Arthur J. Vidich in London in 1950. Two weeks after his second son Paul was born in August 1950 , Arthur took his family on the Queen Elizabeth for his Fulbright year at the London School of Economics.
Arthur's son, Charles interviewed him on his activities during 1950. Here is what Art said in an exclusive interview granted in the summer of 2005.
Charles Vidich: When you went to Europe, how did you go? By train?
AJV: We took trips to Europe. One without you boys. We farmed you out to nannies for about 6 weeks. I always regretted that. But neither of us was aware of the implications of just dumping two children on nannies whom they knew but only sporadically, who took care of them some days a week. I know that it disturbed Charlie in some way from a report that the nanny gave me because she took him to Brighton beach and she said he sat under the table for the first two days. Ha ha.
Paul, of course, was very young and it didn’t matter as much. He was less than a year old. On the next trip to Europe, we didn’t go by car we went by train and took the two boys with us going to France and taking the Simplone Orient Express to Trieste. At that time, Tito had broken with Stalin but was still not part of the west. So you had to get off of a luxurious train of the Simplone Orient Express which went all the way to Turkey and transfer to a Yugoslav train which was an old battered train. It was full of peasants and you got on that train and the atmosphere changed completely. Everybody was delighted to see some Americans, Americanos and babies. The old ladies took the babies, hugged them and took care of them. It was a welcome I couldn’t believe I could receive anywhere. Giving us wine or whatever. And then we got to Ljubljana and Maryan Sadar met us. And from our previous trip we had known what kind of shortages these people were living with. No toothbrushes, no needles, no thread and no bicycles. I had brought a bicycle from England along with all of these supplies that Virginia had for these relatives. And we gave all of these supplies to Maryan Sadar, who I hope and he said he did, distribute these supplies to the relatives. And the bicycle I gave to Stana Sadar in Radovliza. She has not to this day, forgotten that. She sends me a Christmas card every year with a long rundown of what has happened from all of the relatives. So we were there for quite a long time, I would say two months almost and not since that time have I been treated so royally. Before I went there for the second trip, Joe Bensman who was at the Voice of America, asked me to do a study of radio listening habits in Yugoslavia. I said “Ok.” And he said that his superiors said Ok. They tried to clear it with the State Department and the State Department nixed the deal. They didn’t want an American going in there like a CIA agent or something like that. So they didn’t give me the deal. Joe wrote to me separately and said, if you do it anyway, we’ll buy it from you for $500 bucks. Ha ha. So I went and I did it anyway. Ha ha. I traveled to Zagreb, Belgrade and met all kinds of people, and really all strata. I did sixty interviews on the queue tee, writing my notes at night afterwards and remembering the stuff in detail, phrases and stuff and so forth. When I got back, Virginia and I wrote up the report and sent it in and I got the $500 which I needed. I was then pretty strapped for cash. I came back to America with about $100 bucks and I had no place to go so I was put up by Luis Fisher’s wife, Marcusa Fisher in a place in Pennsylvania, in Dutch country. Then I got a letter from Washington asking me to come there to be briefed on my experience there. And I went there and I was really impressed by the coordination of interagency people who were interested in that subject.
No comments:
Post a Comment