When Bill Ayres hit the headlines as a radical bomber a year or two later I still didn't put two and two together to realize that buried somewhere in our subscription list was the name of a local who was Daddy-O to the bomber.
It was much later, with the rise of Barack Obama, that I realized the connection between Obama's pal, Bill Ayers and our subscriber, Thomas Ayers.
I have never been able to dope out if Thomas Ayres was interested in subscribing to a firmly-right newsletter because he was a genuine conservative living in a posh neighborhood in an affluent, Republican suburb of Chicago near where I lived......or if he was actually a covert hard-core radical himself.
As head of a vast electric utilities company that personified capitalism and conservatism at the time, it's hard to decipher what side he was on, and how much he supported his son's radicalism, if he did at all.
Too late to find out now, Thomas Ayers lights went out permanently in 2007.
Leni
Daddy Ayers was a true conservative, unlike his son, who had a different bent, to say the least.