In the shadow of the ‘loneliest man in Washington’

Kids grow up in the shadow of their parents. In my case it was an uncle’s shadow which kept hovering over my life. His name was Uncle Lonny, or Harold G. Stagg, and when I was 8 years old he drove a Cadillac, which made him a god in 1953.

Never mind that he was editor of the Army Times in Washington, D.C.; it was the Cadillac that made him important to me.

Then when he died early at age 51 in 1959 his obituary made him a god in another way. It said “For two days Lonny Stagg was the loneliest man in Washington as the congressman stoutly denied the charges ...” (New Haven Register, Jan. 18, 1959)

By then I was 14. I could imagine driving a Cadillac, but I could never imagine being “the loneliest man in Washington.”

What did that mean? That’s a pretty big shadow for a kid to step out of as he grew into the sunlight of manhood.

It turns out Uncle Lonny had exposed the war record of Republican Congressman Douglas Stringfellow as a fabrication. Uncle Lonny had spoken the truth and in the end he had been proven right.

The congressman resigned on the new national medium television in 1954. Lonny Stagg was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and I had no idea what that meant.

But I did know what “loneliest man” meant because I had stayed back in first grade in 1950 and I was the loneliest kid in my second attempt to pass first grade that next year.

So my big example of family leadership as I grew up was a man who was willing to endure loneliness in order to speak truth to power.

This came in handy over the next 60 years, especially in 1971 after Kent State shootings; in 1984 in the AIDS crisis in New Haven and Yale; and in 2013 after the Boston Marathon bombing.

In each of these situations I was the loneliest truth teller around.

After the 1970 Kent State killings I helped mount a 10,830signature campus petition to President Nixon to overrule Attorney General Mitchell and convene a federal grand jury; in 1984 I invited “60 Minutes” to Yale and New Haven to report on a prostitute who had given birth to a baby with AIDS when no one believed AIDS was a heterosexually transmitted disease; and in 2013 I offered my parents’ burial plot in Hamden to the Boston Marathom bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev when no one would allow his body to be buried in a Boston cemetery.

Lonely stuff. Uncle Lonny stuff. I was prepared by my childhood to take it. Funny how life sometimes works that way — even staying back in first grade.

Paul Keane is a retired Vermont English teacher who grew up in New Haven and Hamden.