place in the summer of 1965, Dorothy is standing on the far righthand side of the third row. When I first saw the picture, I was hoping that Dorothy was the woman who was standing two people to her left. The other woman was tall with short, jet black hair, white-rimmed glasses with dark lenses, and dark lipstick. She looked like a spy who wouldn’t take sass from anybody. Dorothy, on the other hand, looked a little more motherly—a gentle woman with a genuine, sweet smile. If someone needed a go-between to provide payments to Ron Tammen—someone who could handle an errand without asking too many questions—Dorothy Craig would have been perfect. Besides, she probably would have wanted to help support college students and protect national security too.

(I tried to obtain permission to post the photo, but I haven’t heard back from my contact. If I ever do, I’ll post it. In the meantime, if you have access to Newspaperarchives.com, you can view it here.)

What do you find most telling about the check from Dorothy Craig?

The quiet…always the quiet. When Carl Knox wrote his note about Dorothy, he didn’t include any additional information about the check—the date, the amount, and where it was cashed—even though I’m sure that information was provided to him. He didn’t include contact information for Dorothy Craig either, even though that information would have been given to him as well. And he kept Dorothy’s identity to himself or among a very small circle of people. Neither he nor the Oxford PD ever mentioned her in the news. If someone had contacted her, and her transaction with Ron was deemed inconsequential, they could have still provided an update to news reporters while protecting her anonymity. Something like: “An area woman had written a check to Ron for X dollars, but it turned out to be for (fill in the blank).”

Likewise, Dorothy Craig had just written a check to Ronald Tammen, a smart, serious-minded college student who disappeared shortly afterward. The news coverage would have been hard to miss, especially for someone who happened to be sitting in a roomful of order clerks at a paper company. Early and often, investigators lamented the lack of clues in the case. If I were Dorothy? I think I would have come forward and told someone about that check, be it the university, the Oxford PD, or even the FBI when they stepped in. Something like: “I just saw him on Saturday when I wrote him a check for (fill in the blank). He seemed OK.”

That is, unless I was instructed not to.

Do you think Dorothy Craig was the ‘woman from Hamilton’?

Let’s put it this way: I think Dorothy Craig was a woman from Hamilton who may have been acting as a liaison to help compensate Tammen for some activity he was involved with, such as a university study, perhaps. Whether she was the woman from Hamilton who I believe drove Ron away from Fisher Hall, I really don’t know.

You know what I’m thinking?

No, what?

I’m thinking that this new Hamilton connection could make Ron’s blood type test a little more significant.

Interesting. Also, we may have landed on some new words that Carl Knox’s secretary was told not to say in front of a reporter.

**********

Whew! This concludes today’s posts. I’d love to hear any comments or questions you might have about Dorothy Craig, Reuben Robertson, Jr., or any other topic you feel like discussing concerning Ronald Tammen’s disappearance.

Carl Knox Investigation, Champion Paper & Fibre, Miami University

Part 3: The military-industrial complex in Hamilton, Ohio

Hamilton, Ohio, may seem like a long way from our nation’s capital, but in the 1950s, Champion Paper and Fibre Company had garnered the attention of some powerful people at the top. “What people?” you ask. Oh, only Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Both Harry and Ike had a lot of respect for Champion Paper. They or people in their administrations would frequently turn to the company’s leadership for their expertise in business and matters pertaining to national defense.

You heard me. National defense.

Mostly, it had to do with the company’s president, Reuben Buck Robertson, Jr. Reuben Jr. was intelligent, innovative, and oh my gosh, the man had charm. He had looks too, especially in his youth. His dimples could stop traffic. (He was probably told that a lot.) You could say that he attained his position as a birthright—his father, Reuben Sr., had preceded him as company president—but Reuben Jr. was very good at his job. Exceptional, really.

Reuben Buck Robertson, Jr.
Credit: Office of the Secretary of Defense

Before I tell you anything more about Dorothy Craig’s larger-than-life boss, let’s have a quick run-down on the company’s history and how Reuben Jr. got where he was.

The Champion Paper and Fibre Company had its official start in 1893 as the Champion Coated Paper Company. Its founder, Peter G. Thomson, was a bookstore owner, publisher, and printer from Cincinnati. Because of Thomson’s love for the printed word, he had a high regard for paper as well. When printers started using halftones—tiny dots of ink—to reproduce illustrations instead of hand-drawing or etching them, Thomson knew that the paper needed to be coated to create a smooth surface that would hold the ink in place. If the paper weren’t coated, the ink would sink into little crevices and spread. In 1891, Thomson purchased 200 acres in Hamilton to build a coating mill, and in 1894, his new business was up and running. But there were a few snags: in order to operate a fully-functioning coating mill, he needed sufficient quantities of paper to coat. As a remedy, he constructed a paper mill in town. Next Thomson discovered that, in order to operate a fully-functioning paper mill, he needed a consistent supply of wood pulp. Thomson found an ideal spot in Canton, North Carolina, an area so thick with pine trees, it probably smelled like the world’s best car freshener 24/7. The pulp mill was constructed in 1908, and, with that addition, Thomson now had a self-sufficient paper-manufacturing operation that would continue to develop and grow.

The pulp mill in North Carolina was named the Champion Fibre Company, and Thomson’s son-in-law was put in charge. That son-in-law was Reuben Buck Robertson, and his marriage to Peter’s daughter Hope Thomson would be the start of the Thomson-Robertson dynasty of Champion Paper. Peter’s three sons, Peter Jr., Alexander, and Logan Thomson, would all assume positions of leadership in the company, as would other family members, including Reuben’s son, Reuben Robertson, Jr., who was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1908.

Reuben Jr. graduated from Yale Sheffield Scientific School in 1930 with a degree in chemical engineering. That same year, he started working at Champion Fibre for his father. Reuben Jr. was the ultimate Undercover Boss. He started low—as a laborer in the woodyard—and worked his way up the ladder. He toiled and sweated along with everyone else. He asked a ton of questions. In doing so, he developed a keen understanding of every aspect of the papermaking business and the people on whose backs the business relied upon.

In 1935, the two companies were merged to form Champion Paper and Fibre Company, which included adding a new paper mill in East Texas. With the merger, Logan Thomson was made president, Reuben Jr. was vice president, and Reuben Sr. was executive v.p. Two years later, Reuben Jr. moved from North Carolina to work in the General Office Building in Hamilton, a stately building on North B Street that housed roughly 75 Champion office staff. That same year, Dorothy Craig was hired by Champion to work in its General Office Building as an order clerk.

Seventy-five people is a relatively small number of occupants, and Reuben Jr. was a people person. He would make a point of knowing his employees—both those in the office building, and those in all the other buildings too. Dorothy strikes me as a people person too.

Why do I think that? A man named Bill McDulin used to write a folksy column for the Hamilton Journal-News titled “Got a Minute?” that shared newsy tidbits for the locals. McDulin’s guiding principle seemed to be to leave people with a good feeling about themselves and their community. Because they happened to be neighbors, Dorothy Craig, of Carmen Avenue, was mentioned several times in McDulin’s column. In one of his “Remember when” blurbs from 1976, he asked his readers “Remember when Charlie Betz was a member of the Hamilton police department?…Mrs. David (Geraldine) Adkins started writing poetry?”…[and so forth, and then]…Dorothy Craig worked at Champion?”

Literally thousands of people worked at Champion Paper and Fibre Company. For Bill McDulin to have singled out Dorothy over everyone else seems…well, it seems like she must have been known by quite a few people. So without question, Dorothy and Reuben Jr. would have known each other, and not just to say “hello.” Reuben Jr. would have asked Dorothy about Henry and the kids, or sometimes he likely would’ve wanted to know “How are the orders coming in today, Dorothy?” Dorothy would have felt at ease with Reuben Jr. and could answer him honestly, without sugarcoating, even if the news was less than favorable.

Reuben Jr. got his first taste of policymaking on the national stage in 1942, when he was asked to serve on the War Production Board. Although its name sounds as if it was a small group of men in suits sitting around a table and talking about war stuff, the War Production Board was an entire agency tasked with readying the country for WWII. The War Production Board was responsible for converting a variety of domestic manufacturing plants into weapons manufacturers. They’re the agency that coordinated the collection and recycling of aluminum, tin, rubber, steel, and other materials to be used for military purposes. For its part, the Champion Paper and Fibre Company had developed a paper substitute for the aluminum liner that went inside packs of cigarettes. They were brainstorming to that level of detail. And even though people today don’t normally think of foods like coffee and meat as commodities with implications for combat, the War Production Board did, and they formulated strict rules to ration certain foods to conserve resources.

But serving on the War Production Board didn’t stop Reuben Jr. from taking part in the war itself. He also enlisted. From 1942 to 1945, he was an officer in the Control Division of the Army Service Forces, advancing to lieutenant colonel by V-J Day.

Shortly after Reuben Jr.’s return to Hamilton, the Champion Paper and Fibre Company experienced another musical-chairs-style shift in leadership. Logan Thomson died in 1946, and with his death, Reuben Sr. became president. Four years later, Reuben Jr. would be elected president of the company, and his father would be elevated to chairman of the board.

Even with Reuben Jr.’s added responsibilities in running the entire company, Washington continued to call. Over the next five years, he was asked by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to serve in the following ways:

He was appointed by President Truman to the Wage Stabilization Board, from 1950 to June 1951.
In 1953, he was appointed by President Eisenhower and Mutual Security Director Harold Stassen to lead a team of businessmen to evaluate the effects of U.S. spending in Germany.
From 1953 to 1955, he served as vice chair of the Secretary of Commerce’s Business Advisory Council.
In 1955, he served as vice chair of the Hoover Commission Task Force Committee on Business Organization for the Department of Defense.

So, yeah. The people in the highest posts of all the land were interested in hearing what Reuben Jr. had to say. And…are you ready for this? In 1955, President Eisenhower asked Reuben Jr. to serve as deputy secretary of defense under Secretary Charles Wilson. Which. Was. Huge. Reuben’s company would continue to be in good hands while he was away, since Reuben’s father would take over as president in the interim.

Some have described the deputy secretary of defense as the secretary’s alter ego. The deputy secretary knows everything the secretary knows, including issues pertaining to national security. I would hasten to remind readers that the U.S. was now engaged in the Cold War, so there was a lot to know, national-security-wise. I would quickly add that, on an org chart, the deputy secretary is immediately below the secretary and above anyone else having to do with the Department of Defense (DoD), including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Research and Development Board, the heads of all the military branches, you name it. It was Reuben Jr.’s job to oversee the day-to-day matters involved with managing the largest agency in the federal government. Of course, he was a natural.

Still, while he was in that awesomely important role at the DoD in the middle of the Cold War, Reuben Jr. would commute between Hamilton and D.C. by plane almost daily, according to a knowledgeable source. This was made possible thanks to an airstrip on his home property in Glendale, a small community about 12 miles from Hamilton. With that airstrip, plus the use of the company’s fleet of aircraft maintained at Lunken Airport, and Champion’s team of licensed pilots, Reuben Jr. could rub elbows with the nation’s top brass in the morning and still be home in time for dinner with wife Peggy and their six kids.

Oops, my bad. Did I neglect to mention that Reuben Jr. was an amazing husband and dad? Well, dude was an amazing husband and dad. There’s a photo in the company newsletter, The Log, in which he’s walking hand in hand with two of his children, who were dressed like a cowboy and a cowgirl, and he’s beaming away, dimples fully deployed. It’s so clear that Reuben’s children adored their father, just as Reuben’s employees adored their boss.

You may be wondering what papermaking could possibly have to do with the nation’s defense (other than the manufacture of paper liners for cigarette packs, that is). It had to do with the times they were living in. Back then, paper was—let’s see, I need to be careful not to overstate this—paper was everything. If someone from the DoD had an idea they wanted to put into motion, then they were going to need a sh*t-ton of paper to get that idea across to other people. It’s how the government communicated. It was how information was disseminated. After all, they didn’t earn the name “paper pushers” for nothing. Those ration books? Paper. The Uncle Sam posters asking people to bring in their toothpaste and shaving cream tubes for the tin? Paper. And maps. Millions of paper maps. In an August 1995 article, Jim Blount, a former editor for the Hamilton Journal-News who was also a treasured local historian for many years, shared this information that he’d found in a Champion newsletter concerning the importance of paper during WWII:

“For army maneuvers in 1942 in the Carolinas, 95 tons of paper went into 4.5 million maps. Every soldier in that operation received 21 maps covering the 12,000-square-mile area.

‘All ration cards and instructions must be printed on paper, and there is hardly a branch of this defense wherein paper is not used wholly or in part,’ noted The Log, a Champion publication. ‘It is necessary to plotting systems, giving instructions for air raid precautions, first aid instructions, communications and records of all kinds. Bonds, tax stamps, notes, orders, correspondence, even money itself is paper required by the Treasury Department, and the chances are that the bond you buy or the revenue stamp which is canceled on the can of tobacco is made by Champion.’

The 1942 article said ‘in this greatest of all wars in the history of mankind, there is needed for this year alone, 18 million tons of paper.’”

And that was just WWII. The United States needed paper during the Cold War too, for which 1950 was a banner year. On June 27, 1950, which happened to be Reuben Jr.’s 42^nd birthday, the United States had entered the Korean War. On September 4, 1950, then-General Eisenhower—he wouldn’t be president until January 1953—kicked off Crusade for Freedom, a CIA-backed endeavor to raise funds for Radio Free Europe, which, at that time, was a U.S. propaganda tool based in West Germany. Even though it was said to be supported privately by everyday Americans, government dollars were also invested into the printing of stamps, posters, and leaflets by the millions. Some leaflets were used for fundraising at home and abroad. Others were dropped from balloons behind so-called Iron Curtain countries, such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, denouncing communism and advertising radio wavelengths and program schedules. Crusade for Freedom, which ran from 1950 to 1960, was a paper-palooza, and Champion Paper was there for it. Reuben Sr. oversaw the crusade’s two-state region of North and South Carolina. You can watch a 5-minute video on the Crusade for Freedom on C-Span’s Classroom program.

There was talk that Reuben Jr. would become defense secretary after Charles Wilson stepped down, but Reuben wasn’t interested. He wanted to be more present for his family, and he tendered his resignation in 1957. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t still have an avid interest in defense. In 1955, the same year in which he started at the DoD, Reuben Jr. kicked off the Chapaco Council—“Chapaco” being the initial letters from the three words Champion, Paper, and Company—which was a series of retreats for company management at Lake Logan in North Carolina. The line-up of speakers was a mix of military might with big names in business, industry, higher education, and journalism.

Speakers representing the U.S. government for the five years in which the retreats were held were:

Reuben Jr. also hired some of the highest military and intelligence officials the country had to offer to work for Champion Paper and Fibre Company. Conversely, one man, Thomas D. Morris, would be propelled from Champion to the DoD. Here’s the list that I’ve been able to assemble of Reuben’s most decorated hires. To keep things brief, instead of including their entire resume, I included the last position(s) held before they made their career change.

Col. Kilbourne “Pat” Johnston
- Assistant director of CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, 1950-52
- Champion Paper and Fibre in Texas, 1955
- Champion Headquarters in Hamilton, 1957
- Vice president of Champion Paper and Fibre, 1962
Thomas D. Morris
- Director of management and planning, asst. to the president of Champion Paper, and Fibre 1958-60
- Assistant secretary of defense
  - Installations and Logisitics, Jan 29, 1961-Dec 11, 1964
  - Manpower and Personnel, Oct 1, 1965-August 31, 1967
  - Installations and Logistics, Sept 1, 1967-Feb 1, 1969
Col. Karl Bendetsen
- Assistant secretary of the Army, 1950-52
- Undersecretary of the Army, 1952
- Vice president, Texas Division, Champion Paper and Fibre, 1955
- Vice president of operations, Champion Paper and Fibre, Hamilton, 1957
- Vice president, Champion Paper and Fibre, 1960
Admiral Arthur Radford
- Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1953-1957
- Consultant for Champion Paper and Fibre, 1957, Washington, D.C. office
Major General Frederick J. Dau
- Assistant for materiel program coordination to the commander, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, August 1952
- Deputy director of supply and services, WPAFB, November 1952
- Director of supply and services, WPAFB, May l954
- Awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest military award during peacetime, 1959
- Accepted position at Champion Paper and Fibre, 1959

I’d challenge anyone to find a similarly elite cadre of military brass working together at one civilian business anywhere. I have to believe that Reuben Robertson, Jr., was the reason.

Look, there’s no easy way to tell you what happened next. In the early hours of Sunday morning, March 13, 1960, Reuben Jr. was driving home with his wife Peggy from a social engagement in Cincinnati. On a dark stretch of highway, the Robertsons were startled by a car that was sitting in the center lane, unable to move. According to an Associated Press account: “Robertson swerved his Cadillac, but he clipped the stalled car and grazed a passenger who was standing outside.” Evidently, the other car had run out of gas. Of course, Reuben got out of his car to talk to the people in the disabled vehicle, probably to find out if they were OK and to tell them that his insurance would cover the damage to their car. I wouldn’t be surprised if he also offered to bring them back some gas. Suddenly, a drunk driver came careening down the road and knocked into Reuben, throwing him 50 feet into the air. Reuben Buck Robertson, Jr., died almost instantly at the age of 51.

I’m sure you can imagine the news coverage. Everyone who knew him was devastated, including, I’m sure, Dorothy Craig. His memorial service was attended by dignitaries, Champion employees, and family and friends. A memorial issue of The Log was dedicated to his life and career. (I encourage you to download it so you can view all of the pictures.) Miami University’s Board of Trustees, of which Reuben Robertson had been a member since 1957, issued a statement on the loss of their friend and colleague.

Oops, sorry. Did I neglect to mention that Miami University had known Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., quite well? My bad.

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UPDATE: Two readers have asked for more details about the accident, wondering if its cause could have been more nefarious in nature. The driver of the car that killed Reuben Jr. was Willie Lee Griffin, age 31, of Rockdale Avenue, in Avondale, Ohio, which is part of Cincinnati. Oddly, he was only charged with drunk and reckless driving even though he killed someone. Vehicular manslaughter, a felony, was definitely a charge that could have been brought against him at that time. Later, in 1967, Ohio law divided the category into first and second degree vehicular manslaughter, with drunk and/or reckless driving considered to be first degree offenses, and therefore, still a felony. I don’t know why they didn’t hold him accountable for Reuben Jr.’s death.