LEO SZILARD AND MY DAD, FRED DROSTEN

I was recently in Springs on Long Island, to see an exhibit of the work of my old friend Johanna Vanderbeek. Peter and I stayed at Arnold Leo's, another old friend, father of Melissa and Erik and ex-husband of my dearest friend Peggy.In the days (mid 1960s) when our two families spent many hours together, Arnold was working as an editor at Evergreen Press founded by Barney Rossett. I remember speaking with Arnold about Leo Szilard. Arnold had met him through Barney. Szilard had not published with Evergreen, but was working as an activist warning of the dangers of Atomic War. Arnold was so impressed with him that he bought a box of a book that Szilard had written called The Voice of the Dolphins. At the time, I was busy with two very young boys, Ezra and Peter, working at Henry Street Settlement, with little time for reading. When my parents came to visit in our basement apartment at Henry Street, Fred grabbed the book and began reading it. He had worked in Oak Ridge doing research for that project and was well aware of Szilard. I was glad to unload the book to him. Several years later he mentioned that Szilard had come to Washington University and that he had heard him speak. It struck me on reading about Szilard's difficult life that he and Fred had similar problems-- in that each was a scientist with conscionce, stuck in a system that 1. did not respect or listen to them, and 2. their work was instrumental in some pretty bad things that our government had done. Szilard became one of the founders of the Bulletin of Atomic Energy, a journal which Fred had subscribed to from the beginning. These last few August days were the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagazaki. With each imperialist conflict, the United States inches closer to another use of these terrible weapons. We can't say we weren't warned.