Earle L. Reynolds

Earle L. Reynolds (October 18, 1910 - January 11, 1998), born into a circus family, became a physical anthropologist, educator, author, Quaker, and peace activist. In 1951 the Atomic Energy Commission sent Reynolds to Hiroshima to study the effects of the atomic bomb on the growth and development of children exposed to the A-bomb. His professional discoveries concerning the dangers of radiation later propelled Reynolds into a life of anti-nuclear activism. In 1958 he sailed with his wife Barbara, two of his three children and a Japanese yachtsman in a yacht, Phoenix, which he himself designed [Phoenix of Hiroshima - Wikipedia, pending], into the American nuclear testing zone in the Pacific. In 1961 the family, with Tom Yoneda sailed to the USSR to protest Soviet nuclear testing. In 1967 Reynolds and his second wife Akie sailed the Phoenix to Haiphong, North Vietnam to deliver $10,000 worth of humanitarian and medical aid to victims of American bombing.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION Earle Landry Reynolds, an only child, was born Earl Frederick Schoene to William and Maude Schoene as the circus of which they were a part passed through Des Moines, Iowa. Earle's father and uncle Frederick performed as The Landry Brothers, trapeze artists and tightrope walkers for the John T. Wortham Shows (at some point called John T. Wortham Carnival). (Before WWI made German names unpopular, according to Reynolds, the pair were billed as Schoene Brothers Aerial Artists.) Billboard records, "The Landry Brothers work a neat and classy rope acrobatic turn for six minutes, in full stage, which brought the brawny lads one legit." <Sept. 26, 1914, p. 15>. Depending on the season and the family's financial status, their circus acts alternated with vaudeville.

When Earle was eight, Maude told him that his father had been killed falling off a trapeze. She married a circus electrician, Louis Haviland Reynolds, on the condition that he leave the circus and they settled in Mississippi. Earle took his stepfather's surname graduated from Vicksburg High School in 1927. He went on to earn a BA and MA from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, all in Anthropology. He married Barbara Leonard [Wikipedia - pending] in 1936 and they had three children: Tim (1936), Ted (1938), and Jessica (1944). From 1943 to 1951 Reynolds was an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Antioch College and Chairman of the Physical Growth Department at the Fels Research Institute for the Study of Human Development, also at Antioch College [The Ohio Journal of Science, May, 1949, p. 89 footnote https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/3693/1/V49N03_089.pdf.] During this time he wrote and directed his own plays, Solitude, No Pace for a Lady, Americana, Bite the Dust and I Weep for You, at the Little Theatre in Yellow Springs, Ohio. His plays met with local success, and even attracted attention from Broadway producer Jose Ferrer. (Earle and Akie Reynolds Collection). He also won a tri-state tennis championship in (date?)

RESEARCH In 1951 the Atomic Energy Commission assigned Earle to join the newly-formed Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) in researching the effects of radiation from the first atomic bomb on the growth of exposed children. Reynolds and his family moved to an American-Australian occupation base near Kure, Japan, where they lived from 1951-1954 while he completed the first of a series of longitudinal studies meant to be resumed after a one-year sabbatical.

During his three-year assignment in Hiroshima, Earle designed and supervised the building of a 50-foot ketch, Phoenix of Hiroshima at nearby Miyajima-guchi and from 1954-1960 was able to fulfill his lifelong dream of sailing around the world, inspired by Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World. On the circumnavigation with Earle were his wife Barbara, son Ted, daughter Jessica, 10, and three young Hiroshima yachtsmen, Niichi ("Nick") Mikami, Motosada Fushima and Mitsugi Suemitsu plus a cat, Mi-ke (Mee-keh). Earle's elder son Tim opted to attend boarding school in the States instead.

The first leg of the voyage, from Japan to Hawaii, took 48 days (with an 18-hp engine and no electricity). [Earle Reynolds, "We Crossed the Pacific the Hard Way," Saturday Evening Post, May 7, 14 and 21, 1955.]Ted, then 16, using measurements from a hand-held sextant, navigated the 30-ton yacht to Honolulu in 1954 and again, after circling the globe, in 1958. [Earle and Barbara Reynolds, All in the Same Boat, New York: David McKay Co., Inc. 1962; Barbara Reynolds, Cabin Boy and Extra Ballast, a children's fictional account of a family sailing from Japan to Hawaii, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1958; Jessica Reynolds, Jessica's Journal, Henry Holt & Co., 1958, her diary account of the trip from Hawaii to New Zealand, written when she was 11, published as a book when she was 14.]

In Honolulu the second time, after 645 days, 1222 ports and 54,000 nautical miles, what had been a pleasure cruise took a serious turn. Near the Phoenix was docked a small yacht, the Golden Rule. Its crew, four Quaker pacifists, Albert Bigelow ([Wikipedia: Albert Bigelow], George Willoughby, Bill Huntington and Orion Sherwood had attempted to sail to the Marshall Islands to protest the United States' testing of 35 nuclear devices [1]. A regulation against American citizens entering the test zone was passed after the yacht left port and the crew were brought back by the Coast Guard. Impressed by the reasoning and character of these men, Earle and Barbara joined the Society of Friends (Quakers) and considered taking over and attempting to complete their protest.

Earle, at that time one of the world's experts on the effects of radiation, brought himself up to date on the issue, discovering that the results of his research on radiation, 'The Growth and Development Program of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission: Analysis of Body Measurements and Observations Taken in 1952 on 4,200 Hiroshima Children," [NYO-4473 in the Tessmer Collection]. He later learned that his findings had been suppressed by the AEC during the period it was conducting nuclear tests. [Reynolds, Forbidden Voyage] It was published in ?.

In determining whether to deliberately enter the test zone, Reynolds was specifically concerned about the effects of the radiation from the 35 bombs of the Hardtack series on the world environment and on people exposed to it, especially those in Japan, which was downwind and affected by ocean currents from the tests. He was opposed to the United States government's declaring 380,000 square miles of ocean off-limits to American personnel. The forbidden zone blanketed the route by which the Reynolds family intended to sail back to Japan. Also, as the Marshall Islands were a Trust Territory of the U.S., Reynolds objected to the removal of Marshallese from their home islands for the purpose of detonating weapons which would render their islands uninhabitable for years to come.

PROTESTS For these and for other reasons, Earle, Barbara, Ted (20), Jessica (14) and Mikami cleared "for the high seas" on June 11, 1958. On July 1 the Phoenix was intercepted and stopped by the Coast Guard cutter Planetree 65 miles inside the forbidden zone. Two armed Coast Guard officers jumped aboard and put Earle (only) under arrest. Reynolds pointed out that Mikami was a Japanese citizen and was not subject to the injunction. The officers did not discuss Mikami's rights or abridgement thereof. Reynolds was ordered to sail the Phoenix to Eniwetok and the Navy cruiser Collett escorted the 50-foot yacht there.

At 0430 in the darkness of July 3rd, Reynolds' wife and son were startled by a gigantic flash which briefly lit the entire sky. A Japanese newscast later confirmed the explosion of an American nuclear device in the Hardtack series.

From Eniwetok, Reynolds was flown by MATS plane back to Honolulu for trial. The merits or motives for entering the test zone were not permitted to be raised. On the basis of being an American citizen and of having entered an area off-limits to Americans, Earle was convicted. The appeal took two years. During this time Reynolds was free to lecture and write about his voyages and about issues of peace but he lost the right to be called "Dr." Reynolds, lost his standing in the academic community and his teaching position at Antioch.

When the decision of the lower court was overturned, a small announcement atypical for the publication appeared in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [Feb. 1961]. Taken from the New York Times of December 30, 1960, it read, "The conviction of Dr. Earle Reynolds, who sailed into the US nuclear test area of the South Pacific as a protest during the 1958 tests, was reversed December 29 by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The court held that Reynolds was wrongly convicted of a felony because he had committed no more than a trespass, a misdemeanor"(NYT, 12/30)

With the court case was closed, the Reynolds family sailed back to Hiroshima with Mikami, who thus became the first Japanese yachtsman to sail around the world. (Suemitsu and Fushima left the voyage and returned to Japan after three years.)

In October, 1961, the USSR started its own nuclear testing program. The Reynolds family plus Tom Yoneda (and two cats) sailed to Nakhodka in protest. (The nearest military port, Vladivostok, was inaccessible in winter.)They carried with them hundreds of letters from people around the world appealing for all governments to disarm. Soviet Coast Guard officers intercepted and boarded the Phoenix () miles offshore. Before ordering the yacht to return to Japan, Capt. Ivanov wrote a page in Jessica's diary and had his crew bring aboard legs of mutton, fill every available container with sauerkraut and fill two 55-gallon drums with diesel fuel, for which they had no use. In her book bout the trip, Jessica called this encounter "surreal." [Jessica Reynolds, To Russia with Love, Wilmington College Peace Resource Center, due out 2010. Also published in Japanese translation by Chas. E. Tuttle Co, Tokyo 1962]

In 1962, Reynolds was invited to captain the Everyman III, on which members of A Quaker Action Group (AQAG) sailed from London to Leningrad via Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. This boat too was stopped at sea by armed soldiers. This time the crew were tied up with ropes. That same year, Reynolds and Professor Tatsuo Morito of the University of Hiroshima co-founded the Hiroshima Institute of Peace Science (HIPS). Reynolds became a spokesman for the Japanese peace movement but eventually found the Gensuikyo branch too political for his taste. He was quoted in the press as saying, "Peace can not be achieved in an atmosphere of hatred."

Meanwhile Barbara, with two survivors of the Hiroshima bomb, was taking the letters refused by the captain of the Soviet ship around the world to appeal for peace before congressional hearings, in churches and schools. [Barbara Reynolds, Wikipedia - pending]

Divided on approaches to peace among other things, Earle and Barbara divorced in 1964 and that same year Reynolds married his secretary Akie Nagami, a citizen of Hiroshima and a graduate of Hiroshima Women's College where he was Professor of Anthropology. Together Earle and Akie continued his voyages in the Phoenix, delivering humanitarian and medical aid to the Red Cross Society of North Vietnam for civilian victims of the Vietnam war. The crew spent eight days visiting hospitals in Hanoi and Haiphong and observing the effects of the war on outlying villages. (1967) [Boardman, Elizabeth Jelinek, The Phoenix Trip: Notes on a Quaker Mission to Haiphong, Burnsville, N.C.: Celo Press, the printing and publishing department of the Arthur Morgan School, 1901 Hannah Branch Road, Burnsville, NC 28714, 1985]

Earle and Akie made two attempts to sail the Phoenix to Shanghai as a gesture of "friendship and reconciliation" from an American and a Japanese citizen to the people of China, although the Japanese government refused to grant Akie a passport on the grounds that China and Japan had no diplomatic relations. In 1968 the couple was stopped on the high seas by the Japanese government. Two years of civil litigation follwed in Japanese courts. In 1969, with a crew of six Americans, they were stopped offshore by Chinese authorities and their entry prohibited.

After these attempts to sail to China, the Japanese government passed a new immigration law cracking down on "undesirable aliens" and Reynolds was expelled from his adopted country after living there 13 years. He and his wife sailed to San Francisco and settles in Ben Lomond, California where they became the resident hosts of Quaker Center. Reynolds sold the Phoenix, giving the money from the sale to Quaker Center in exchange for a lifetime residence on the property. [Earle Reynolds, "The Center is Quaker: A Personal History of Ben Lomond Quaker Center," self-published,1985]. He taught Peace Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at Cabrillo College while Akie earned an MA in Peace Studies from Antioch College and worked as a career counselor at UCSC, specializing in peace-making careers and in placing students in overseas jobs. His seminar class founded the Peace Resource Center at Merrill College on the University of California at Santa Cruz campus in 1975 but it became a casualty of financial cutbacks in the 1980s. For the next 24 years he continued an active schedule of teaching, writing, giving lecture tours, attending meetings, and protesting against nuclear testing in Nevada and against nuclear weapons research.

After Akie's death from breast cancer in 1994, Earle spent the last four years of his life in a home for Alzheimer's patients in Garden Grove, California. His daughter wrote a novella based on their relationship during those last years. [Jessica Renshaw, New Every Morning, Pleasant Word Publishers, 1996].

In a 1986 interview [Santa Cruz News, January 9, p.4], Earle commented on his life work: "I've been ahead of the game. I was pointing out the dangers of nuclear weapons 30 years ago. . .I've been kind of a renegade scientist. As soon as I stepped over the boundaries, as soon as my findings became politically sensitive, I lost my credibility as a scientist. Now a scientist will stand on a podium and say what I was saying 30 years ago. I'm like a voice in the wilderness that finally begins to hear answering voices."

(In his 80's, when Alzheimer's had stripped him of almost his entire memory, Earle could still remember building a boat and sailing it around the world. He could remember growing up in the circus, which alternated with vaudeville. He told of "sleeping in the lid of a wardrobe trunk," on which he remembered were pasted the pictures of his "best friends: the fat lady, the man with no arms and the Wild Man of Borneo." He said he cut his teeth on the corner of a resin box. He remembered proudly working out at the age of four on his "own miniature trapeze, hung a few feet from the ground," and at five being the "howler" in the den of the Wild Man of Borneo, "with a well-resined string, a tin can, a glove, and plenty of energy."

Some of the stories he believed about his childhood, however, and which he described to other biographers, must be considered apocryphal. According to Earle's birth certificate, his mother's name was Maude Landry, not Madelaine Landre and she was born in Prentice, Wisconsin, not in Canada. Although it has not been substantiated, Maude may have run away from a convent at 16 to join the circus when it passed through her hometown. She was certainly with the circus by the time she turned 17, when she gave birth to Earle.

His father William was not blown to his death from a tightrope stretched between two buildings in downtown Dallas by a "gulf wind" while performing for WWI troops in August,1918, as Earle always believed and as he wrote in his brief (8-page), unpublished memoir, Penny Arcade. According to public records, William Schoene died of pneumonia in San Angelo on April 7, 1926 and was buried in public ground. William's obituary appeared in the May 8, 1926 issue of Billboard (p. 90). Maude had long since remarried.)

Related reading: Reynolds, Earle L., The Physical Growth in 1951 of Hiroshima Children Exposed to the Atomic Bomb, 1951, manuscript and notes are in Earle and Akie Collection, UCSC (see link)

Reynolds, Earle L., The Growth and Development of Hiroshima Children Exposed to the Atomic Bomb, 1953, book is in Earle and Akie Collection, UCSC (see link)

Review of book (above)in Human Biology, May 1964.

Reynolds, Barbara Leonard, Cabin Boy and Extra Ballast, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958. Fictional children's story of a family sailing from Japan to Hawaii.

Reynolds, Jessica, Jessica's Journal, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1958. Eleven-year old's diary account of the first year of a three-year circumnavigation of the globe on the Phoenix. Non-fiction.

Reynolds, Earle, The Forbidden Voyage, New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1961. Non-fiction. The family's protest voyage against American nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Reynolds, Earle and Barbara, All in the Same Boat, New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1962 Family's trip around the world by home-made yacht.

Reynolds, Jessica, To Russia with Love, Tokyo: Chas. E. Tuttle Co., 1962 (in Japanese translation only)The Reynolds family's protest voyage against Soviet nuclear testing in the U.S.S.R.

Reynolds, Jessica, To Russia with Love, Wilmington, OH: Peace Resource Center, Wilmington College (in English) due out in 2010.

External links

• [2] The Earle and Akie Reynolds Collection at the University of California at Santa Cruz has extensive writings by, photographs of and information about Earle Reynolds and his second wife.

http://www.truthout.org/preserving-golden-rule-a-piece-anti-nuclear-history56895 February 14, 2010 article about Golden Rule and Phoenix.

http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/DG001-025/dg017/dg017cnvamain.htm Swarthmore College Peace Collection: Committee for Non-Violent Action Records, 1958-1968

... Community Health Services · To the Moon and Beyond · Critic at Large; Dr. Earle Reynolds, Freed From Jail Term, Continues War Against Nuclear Testing ... spiderbites.nytimes.com/pay_1961/articles_1961_05_00001.html

A Tass dispatch from Hanoi aid Dr. Earle Reynolds' : 10000 of American Quaker medcal supplies to North Vietnam, ailed around Red China's Hainan Island and ... news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19670326&id...

Legal Brief: Earle L. Reynolds v. United States of America, Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii, August 1958. From Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, 1873-2002 http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/catalogue/pauling12.html

Folders 85 - 86

Reprint of article by Dr. Conrad, et al., "use utoweof a Portable Whole-Body Counter to Measure Internal Contamination in a Fallout-Exposed Population"; various publications (The New Yorker, The Nations, Saturday Review, and Sept.-Oct. 1957, Jan.-Feb. 1958, First Quarter 1969 issues of the Micronesian Reporter with articles pertaining to the Micronesia/Marshall Islands and to experiences of anthropologist, Dr. Earle Reynolds.** (Many of the contents of these folders were LOST in the flood and all of it is flood damaged)** From Papers of Wataru W. Sutow, M.D. at http://mcgovern.library.tmc.edu/data/www/html/collect/manuscript/Sutow/Sutow_S5.htm

http://www.san.beck.org/GPJ29-AntiNuclearProtests.html

http://www.modis.ispras.ru/wikipedia/Category:American_anti-war_activists.html