I remember the night before their execution going to Broadway and 86th Street in Manhattan with my father to buy a newspaper. There was a very, very large protest to save the Rosenbergs going on. A man approached my father with a petition to sign and my Dad rolled it up and shoved it in the guy’s face along with a punch. The man did nothing and said nothing. I think he knew not to mess with my Dad who as a very patriotic American and a vet. I was only about six years old at the time, but later when I grew up I did read about the Rosenbergs. I think they did it for money.
There is no evidence of that. The Rosenbergs were True Believers in the communist ideology who also thought that the Soviet Union was the only serious obstacle to world hegemony by Nazi Germany and, later, the capitalist USA.
Although I was with my grandparents in Tampa at the time I lived in Okeechobee, FL, a small cow town at the north end of the lake by the same name. The courthouse had been built in the 30’s and had open halls that my friends and I used as play space whenever we chose. There was a display of local history pictures in one of the halls and it had a couple of pictures of people being publicly hanged in front of the courthouse. My friends and I were VERY affected by knowing that right out there on the front lawn men had died by hanging. We would avoid the area at night for fear of ghosts. A lot goes on in the mind of 12-year-old boys, especially back in those days!
Thanks for the story. I really enjoy hearing first-person accounts of events that I remember!