Ava Helen Miller in Corvallis, 1921-1923

Ava Helen Miller, ca. 1922. Note annotation by Linus Pauling: “Ava Helen about when I met her.”

[Part 2 of 2]

Ava Helen Miller entered Oregon Agriculture College, now Oregon State University, as a freshman in the fall of 1921. During that first year, she met Linus Pauling, and shortly thereafter the two fell in love and became engaged. This chance meeting derailed her plans to continue her formal education, and after five terms at OAC, she left school to start her life with Pauling. But even though she spent less than two academic years in Corvallis, Ava Helen made the most of her experience.

The tenth of twelve children, Ava Helen was born in 1903 in Beavercreek, Oregon, an unincorporated area southwest of Portland. When the time came to begin considering colleges, OAC proved a natural choice because, by 1921, three of her siblings were already attending the school. These siblings were her brother Milton, a senior majoring in agriculture; another brother Clay, a junior also studying agriculture; and sister Mary, a senior in home economics. Like Mary, Ava Helen entered OAC as a home economics major. And instead of living in a women’s dormitory like most first-year students, Ava Helen lived with her siblings in a Corvallis rental home that her mother Nora also resided in.

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Though college was not an ordinary expectation for women of the era, a higher education seemed to be in the cards for Ava Helen. She had always excelled as a student, graduating from Salem High School in three years as the class president. Buoyed by her past successes, Ava Helen enrolled in a wide variety of courses during her OAC tenure, including Spanish and French, languages for which she showed a particular aptitude.

Generally speaking, her performance in college improved as she became more settled. During her first term, she received mostly Bs with a C in general chemistry and an A in English composition. Interestingly, during her second quarter, Ava Helen received her only F, which was also in English composition. That winter term was clearly challenging with respect to academics, as her grades were somewhat worse than was typical for the rest of her OAC time. (Coincidentally or not, this was also the term in which she met her future husband.) But later, her grades improved. In her last quarter, she took Child Care and received an A, perhaps a foreshadowing of her future responsibilities as a mother of four.

Chemistry was always one of her best subjects, and instructors besides the young Pauling took note of her chemistry aptitude. One of them, an organic chemistry instructor named Mr. Quigly, remarked that she was among his best students. Despite this aptitude, Ava Helen notably received a B in general chemistry during the winter term of her first year, a grade that she felt was lower than she deserved. This belief was accurate, but because the instructor for the course was her soon-to-be husband, the instructor – “boy professor” Linus Pauling – deliberately lowered her grade from an A to a B, in an effort to obfuscate any potential impropriety. This decision remained a source of good-natured ribbing between the couple for years to come.

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Ava Helen pursued interests outside of academics during her stint in Corvallis. She joined the school’s drama club, known as the Mask and Dagger, during her first year. The club produced several plays including larger productions like Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Clarence,” a modern “light comedy” by Booth Tarkington. Near the middle of the year, Ava Helen hit the stage in a one-act offering titled “Pierro by the Light of the Moon” by Virginia Church; Ms. Miller was cast as Columbine, the second lead.

During her second year at OAC, Ava Helen also served as secretary of the Lyceum Club, which consisted of “musicians, readers, and lecturers.” The club focused on coordinating cultural events for the local community and, during Ava Helen’s year, hosted several prominent artists and musicians, including the Flonzaley String Quartet.

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A discussion of Ava Helen’s time at OAC would be remiss if it did not include mention of her romance with Linus Pauling. During the winter term of her first year, she was enrolled in a general chemistry course that was mandatory for all home economics majors. Pauling, himself a fifth-year senior at OAC, was assigned to teach the class, though he was only a few years older than the students that he was asked to teach. Shortly after their first encounter in January 1922, Ava Helen and Linus hit it off, and by the end of the school year they were engaged.

In the summer of 1922, Pauling left Oregon to begin his graduate studies at Caltech while Ava Helen continued her schooling, starting her second year at OAC. The initial plan was for Ava Helen to stay at OAC and complete her degree while Pauling worked on his Ph.D, and the pair wrote to each other nearly every day, and saw one another on breaks. But the waiting and separation proved too much, and by the end of the second quarter of her second year, in March 1923, Ava Helen dropped out of school in order to plan her wedding. In June 1923, the couple married and Ava Helen moved to Pasadena to begin a new life.

Ava Helen’s OAC

Ava Helen Miller, fall 1921

[Part 1 of 2]

Ava Helen Miller entered Oregon Agricultural College (OAC), now known as Oregon State University, in the fall of 1921. She spent a total of five quarters at the school; one quarter shy of two full academic years. And even though her experience in Corvallis was relatively short, it was a memorable period for Ava Helen, one culminating in her meeting her future husband, Linus Pauling.

During the 1921-22 school year, OAC was home to its largest student body to date – more than 7,000 enrolled for at least one quarter, and a graduating class of 3,147. (2,040 men and 1,107 women.) The freshman class was 300 students larger than had been the case the previous year and the student body included 47 international students from Bolivia, Palestine, Peru and South Africa, among other far away lands. An additional 995 out of state students pursued an OAC education, with Washington leading the way (384) followed by California (315) and Idaho (111). Within the college, Home Economics awarded the most degrees that year, tallying 889; the School of Agriculture came in a close second with 876 degrees.

Those enrolled from out of state did so despite the fact that, in the fall of 1921, OAC began charging non-residents tuition – $20 per term – for the first time. The change impacted new students only, meaning that existing out of state students could still attend for free. (Ava Helen was a resident of Oregon, so this did not affect her.) Understanding the financial burden that this decision could have on its students, the OAC Board decided that non-Oregon residents who had served in World War I could receive a 50% discount on tuition. According to the monthly OAC Alumnus, the fees were enacted to “prevent an undue influx of students from other states and at the same time [provide] additional income […] in the construction of buildings.”

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OAC’s post-war population bump coincided with shifts in the types of activities available to the college’s women students. Several clubs for women were sponsored, including those dedicated to riflery and mandolins, but new sports were an area where women were really able to broaden their horizons. OAC co-eds competed in baseball, basketball, swimming, track, tennis, archery, volleyball, and the afore-mentioned riflery; dance was also organized as part of women’s athletics.

As was the case most everywhere however, traditional men’s athletics remained far more popular across campus and the community. The most prominent sport at OAC was football and the team, affectionately known as the “gridiron squad,” was lavished with rituals and processionals prior to each game. Among the most extravagant was a feeding party where the players dined on “big juicy steaks cooked rare, toast crisp through and through, big baked potatoes that rival the prizes of the Pullman diner [a popular upscale train car from the time] – all topped off with ice-cream.” And though the men ruled the sporting world at OAC, these epic meals took place in the women’s Home Economics Tea Room, as that was clearly the place for the best food on campus.

With more people at the school, more options to choose from, and requirements that first- and second-year women sign up for P.E. credits, its no surprise that, during Ava Helen’s second year, women’s physical education courses saw more enrollees than ever before. Elective options included seasonal sports, aesthetic dancing, swimming, or apparatus work, which is similar to gymnastics. The era’s women did not play softball, but were allowed to play baseball (with other women). To help manage growing numbers, and to harken back to times when the program was much smaller, the Physical Education Club arranged weekly dinners to assist students in getting to know one another.

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Competitive speaking was another area opening up to OAC’s women. By the fall of 1921, women had three different debate teams available to them – varsity, junior varsity, and intramural. During Ava Helen’s first year, the women’s Dual Debate Team (junior varsity), competed against the University of California and was asked to address the possibility of Irish independence. Meanwhile, the varsity squad was charged with discussing: “That the principle of the closed shop should be applied to all American industries. Farming and all industries employing less than three men are excepted.”

Intramural debate tended to pit classes against one another, with a 1921 contest asking freshmen and juniors to consider federal government ownership and operation of coal mines. Other topics shed light on the culture of the state a century ago – notably, a men’s interclass competition considering whether or not “Oregon should enact a law prohibiting Orientals from acquiring land within the state.”

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By Ava Helen’s time, women had clearly emerged as a priority for OAC. Importantly, in the fall of 1922, the college finished construction of its third women’s dormitory, Margaret Snell Hall. And a year prior, OAC had welcomed it newest Dean of Women, Mary A. Rolfe.

Rolfe had worked for various organizations before OAC, including the YWCA and the University of Iowa, but immediately prior to her tenure in Corvallis she had served in France as a “searcher.” In that role, she worked with other stenographers to write down wounded soldiers’ last words, which would then be conveyed to their families back home. As Dean, Rolfe believed that “My relation to young women should be that of friend,” an ideology that she upheld by creating opportunities for women and treating them as capable and inquisitive. One early example of this was her sponsoring the Oregon chapter of the Home Economics Conventions, a program “of interest to all women, whether professional home economics women, teachers, or homemakers.”

Ava Helen Miller took advantage of all that her college had to offer during a period of significant change. An exploration of her experiences at OAC will be the focus of our post next week.

Pauling’s “Immoral Man”: Nuclear Testing, the Nature of Leadership, and Letters to the Kennedys

[This is post 3 of 3 originally authored by SCARC Student Archivist Ethan Heusser for the Rare@OSU blog.]

For internationally renowned scientist and activist Linus Pauling, the early 1960s represented a time of feverish peace work that matched the dangers and necessities of an ever-escalating international crisis. One of the most interesting (and complicated) examples of his correspondence to world leaders during this time was to President John F. Kennedy.

Most of Pauling’s communications with JFK happened during his tenure as President of the United States between 1961-63. (Pauling, meanwhile, was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1963.) The topics of their letters varied widely between nuclear disarmament, nuclear test bans, international peace treaties, and even the Cuban Missile Crisis itself.

Though Pauling’s letters frequently asserted an authoritative tone, the two did not always maintain the level of peership this might imply; many of Pauling’s letters went unanswered, and those that did get replies were sometimes written by others on Kennedy’s behalf.

Pauling was often vehemently critical of President Kennedy’s policies and public relations efforts regarding the cold war and nuclear disarmament, attacking his moral character for failing to take strong enough action to de-escalate rising nuclear tension.

It’s also worth noting that Ava Helen Pauling played a similar role in advocacy to the Kennedys; she wrote Mrs. Kennedy with a similar message about the threat of nuclear weapons, albeit focusing specifically on the impact this might have on her own children. The Paulings’ two-pronged approach is emblematic of their larger team effort.

Nevertheless, Pauling’s lengthy diatribes and urgings to the Kennedys ended abruptly after the infamous assassination in 1963. Of particular significance is a brief letter written to the First Lady three days later, within which Pauling expresses remorse over the death “of our great President, John F. Kennedy.”

The tone of that letter is hard to interpret due to its pithiness, but the typically stoic manner in which Pauling writes reveals here a brief moment of vulnerability. For all his “urgings” and his attacks on Kennedy’s moral character, Pauling clearly also had a certain amount of faith in Kennedy’s ability to listen to reason, make compassionate decisions, and lead the nation through moments of immense political pressure. Not only that, but as someone familiar with death threats due to activism, it’s hard to imagine Linus Pauling seeing November 22^nd as anything other than a sobering and uncertain experience. The long and difficult relationship between them was snuffed out, but the legacy of the work, unfortunately, needed more than ever to be continued.

Ava Helen, Linus, and the Push for Federal Union

[Part 3 of 3]

Soon after its publication in 1939, Clarence Streit’s thought-provoking book, Union Now, became a popular topic of discussion nationwide. As we’ve described in the previous two posts, the book proposed the forming of a federal union of democratic republics in order to protect democracy from being overrun by totalitarian dictatorships. Chapters of the Federal Unionist Club were founded in cities across the country at a rapid pace; by 1941, sixty cities had established a local division of the club and many more were in the midst of starting up. In Pasadena, Linus and Ava Helen Pauling joined the city’s chapter of the club, which was dedicated not only to discussion among members, but also to working towards the goals established in Union Now.

Linus and Ava Helen’s decision to join the Federal Unionist Club was made in direct reaction to the events leading up to World War II. Raised in a large and politically engaged family, Ava Helen had seemingly always been a peace activist at heart. As the mother of four children however, Ava’s time for direct involvement was limited, and her membership in the Unionist club marked an important beginning of her public activism.

Linus, on the other hand, could have happily remained a research scientist for the rest of his days. But gradually he came to realize, with his wife’s help, that his scientific work would prove far more worthwhile if it served the public, and his involvement with the unionist cause likewise served as a first step in pursuing this aim.

By the late 1930s, the dynamic between scientists and world affairs had changed in such a way that Linus could not ignore the negative effects of political issues in the world. In particular, as the persecution of Jewish populations became more widespread, Jewish scientists were discharged from their positions and Linus began to receive pleas from Jewish colleagues in Europe, asking about any available positions at Caltech.

In the midst of changing times, Ava encouraged Linus to read Union Now, which he did. Linus quickly found himself coming into agreement with his wife, and concluded that taking action in favor of Streit’s proposal was – at least for the time being – a better option than passivity. In a letter to Professor Arthur Compton of the University of Chicago, Linus wrote that the state of current events was such that “I can not subscribe to such a policy of nonresistance.” Linus and Ava Helen thus became active in the struggle for peace.

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The cover of Ava Helen Pauling’s Union Now scrapbook.

As members of the Federal Unionist Club, Ava Helen and Linus played various roles. Ava Helen was more directly a leader, serving as the Pasadena chapter’s treasurer and historian. As such, she amassed the club’s financial records and kept track of their budget, which was mostly used to organize public debates and to purchase books and pamphlets summarizing Streit’s proposal. She also created a scrapbook consisting mainly of newspaper clippings that documented a great many club appearances in the press.

For Linus, club membership came with a less active but still important role, at least in the context of his own biography. Since the time of his graduation from Oregon Agricultural College, Pauling had felt the need to fashion his work in service to the general public. As a chemist in the post-World War I era, Linus was aware of the dangers that could arise when science was used for warfare, and thus had intended to stay tuned to events where his knowledge as a scientist could help prevent the use of chemistry for harm.

Now that a second world war loomed on the horizon, Ava Helen’s involvement with and care for the issues being discussed at club events offered Linus the chance to initiate his own involvement in world affairs. As we have pointed out earlier in this series of blog posts, the Pasadena Chapter of the Federal Unionist Club served as a forum for Linus to deliver his first important non-scientific speech, one in which he publicly stated his support for federal union and came prepared to answer questions regarding specific implications of Streit’s proposal.

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Map of Clarence Streit’s proposed federal union.

Though Linus and Ava Helen, in the minds of some, may have appeared to be supporting an unusual idea, Union Now was an unequivocal hit. The book received numerous positive reviews, including one published in The New York Times, which later listed Union Now as a best-seller.

Given its success, it is interesting to note that Clarence Streit had been forced to hold off on publishing Union Now until the eve of World War II. Prior to 1939, publishers had been unwilling to consider any sort of public release of the book – not only did they believe that it would not sell but they also feared that their presses would lose repute if Streit’s political ideas were interpreted as too controversial.

By 1939 however, the immediate threat of war had created an opportunity for the publication of Union Now, and the book was picked up by Harper & Brothers. Later that year, Time Magazine devoted an article to Union Now that suggested that the western world’s failure to accept Streit’s proposal would inevitably bring about war. Clearly his ideas has entered into the mainstream.

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As copies of Union Now continued to be sold at a rapid clip, its proposal grew to be widely and passionately debated. Pamphlets and articles from the period reveal an interesting discursive battle between pro and anti-unionists, each side arguing against the other’s ideals and main proponents.

One prominent anti-unionist, Lillian Scott Troy, published a pamphlet titled “Union Now…Treason!” in which she stated that the true purpose of Union Now was to bring the United States back under British domination. This argument arose partly in the wake of Streit’s second book, Union Now With Britain (1941), in which he suggested that a smooth transition to federal union could begin with a union of Britain and other English-speaking democracies.

Though discredited by some foes as un-American, Federal Unionists thought of themselves as continuing the legacy of the founders of the United States, largely because they intended to extend the tenants of the U.S. Constitution to Britain, rather than bringing the U.S. under British rule. Troy’s arguments, in particular, were easily dismissed by Federal Unionists because of her questionable reputation. An American citizen, Troy had been deported from Britain for allegedly securing the release of Baron Louis von Horst, a convicted German spy.

That is not to say that unionists did not have contentious figures supporting their side. One such individual was Fyke Farmer, a close follower and supporter of the movement who, much like Troy, was surrounded by controversy. A Tennessee lawyer, Farmer came under national scrutiny in 1953 when he decided to defend Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two Americans who were ultimately executed for treason, having been accused of sharing information about the U.S. nuclear program with the Soviet Union. Like Lillian Troy, Fyke Farmer was considered by his detractors to be a potential threat to the nation.

In spite of the negative press that sometimes appeared, Federal Unionists remained focused on their primary tactics – public discussion and distribution of print materials – to continue spreading the word of Streit’s proposals. This collective effort of Federal Unionist chapters around the country helped to repel the cries of opposition to unionism that sometimes arose.

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While the public clearly engaged deeply with the viability of the ideas presented in Union Now, the historical record would seem to indicate that the United States federal government, and international governments as well, paid little attention to the proposal. Nevertheless, Linus and Ava Helen’s records relating to the Federal Unionist Club offer unique insight into the beliefs and ideals of a collection of citizens who took action in the hopes that their efforts could change the fate of the nation and the world.

Ain’t Misbehavin’

The Paulings, 1976.

Creative nonfiction by Melinda Gormley and Melissae Fellet

Big Sur, 1976-1977

Linus and Ava Helen Pauling are in the kitchen of their home on the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur, California. A film crew follows their activities. Ava Helen ladles soup from a large pot on the stove and puts the bowl onto Linus’s plate. Ever careful and meticulous, Linus adjusts the bowl, squaring up its handles so they point directly to his right and left.

Linus Pauling is considered one of the most influential and controversial scientists of the 20^th century. Even before becoming the sole winner of two unshared Nobel Prizes – one in chemistry and the other Peace – he was a public and political figure agreeing to interviews, debates, tapings, and photographs.

Pauling had little interest in politics until he met Ava Helen. Growing up in a politically active family, she was familiar with debates around the dinner table. She followed her humanitarian values into activism for civil rights, women’s rights, and peace. In early 1940, she joined the American Civil Liberties Union, working to raise awareness about the internment of Japanese Americans.

She inspired Linus’s entrance into the peace movement. After one of his public lectures in the mid-1940s, Ava Helen voiced a concern to her husband. “I think that you should stop giving lectures about atomic bombs, war, and peace. When you talk about a scientific subject you speak very effectively and convincingly. It is evident that you are a master of the subject that you are talking about. But when you talk about the nature of war and the need for peace, you are not convincing, because you give the audience the impression that you are not sure about what you are saying and that you are relying on other authorities.”

What shall I do? Pauling wondered. I want to earn and keep Ava Helen’s respect. I don’t want her to think I am a coward. And, I have my own self-respect to consider. I won’t be cowed by Communist witch hunts. When other scientists pulled back, Linus didn’t. He attributed his perseverance to his wife. He did it to retain her respect.

“Of course it’s important that you do your scientific work. But if the world were destroyed then that work would not be of any value,” Ava Helen continued, feeling a little guilty. He gets great and deep pleasure from his scientific work, she thought to herself, and he’s so competent and enthusiastic in it. But he must realize that there is a need for people to know and understand the different means of waging war.

Torchlight procession in Oslo, December 1963.

Ava Helen’s remarks changed the course of Linus’s life. He learned about international relations, international law and the peace movement. He began speaking about the dangers of atomic weapons always keeping his presentations up-to-date with the latest scientific advances and political developments. Linus, who tended to make sense of things through calculations, estimated that he spent half of his time on scientific questions and half on political activism during the 1950s.

Linus and Ava Helen also worked together on many specific political efforts. In 1957, she helped him distribute a petition that gathered 9,000 signatures from scientists worldwide. It was the largest organized political movement among scientists in a decade. Together, they delivered the petition to the United Nations.

During the 1950s and 1960s, she worked with Linus on peace and nuclear disarmament. She accompanied him to peace conferences around the world. Ava Helen also continued her own public life, organizing protests and speaking to women’s groups about peace and ending weapons tests.

Often Linus and Ava Helen faced harsh criticism for their efforts. Pauling’s scientific career suffered as a result of his activism. In 1952 the U.S. State Department denied him a passport and the next year he received notice that his large U.S. Public Health Service grant would not be renewed. Undaunted, they both continued their activism, following their shared humanitarian convictions, despite the consequences from their perceived political misbehavior.

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The Paulings, 1977.

The filmmakers are creating Linus Pauling: Crusading Scientist, a 1977 documentary that describes Pauling’s scientific achievements and political activism.

The interviewer turns his attention to Ava Helen asking, “Is he hard to live with?”

She wears large, round, dark rimmed glasses with lightly tinted lenses. Her short hair is gray and white. She looks from the interviewer to her husband before responding.

“Yes, he is.” She nods and gazes at Pauling.

Pauling looks at her. “What?” he chuckles.

Ava Helen is laughing and smiling, too, still gazing at her husband who sits between her and the camera.

There’s a long pause. Pauling turns back to his wife, who is wearing a loose sea green turtleneck under a colorful, earth-toned poncho.

Ava Helen looks at her husband and says, matter-of-factly, “I said yes he is.” She smiles at him. The love and admiration they have for one another is evident, even after 55 years of marriage.

“Hard to live with?” Pauling feigns disbelief, turning from his wife to the interviewer. “I thought I was just about the easiest-going person that there was in the world.” He crinkles his nose, squints his eyes, and lifts his shoulders while looking at the camera. It’s his silent way to say, perhaps I exaggerate. He leans down to his bowl of soup and sups two spoonfuls.

“That could be true, too, but still be hard to live with.” She tells him while she watches him eat.

He wipes his mouth with a napkin and responds in a more serious voice. “In a sense I think you are hard to live with.” He leans forward and looks at her before sitting upright and focusing on the cameraman again. “Your principles are so high. Your standards are so high that I have to behave myself all the time,” he says with mock exasperation while playfully rolling his eyes.

Ava Helen laughs. “And that’s a great burden, I’m sure. Well now, you tell me the next time you want to misbehave.”

“O. K.” Pauling laughs tossing his head back slightly and wearing a big grin. “It will be with you though.”

An Incident in The Netherlands

Linus and Ava Helen Pauling were well known for their support of one another’s work; particularly so when it came to the topic of world peace. As with all activists, the Paulings often found themselves encountering both support and opposition to their ideals. One instance of opposition made headlines around the world and showed that fame was at times both sword and shield for the Paulings.

By the spring of 1964, much of Ava Helen’s work as an activist was channeled through her involvement with Women Strike for Peace (WSP), a network of female peace advocates from across the United States. That year, Ava became one of the primary organizers of a meeting that was to take place in The Hague, Netherlands. The WSP called women peace activists from around the world to meet in The Hague to protest against the transfer of nuclear weapons from the United States to other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries.

At the time, it had been agreed that existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons should not be transferred between countries. The United States, however, was trying to make a case for the legal transfer of nuclear weapons to West Germany on the grounds that, when it came to international agreements, NATO allies functioned as a unit rather than as individual countries. Ava Helen and the WSP were successful in garnering the support and participation of women from every NATO country including, importantly, representation from West Germany.

Ava Helen and Linus’s plans to attend a peace conference in Mexico City just days before the WSP demonstration had made it unlikely that Ava would be present at the peace demonstration in The Hague. WSP members, however, urged Ava Helen to find a way to attend, and last minute arrangements did indeed make it possible for her to fly overseas for the meeting.  Once arrived, however, it was Ava Helen’s absence from the proceedings which changed the outcome of what had been planned as a silent protest.

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Days before the demonstration was to begin, the Dutch government – without informing WSP – banned the women’s peace demonstration and began preventing participants from entering the country. Unaware of this turn of events, Ava Helen boarded a flight from Mexico City to Amsterdam on May 10th, where a copy of The Triple Revolution was found among her belongings. The presence of this pamphlet was evidence enough for immigration officials at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to recognize Ava as a participant in the demonstration.

The Triple Revolution was a memorandum, issued by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, to which Linus Pauling had contributed. The document was addressed to President Lyndon B. Johnson and it rejected both the development of nuclear weapons and the move toward an economy dependent on machine-based labor. Published in pamphlet form, the document became an important component of WSP’s rhetoric, as it was applicable to issues of concern in both the United States as well as many other parts of the world. The Triple Revolution‘s notoriety as a radical proposal, however, placed its supporters in opposition to much of the leadership of the western world’s governments.

This is the context of what awaited Ava Helen when she arrived in Amsterdam. Having made the decision to ban the WSP demonstration, and cognizant of her role in its organization, the Dutch government made the decision to deny Ava Helen’s entry into the country.  Not long after landing she was promptly put on to a different flight, this time bound for Copenhagen, Denmark.

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By the time that Ava landed in Copenhagen, Linus Pauling had arrived at his home in Pasadena, where a call that he received at one o’clock in the morning alerted him to his wife’s situation in The Netherlands. In a personal note written at 1:15 AM on May 11^th, Pauling expressed his frustration as well as his intent to notify the press about the incident. In a later note, he recalled the events of that day, condemning the incident as a “dictatorial action of oppression and prevention of free speech.”

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, Ava Helen was met by news reporters who asked if she had mentioned to the Dutch immigration officials who she was and to whom she was married. To this Ava replied

I was certain they did not recognize my name or that of my husband and I felt that, as a matter of principle, I could not bribe officials by telling them I was the wife of a man who had won two Nobel Prizes.

Ava assured the journalists that the whole affair must have been a mistake and that the mishap would be taken care of. When a reporter contacted the Dutch embassy in Copenhagen, however, they found that Ava had been wrong: the Dutch government had in fact given orders to keep WSP members out of the country. The Danish press promptly published Ava’s story, which made news around the world.

When Linus called the Dutch embassy in Washington, D.C. he was told that the demonstration had been cancelled. Not knowing that the European media was already covering story, Pauling quickly made plans of his own for notifying the press. With journalistic efforts underway on two continents, questions began to arise concerning the legality and the implications for civil liberties of the Dutch government’s decision.

Back in the United States, members of Women Strike for Peace also flooded the Dutch embassy with questions regarding Ava’s denied entry and the suppression of their demonstration. These pressures ultimately compelled the Dutch government to retreat from its initial decision. That same day, the activist women who had made it into the country gathered in a silent demonstration outside of the Peace Palace in The Hague. Two days later, Ava entered The Netherlands and joined the women of WSP for their NATO meeting.

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Ava Helen’s contretemps with Dutch immigration authorities stands as another example of the ways in which the Paulings’ fame both exposed and protected the two peace advocates. And while the Danish press had questioned why Ava didn’t use her last name to get into get into The Netherlands, it is clear that doing so was not necessary.

By the early 1960s, Ava Helen and Linus Pauling had become well-acquainted with the art of circulating their opinions through means of peaceful protest. As Ava wrote in a letter to Linus, had she used her name to enter the Netherlands, the meeting might not have taken place. Although initially anonymous, Ava’s role in the Women Strike for Peace demonstration and the attention that she received from the press, were crucial to the Dutch government’s decision to allow the meeting to take place and to making the demonstration news around the world.

A Trip to North Salem High School

Recently the blog took a field trip a few miles up I-5 to North Salem High School, where Ava Helen Pauling was inducted into the school’s hall of fame.  A grand old building dedicated in 1937, the current school is not at the same location as the facility where Ava Helen spent her high school years, but it is the successor to the original Salem High School, which once existed in a downtown space now occupied by a department store.

North Salem’s 2013 hall of fame class included a former wrestler, a retired teacher and an alum who spearheaded the creation of a scholarship fund for outstanding students.  Ava Helen was inducted in the Distinguished Lifetime category, her nomination penned by Emily Schwab, a member of North’s class of 2009 and a recent history graduate here at Oregon State University.

And indeed, a strong OSU presence was on hand at the ceremony – along with Emily, representatives of the OSU Libraries and the Linus Pauling Institute were in attendance, as was Ava Helen’s biographer Mina Carson, an OSU professor of history. In addition, Cheryl Pauling made the trip down and spoke eloquently of her grandmother, “a tiny little thing” who taught her to make toffee and “was always full of hugs and love.”

Cheryl Pauling sharing memories of her grandmother in the North Salem H.S. library.

Ava Helen’s wedding ring, which Cheryl brought to show.

It was also homecoming.

Though she grew up more than forty miles away in Beavercreek and later Canby, in 1918 Ava Helen moved to Salem, Oregon’s capitol, to live with her sister Nettie Spaulding and attend high school.  It is not clear why this decision was made; possibly it related to family finances, Ava being one of twelve children afterall.  It is possible too that the school in Salem was better than anything closer to where the Millers lived.  Or maybe Ava Helen, ever independent, simply needed a little more space.

Ava Helen Miller at left, with some of her high school classmates, 1921.

Much of what we do know about Ava Helen’s high school experience is contained in a journal that she kept during the period.  As Mina Carson writes in her biography, Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary

Her notes suggest a lively, flirtatious disposition.  There were plenty of boys to write down…even if some were cousins….Ralph Hamilton, Wallace Griffin, and Keith Brown also found places in [the journal]….’He joined the navy during the war,’ she wrote of Claire Gaines of Canby, ‘and I have ever felt happy to think I refused to kiss him good-by which perhaps took a bit of conceit out of him. [He] married in 1921.’ On the back of a photograph of Haines she wrote in retrospect: ‘my heart’s first flutter.’

Ava Helen’s lifelong interest in politics was also evidenced during her Salem years. Again from Carson

The Spaulding household…was probably lively and certainly close to the state’s political heartbeat. Her sister Nettie was secretary to one of the Oregon Supreme Court justices, so there was a direct link to affairs in the capitol, and 1630 Court Street, the Spaulding home, was just a few blocks’ stroll from the Supreme Court building and the State Capitol. Ava Helen carried her father’s Democratic politics into her adolescence; of a family friend, an admired physician, she wrote: ‘We quarreled about politics. He is a Republican.’

One senses that the Salem years were mostly happy for the young woman.

[She] graduated from Salem High School in three years. She was class president her senior year. For her senior class picnic at Silver Creek Falls that spring she helped organize the food for a class of one hundred twenty-five. She dared kiss a boy for the camera. She was a girl of fun and will, as well as a sense of duty.

The many hall of fame plaques lining the entryway into North Salem High School are testament to the institution’s rich history.  In an era where recognition and preservation of the past too often fall prey to tight budgets and the need to cope with present circumstances, it is refreshing to see a school that is honoring its traditions. To us, it is clear that the good folks at North are working to act in accordance with their school pledge:

The Memories of North Salem

Will never fade nor die

We love our alma mater

All hail North Salem High. 

The Second X Chromosome

[An excerpt from Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary, by Dr. Mina Carson – now available from the Oregon State University Press.]

Like her letters to her global correspondents, Ava Helen’s paper on women, “The Second X Chromosome,” used simple language to deliver a confident and impassioned assertion that it was time for all women to receive the equal standing and opportunities to which, in many places, their legal status already entitled them. Following her initial drafts through her final typed presentation for distribution, it is evident that she wrote easily when she was excited, in many cases framing the ultimate argument in her first handwritten draft. Linus too contributed to the paper, although his surviving notes addressed not rhetoric, but background research that he or Ava Helen thought would be helpful: information about Jane Addams, Bertha von Suttner, and other figures she introduced in the body of the paper.

She indicted American hypocrisy.

While her legal and social status under law are now more or less secure in most parts of the world, discrimination against women is still very real and nowhere more than in the United States which lags woefully behind the more advanced Western Nations and indeed in many respects behind the socialist countries in equality for women.

Whereas women were admitted to Soviet medical schools strictly on the basis of “scholastic ability,” she said, “in the United States … the ratio of women to men in medical schools is smaller than in 1900.” Perhaps in a nod to her more conventional audience, she joked that while Japanese women were often cited as the “ideal of complete subjection to men,” at least a woman walking behind her husband could keep an eye on him.

Ava Helen’s use of genetic imagery (“the second X chromosome”) to frame her argument exemplifies not so much an essentialist position on women’s special nature – although she could never quite separate herself from that possibility – as a Jane Addams-like strategy of promoting a “both-and” philosophy of equal opportunity. Like Addams fifty years earlier, Ava Helen skirted essentialism (the “nature” of women) by discussing women’s social and cultural roles throughout history – even prehistory.

She argued that, because of their role in carrying the embryo, the earliest women were undoubtedly “observant, wary, cautious, and persevering”: the first scientists, as they figured out how to feed and warm their families. Some anthropologists saw women as the stabilizing force in society, as they established agriculture, fire, and private property under primitive matriarchies. Ava Helen argued that historically, as her indispensable skills were recognized, woman fell victim to male efforts to keep her “under subjection.” Ten thousand years ago, matriarchy gave way to patriarchy “and women returned to the status of chattels.”

Ava Helen Pauling, 1958.

Only in the last two hundred years, she argued, had patriarchy faced new challenges. Women had written two of the nineteenth-century novels that successfully changed social perceptions of great injustices: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen Nieder [Lay Down Your Arms, or as Pauling translated it, Down with the Weapons of War]. In the twentieth century, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death likewise analyzed the social and environmental infrastructure:

In each of these four books the author, a woman, is attacking and exposing a well entrenched economic asset of society in areas controlled completely by men, eg. slavery, war, poisonous chemicals, and the funeral industry.”

Ava Helen brought her no-nonsense brand of political argument, fronted by her stance against interventionist warfare, to her position on modern feminism. She was not a fan of Betty Friedan’s recent Feminine Mystique, which, she wrote to a friend, “has some very foolish ideas in it.” She indicted Friedan for blaming the inability of American POWs in Korea to withstand their imprisonment on their permissive, smothering mothers. Pauling had no patience for an analysis predicated on the legitimacy of America’s military engagement in Korea. “I won’t agree,” she asserted, “that a woman’s highest role is to teach her sons to fight nobly the kind of war that was fought in Korea.” One can imagine the L. A. Unitarians nodding at this point.

Coupled with her disdain for Friedan’s tacit acceptance of the normality of the Korean War, Pauling resisted the invidious distinction between housewife-mothers and women who worked outside the home. “[W]ere the brave, napalm bomb throwing heroes of the Korean War the sons of career women? This would make an interesting study.” She went on:

A way to verify the Feminine Mystique would be to conduct a survey among women who work outside the home and compare them to women who work within the home with regard to happiness, contentment, joy of life, and adjustment to family and friends. I believe such a survey would show that work outside the home is not the answer to the American woman’s dissatisfaction and unhappiness. It is an oversimplification of the problem. Many women who work outside the home are just as unhappy as women who don’t.

The answer: equal access to college education; equal weighting of professional and household labor; public nurseries to allow mothers as well as fathers to go to school or work outside the home; and women’s active participation in politics.

Ava Helen Pauling, August 1964.

Ava Helen’s feminist reform philosophy reflected her immersion in the Women Strike for Peace movement, whose primary image was that of active mothers protesting on behalf of the generation they were carrying in their wombs and raising, but whose most powerful spirits were women in their thirties, forties, and fifties, veterans of other peace movements, some of whom still had children at home and others of whom were primarily professionals.

Pauling’s evolving philosophy also offered her a way to resolve her own existential dilemmas. She had put her college education aside to marry and bear four children. Her identity for twenty years was the wife who protected her husband’s creative and intellectual life from family demands. Yet she had also excelled in chemistry as well as language and social science at Oregon Agricultural College. She had left her first toddler and a brief manual on modern child rearing in her mother’s hands in order to tour Europe with her husband unencumbered by maternal responsibilities. She had tutored her husband in social justice issues during the Depression of the 1930s. She had plunged into political work as Europe collapsed again into bloody war, and then as the United States imprisoned American citizens on suspicion of hostile loyalties. She had inspired Linus’s activism after the war to help fellow Americans understand the dire implications of the United States’ development of nuclear weapons, and over the following decade had stayed by his side as he risked his career against panels of accusers and political adversaries. And from the mid-1950s on, she had accepted her own career as a peace activist, her skills as a strategist, networker, and speaker enhanced by her notoriety as Linus’s wife and his partner in the petition drives that ultimately earned him the peace prize.

The Paulings at Deer Flat Ranch, 1962. Photo by Arthur Dubinsky.

Her friend Corda Bauer picked up on Ava Helen’s ambivalence as part of a snapshot Ava Helen sent her along with the manuscript of her “Second X Chromosome” paper. The photograph shows the Paulings at their ranch, with Linus in the foreground leaning on a fence, and Ava Helen slightly behind him. Bauer requested permission to ask an “impertinent” question:

Was it design or chance that kept you in the background of the photo? As an advocate of women’s rights I would have liked to have seen you leaning on the fence too, in an attitude of secure accomplishment. Linus deserves the place between the gateposts, where he can come and go as he pleases. Had you sat on top of the fence, it would have symbolized that women have to overcome many hurdles, but by golly no mere fence is going to stop them.

She was Linus’s equal, yet a step behind him, like the Japanese women Ava Helen had joked about. Linus Pauling, Jr., remembers that by the 1970s – and perhaps earlier – Ava Helen had started aiming sharp comments at Linus as they went about their daily routine. He remembers hearing her mutter that she too might have won a Nobel prize had she not been busy keeping the house and raising the children. This memory probably does not detract from the other things we think we know about the Paulings’ marriage: that the couple shared an unusual intimacy; that they preferred being together to being apart; that within the walls they were colleagues in their peace activism; that Linus always credited Ava Helen for her inspiration and companionship during the years of peace work; that he was most likely not a tyrant behind closed doors. From the year of courtship through his distracted grief after her death in 1981, Linus held Ava Helen as the most precious force in his life. “When asked to name someone else in the United States who might merit recognition for his efforts towards peace,” said Wallace Thompson during a Nobel celebratory dinner, “Dr. Pauling unhesitatingly said: ‘My wife.'”

The Paulings with Mrs. Dubinin at the 7th Pugwash Conference, Stowe, Vermont, 1961.

Nonetheless, in the early years of marriage she suffered the decentered isolation of virtually all stay-at-home parents. This was exacerbated by Linus’s early and persistent fame, and his multiple scientific commitments. After the first few years of their marriage, she could not keep up intellectually with his work, and that must have added another dimension to any resentment she felt at her position in their life together.

Did she encourage their peace work in order to climb to an equal footing with him in their marriage, and in the world’s eyes? If she harbored that motivation, it really seems to have been obscured by her genuine passion for political change, coupled with her anxiety for Linus to be as effective as possible in his advocacy work. Yet by the early sixties, as she received multiple invitations to speak to progressive groups and women’s groups, and as she established a position as a key consultant among peace advocates, as she was for the WSP founders and Canada’s VOW activists, she also articulated her feminist vision of the equal value of all kinds of labor, professional or domestic, paid or unpaid, as well as the power of women to move the world politically. Rosa Parks, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bertha von Suttner – all applied their personal and intellectual power to identify and redress social wrongs. Corda Bauer understood Ava Helen’s core message when she compared her friend’s talk to Camilla Anderson’s assertion in Saints, Sinners and Psychiatry: “Once women have tested their strength and overcome their rebellion, they are then free to return to homemaking and bringing up children with love and understanding by choice rather than being forced into it.”

Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary is available for purchase from the Oregon State University Press.

Swirling

Ava Helen Pauling speaking at a “No More Hiroshimas” march, sponsored by Women Strike for Peace. August 1961. San Francisco, California.

[An excerpt from Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary, by Dr. Mina Carson – now available from the Oregon State University Press.]

Linus’s night on the cliff at Salmon Cone proved a stutter but not an interruption of the Paulings’ accelerating peace work from the late 1950s into the early 1960s. Typically, Ava Helen did not pause, at least in writing, over her scare that night and Linus’s post-traumatic reactions. By early 1960 she had plunged into her service as a board member of the United States section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Within WILPF, she had a new cause: the promotion of an international congress of women for peace.

Linda Richards, a student of nuclear politics, has posited that there is a style of activism that might be characterized as “swirling” or circulating: one individual flowing through a number of different networks and organizations, planting seeds of ideas, making connections, circling back to remind people of their promises and possibilities. This is the kind of activist Ava Helen became. Though her name appeared on the masthead of her organizations for limited periods of time, and is not frequently found in the national and international archives of these groups, her correspondence attests to her wide-ranging contacts, her polite yet direct approach to getting things done, and her persistence. In addition, the blunt and sometimes impatient Ava Helen rears her mischievous head.

The Paulings, 1960.

Ava Helen’s service in WILPF and her breathtaking international travel schedule, as she talked with and befriended women around the world, fertilized the feminist thought in her approach to activism. More and more she was called on to be the voice of women acting for peace. Claire Walsh at the United States WILPF headquarters in Philadelphia asked Ava Helen after her appointment to the national board if she would be available to give talks to small groups of WILPF members.

I should be very happy to speak … if you think that I have something of interest to say to them. I suppose that you are suggesting that I tell about such matters as our visit to Dr. Schweitzer and other things of interest which I may have observed on our many travels.

She had already given speeches on Russia, particularly conditions for women and children, on conservation, and on the international WILPF meeting in Stockholm. She was mobbed after her speeches, and her skills grew. “I don’t know why you should fret over a speech; you couldn’t make a bad one, not with that delivery power you sway,” a friend assured her. In March 1961, inviting her and Linus to speak to the recently organized Canadian branch of the Voice of Women (VOW), Jan Symons wrote to Ava Helen that, according to the VOW members, she was “becoming as much of a celebrity as your husband.”

When the Paulings traveled together, now most of the time, there was little hiatus from demands on their time and energies. “I only regret that we are such dreadful guests,” she wrote one hostess on returning from New York in late 1960. “The telephone rings every two minutes and I am sure that our hostesses are always glad to see us leave.” The Paulings welcomed the new student movement of the 1960s, and student activists began inviting both Linus and Ava Helen to their events. In May 1960 the Paulings joined the San Francisco Peace March.

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Group photo of participants in the Oslo Conference, 1961.

At the beginning of 1961 the Paulings launched two related projects: a new petition drive to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and a May meeting in Oslo of world scientists and intellectuals to precede a scheduled NATO ministers’ meeting in the same month. The young Kennedy administration seemed willing on the one hand to go forward with test-ban negotiations, and on the other to share nuclear weapons with NATO allies. The Paulings shifted their focus slightly to take on the issue of proliferation. The petition drive of 1957 to 1959 had worked very well. Now they sent the new petitions to two thousand of their previous signers and received seven hundred signatures back, including thirty-eight Nobel Prize winners. These Pauling presented to the United Nations, as before, and immediately broadened the appeal. The Pauling home again became command central for a mailing drive of international proportions. The response was positive, though there was a bit of confusion about a simultaneous petition circulated by SANE calling for an end to testing. Ava Helen had to explain to at least one correspondent that both petitions were “worthwhile,” but that theirs focused on nonproliferation.

Simultaneously, the Paulings started rounding up support for the proposed meeting in Oslo to bring together scientists from Soviet satellites as well as western countries, to contest the NATO stance that it was impossible to cooperate with Soviet-dominated governments. Underlining that this project was theirs alone, they had stationery made up under the title “Conference Against the Spread of Nuclear Weapons, Oslo, Norway, 2 to 7 May 1961,” under their names and home address in Pasadena. Individuals listed as sponsors included Karl Barth, Max Born, Mrs. Cyrus Eaton, Erich Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Gunnar Myrdal, Alan Paton, Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer, and Hideki Yukawa. The Paulings had emphasized to prospective attendees – only about seventy-five were invited – that there were no organizational sponsors except a Norwegian group handling local arrangements. The Paulings also offered to pay the travel costs of participants.

Always on the move – the Paulings in 1961.

Ava Helen used her network of connections to push the petition and raise money for the conference. Her friend Jan Symons, a recent migrant from New Zealand to Canada, warned her that some of her new acquaintances in Quebec shied away from the Paulings’ petition for several reasons, chief among them the Communist bugaboo. Their new Canadian organization, the Voice of Women, was feeling the anti-Communist heat, and the Paulings were perceived as leftwing and untrustworthy (Linus’s warnings about smoking apparently representing a medical fringe element). Within VOW, Symons claimed, Ava Helen was declared to be “as much of a celebrity as your husband,” but outside the group, both VOW and WILPF were suspect. “One nice Quaker woman psychiatrist told me that it undoubtedly had a bad name in the U.S. as Communist.” Like Ava Helen, Jan Symons was exasperated.

We are told we are peace-loving, that it is the Russians, the Communists who want war … I notice that when people get Russian scientists to sign petitions against war, however, they are dismissed as only another Communist front.

Despite some peace workers’ reluctance to sign the petition, the Oslo conference was a heartening success for the Paulings. On the way they visited France, where Linus received a prestigious award from the city of Paris; they arrived in Oslo on May 4. Sixty scientists, intellectuals, and peace activists attended from around the world, including the Soviet Union. Else Zeuthen, international chair of WILPF, joined nine or ten other WILPF leaders at the conference. Without agendas in hand at the beginning of the meeting, the participants shifted into high gear almost immediately to draft, collectively, a statement for post-conference circulation among the citizens of the world. The group included members of the test-ban negotiating teams of both the United States and the Soviet Union; the collective level of expertise at the conference was high, attesting to the Paulings’ global credibility. The statement the group hammered out called for a ban on the spread of nuclear weapons to any more nations or groups of nations; universal disarmament to prevent a “cataclysmic nuclear war”; and international controls and inspection of nuclear weapons “such as to insure to the greatest possible extent the safety of all nations and all people.” Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Pauling were the first signatories – and the only ones directly under the statement text (other original signers were listed on the back of the copies circulated throughout the world for additional signatures).

Ava Helen opened the conference on the first night, and Linus gave a speech. In the mornings and evenings the Paulings circulated around the tables, checking in with people. Their friend from Berkeley, Dr. Frances Herring, remarked in a diary of the conference that Ava Helen looked “tragically tired.” Herring discovered that few of the attendees realized that the Paulings had underwritten the conference financially as well as morally.

There is to be a torch parade, winding from the Nobel Institute to the Grand Hotel (about a mile) tomorrow night, to honor the Paulings. That should make them feel good!

In fact, despite their exhaustion, both Paulings were delighted with the conference. “Everything has gone along almost perfectly,” Linus wrote. “The Aula meeting was grand. The Vice-Rector gave a speech thanking us. Friday night there was a great torchlight procession in our honor – quite a sight!” Else Zeuthen offered a longer reflection on the evening in her report to the WILPF membership.

A most striking moment of those eventful days was one evening after sunset, when the Paulings received the homage of a torchlight procession, standing on the balcony of their room on an upper floor of the Grand Hotel. Many members of our Norwegian Section were among the procession, whereas Inga Beskow and I enjoyed the wonderful show from the vantage point of a neighboring balcony of the Hotel. The torches flared beautifully in the soft spring night and filled the whole of Karl Johan, the impressive main thoroughfare of Oslo, as far as the eye could see. Numerous cries of ‘Thank you, Pauling’ sounded from the procession. The Paulings were much moved by this beautiful display of confidence; and how they deserved it for their brave and indefatigable work! Marie Lous Mohr [a Norwegian WILPF leader] at the festive dinner given to the Conference made a speech expressing a hope that Oslo might once more welcome Professor Pauling, and then as Nobel Peace Prize-Winner.

They stayed on in Oslo for several days. Linus gave a radio address and both Paulings spoke at the university as well as holding a press conference. They attended a cocktail party at the Russian Embassy. As always, every meal was an event. To Peter, Ava Helen admitted that they were exhausted, but “fairly contented” with the outcome. She too was impressed with the ceremony called out by international meetings: in this case, the NATO ministers meeting that directly followed their own. “The 50 star USA flag did, I must say, look beautiful waving in the spring winds. All the flags looked fine. I see why there must be a flag.”

Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary is available for purchase from the Oregon State University Press.

Deer Flat Ranch

Outside the old cabin at Deer Flat Ranch, 1962. Photo by Arthur Dubinsky.

[An excerpt from Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary, by Dr. Mina Carson – now available from the Oregon State University Press.]

After Linus won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1954, the Paulings could afford to realize a dream. They staked out a place along the rugged central California coast where they could get away from the constant demands of colleagues, children, and friends. In the 1950s Big Sur was a wild, grassy, weather-beaten area of ranches, ranger stations, and primitive living conditions, not unlike the coast of Scotland in some patches. Artists and writers had been drawn to its isolated beauty for decades. The Paulings seem to have chosen the site for its remoteness and natural beauty. Linus recalled that by 1950 they had been thinking about “a place in the country” where they could escape the clamor of their everyday lives. Five years later, on a trip up the northern California coast, they decided on a whim to drop over to Route 1, a narrow, winding coastal road of breathtaking landscapes. Linus’s attention wandered to a piece of land —”a point of land projecting into the ocean, with a cabin and barn, and with cows grazing on the grass there.” In hindsight, it was one of the magical affirmations of their good fortune as a couple. “I said to your mother ‘There’s the sort of place that we ought to have,’ and she replied ‘Yes, and there is a sign saying that it is for sale.'”

Some days later, having tracked down the owner’s whereabouts and gotten a key to the gate, the Paulings wandered the property. They took a sleeping bag and made camp on one of the cliffs. The 160-acre property was called Salmon Creek, after the adjoining creek and national forest area; the Paulings renamed it Deer Flat Ranch. The next year they bought another five-acre parcel at Piedros Blancos, complete with a Chevron station and store, which they rented out for some years, fixing the monthly rent at the amount of gas sold at the station times 2 cents per gallon. Their property was scattered over a long stretch of Highway 1, with the station twelve miles north of the ranch. The gate to the ranch, which they kept locked when they weren’t there, was about a quarter mile from the Salmon Creek ranger station.

The Paulings started visiting and developing the ranch right away, though Big Sur was a three-hundred-mile drive from Pasadena. Ava Helen loved gardening and always maintained a flower and vegetable garden at home, but a ranch was a new enterprise for the couple. They dove into the project. By January 1957 they had arranged to graze cattle on the land and had begun the licensing procedures for that enterprise. The numbers were small: in 1960 Linus wrote to Peter that they now had thirteen head on the land. The windy oceanside perspective offered a chance to hike and observe wildlife. In 1958 Linus wrote to a biologist about the sea otters he and Ava Helen had spotted along the Big Sur coast.

Letter from Linus Pauling to Karl Kenyon, May 19, 1958.

When the Paulings weren’t there, the ranch and cattle were overseen by a series of caretakers and caretaking arrangements, with varying satisfaction on both sides. The first was their Pasadena handyman, who mysteriously disappeared back east to his home state of Tennessee within a few months. Caretaking the caretakers generally fell to Ava Helen, who managed the long-distance relations with a combination of intimacy and matter-of-fact command that sometimes ruffled the employees’ feathers. Writing a check to the Paulings for the monthly phone bill, probably for the cabin, to settle up accounts, caretaker Michael Hall commented, “I think your charge of $4.00 for cleaning the cattle truck bed is one of your lower grade things I’ve seen you do.” In the mid-1960s the Paulings had a caretaker with a drinking problem whose friends regularly plied him with liquor and pilfered his money on payday. “Things were getting so bad that we had told him we would absolutely not allow him to stay on the property if he continued to have these people come. He says that he does not even know their names, but we are not quite sure about this.” Wishing to protect her employee, she nonetheless lost patience with his willingness to put up with his “low life,” “derelict” acquaintances.

The Paulings initially used the original cabin on the property; it was simple, with a large central room and a rear bedroom, as well as an indoor bathroom. There was running water to the main room and the bathroom, and a refrigerator. There were two single beds in the big room, and a collapsible double bed that could be maneuvered into the small rear bedroom. Larger groups could pitch tents outside the house. By the late 1950s, spending a few days each month at Deer Flat Ranch, they already viewed the ranch as a healing escape, a breathing space from their increasingly busy lives. Linus remembered his wife saying, “Do you know, we have been here for one week, you and I, without seeing a single other person. This is the first time in our 40-odd years of marriage that this has happened.” Ava Helen wrote to an associate in 1960, relative to the breathless pace of their lives in peace work, “We get a great deal of pleasure from our ranch and have now stocked it with wonderful animals so that we feel not only a very close connection with the world and its people, but with the earth itself. This is a good feeling and does a great deal to restore us both spiritually and physically.” Continuing a wistful theme of those busy years, she wrote: “We hope that we shall be able soon to spend much more of our time there.”

The Paulings at their ranch, 1964. Photo by Arthur Herzog.

The ranch proved an anchor in their lives together, but they did not use it solely as a retreat. Over the years friends and family visited, and from early on, trusted friends were invited to borrow the ranch when the Paulings weren’t in residence. During the summer of 1957, when Ava Helen and Linus were traveling in Europe, they loaned the house to several of Linus’s colleagues. The service station manager — Luther Williams, initially— agreed to hold the keys to the ranch house and tool shed for visitors.

When they could stay for longer periods, they made improvements on the original cabin. In 1960 Linus became engrossed with building bookshelves from birch boards and brass rods in both the bedroom and the main room. He stocked them with that intellectuals’ favorite, the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, though the scientist in him was understandably bothered by the archaic factoids (Los Angeles with a population of six thousand, for example).

But a few years later the Paulings had outgrown the old cabin and had enough money to dream larger. In 1965 they built a new house at Deer Flat Ranch and gave the cabin over to the caretaker. In 1970 part of the ranch burned in a grass fire that swept through Salmon Creek. Undiscouraged, but feeling besieged by family, the Paulings decided to build a bunkhouse on their property, “so children and grandchildren can come there without interfering too much with us,” Ava Helen wrote frankly to a friend in New York. The bunkhouse also made it possible for the Paulings to host even more friends.

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At the end of January 1960, Ava Helen experienced one of the most frightening episodes of her life. She and Linus drove up toward Big Sur on Wednesday, January 27, via Asilomar, where Linus attended a spectroscopy conference. They arrived at the ranch on Friday, probably anticipating much-needed rest from their world tour that fall. On Saturday morning, Linus left on a walk, telling Ava Helen that he would be checking the fence lines, possibly to prepare for an exploratory discussion about exchanging some of their land for land in Los Padres National Forest. When he wasn’t back by noon she began to worry; by early evening she was frightened. She left him a note saying that she didn’t know where he was and had gone to the ranger’s station for help. The ranger quickly organized a search, but halted it at 11:30 p.m. and then sent out a much larger crew in the morning. Ava Helen’s diary entry for Saturday, January 30, read tersely: “Paddy lost.”

Ava Helen’s note to her husband, January 30, 1960.

Linus had gotten stuck on a cliff during his walk the previous day. Rightly alarmed when he realized he could move neither forward nor back without risking a rock slide that would propel him far down onto the rocks by the sea, he sat down, sat still, and thought —about Ava Helen, about chemical bonds, about the periodic table — about anything that might keep him awake through the long night. Though his actions to stay safe were quite rational — digging a depression to stay immobilized on the ledge, moving his arms and legs, staying awake, and keeping warm — his retrospective account suggests that he was paralyzed by fear. “It seems to have been beyond my decision; I had got frightened enough so that I was unable to leave the ledge.” In the morning a crowd of searchers, and a crowd of reporters, gathered at Big Sur to continue the search. A reporter precipitously called in a story that Pauling was dead. That was the news Linda and Crellin heard.

Just before 10 a.m. Pauling spotted a lone searcher on the beach, and called out to him. The searcher in turn summoned the deputy sheriff, making his way along the cliff above the ledge. The sheriff actually joined Pauling on the ledge; one could get down to it or up to it, but not, Pauling had believed, down from it. While the searcher ran to tell Ava Helen that Linus was all right, the sheriff eased them both down from the treacherous ledge.

After Linus was found and shepherded back to the cabin on Sunday morning, Ava Helen dispatched telegrams to family to let them know that he had been saved. Then they stayed at the cabin to try to recover from the ordeal. “I found that Mama was very much upset by her long wait,” Linus later wrote to the children, “and the uncertainty as to what had happened to me.” That was putting it mildly. But Linus had little reserve to offer Ava Helen; he himself, without yet knowing it, was in shock. Ultimately he would have to retreat from his university appointments the next week and take to his bed. News of the crisis had gone out over the wires and appeared in newspapers around the world. Perhaps for his children, perhaps for his parents, perhaps to allay his own shock, Crellin had already written a detailed account of his own perspective on his father’s accident, including having been told that Linus was dead. Pauling made amends as best he could to his wife and his family. “I am very sorry that I caused you and Mama so much anguish and concern,” he closed his long account to his children of the horrific night at Big Sur.

Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary is available for purchase from the Oregon State University Press.