TRAVEL FACES: VALE TANNY POLSTER

I met Tanny (Nathaniel) Polster in 1986 in Washington DC. I was on the way to Nicaragua to spend a year or so covering Central America for The Age and other publications.

My friend and colleague, Mike Steketee, had given me his number, saying he was a remarkable older journalist, really worth looking up. We kept in touch through my time in Central America and later New York and then when I returned home to Australia, becoming great friends, pen pals in many ways, writing letters in the early days and emails later. He encouraged me with my writing, sending me books and other interesting and unusual presents. Whenever I could when I was in the US I visited him.

Tanny was born on December 30, 1921 and died at the age of 93 this year.

According to the very brief death notice I found he was a World War Two veteran, anti-poverty program worker, lobbyist for the National Cancer Institute, and publisher of specialised medical newsletters of heart, lung and blood and adolescent medicine.

From what he’s told me over the years he grew up in Columbus, Ohio. His father had come to the US as a teenager from then Austria-Hungary, while his mother’s family was from Russia.

Tanny was a political animal. Being a Jewish man and a humanitarian , he was horrified by what he saw in Europe during his time in a US Air Force squadron but even more horrified by the later treatment of refugees by the US.

“The military never told home folks we bombed Switzerland during WW II,” he wrote in an email. “Minor mistake by navigator of bombing crew.”

He told how he met a mixed race couple at a party in Chicago, who had been living in Switzerland, and how the “white wife said her mother was in the town bombed by U.S. planes. Her mother had her in her arms as she ran away from the explosions”.

“I detested telling her that my bomber group dropped those bombs.  My automatic cameras in the planes verified the town bombed.

"That day, a Brooklyn G.I. warned me to insist on flight pay in the few flights I took.  His plane exploded on take-off a few minutes later. No survivors. Futile memories. We got rid of Hitler while committing genocide of German civilians.”

Back home, he worked as a journalist at the Washington Post and in the Deep South including Savannah and Charleston, Georgia. He was deeply involved in supporting the Civil Rights movement.

It was during this time that he met John Tiller, a Black former college basketballer from Philadelphia, who later became an adviser to Alexander Haig and George Bush Senior, particularly in the areas of health care reform.

“He and I became friends when that was extremely rare, white and black,” Tanny said, almost surprised that they were able to overlook their different political views for all those years.

He considered John the best man he ever knew.

Tanny and I were having lunch in a Washington restaurant one day I think in 1987 when I glanced out the window to see a tall, striking man glide past. And then he came inside, pulling a chair out and sitting at our table.

“I’ve invited John because I know he can show you all the best dance clubs and bars in DC,” Tanny announced.

John and I stayed friends until his death from lung cancer in May, 2012. And some of the best times of my life were spent with those two.

In the 2000s, Tanny met his second wife, Janet Schirn, a well-known interior designer - past President of the American Society of Interior Designers as well as a Fellow of the Society -and moved to Chicago. She was a wonderful, artistic, inspiring woman, who told me once Arnold Schwarzenegger was among her clients.

I visited them when she was very ill in 2008 and she told me Tanny was the love of her life.

But after she died he had to move out of the apartment, finding one closer to the lake, where we went swimming together the last time I visited him in 2011.

Tanny was still working, lobbying to make changes to a society he felt was not just economically bankrupt but in many ways morally as well.

While ostensibly a Democrat, he was no fan of the Clintons and more an admirer of Michelle Obama than Barack. He believed change had to come from way above the president.


This is from one of his later emails to me: “My great nephew (age 40 or 50) moans that we are a 3rd world nation. China owns us via U.S. government bond purchases. France, Spain, Japan, and other dinky nations have faster trains.  Our bridges are falling down. Our roads are pitted. Obama, the social worker, told the Wall Street crooks to stay out of jail and put taxpayers into eternal debt with not a community person, not a layman, not a non-crook in on the talks. Now he doesn't know how to pretty-up the $6 to $11 million a year that the crooks are paying themselves. Rubin is God's gift to anti-Semitism. He re-appoints the government officials who presided over the chaos.  Manufacturing is down.  Automobile makers and airlines are bankrupt. The daily newspaper industry is dying.”

He felt so strongly about the newspaper devastation that he spent a year working on a plan for the Chicago Tribune that he thought would “1) expand circulation and 2) wake up America's sleeping electorate.  I tried selling it twice, but fumbled the ball.  I have taken months to improve the selling of it. Just finished tonight”.

He wept at the inefficiency of American public transport, noting he could only get a midnight train to visit his sister in Pittsburgh.

“Inter-city travel in the U.S is now a crushing bore: Full body X-rays to learn if you have a tooth capped or a bomb in your bowel.  Rules, I.D. cards, delays, long lines, mistakes,” he said in an email to me in 2011.

He was also very funny, with a wicked sense of humour that many did not understand or appreciate.

Once her ordered me a martini in Chicago and told the waitress to “cut the vegetables” – ie the garnish!

“Down the street there is an institution where girls in mid-thigh skirts and spike heels attend,” he emailed once.  “It is named Detention (no joke).  I've never been inside, but I had my pocket picked nearby. On weekends 2 or 3 police cruisers monitor the folks.  It's not in South Dakota, but you could write about it.”

Until his later years Tanny was pretty fit. He’d take an inflatable boat in his car boot to one of the Chicago rivers, blow it up and row for miles. He took me once on a freezing, winter day.

He was a ladies’ man, always admiring good looks and intelligence – he liked to have a woman companion.

There is a lot I don’t know about Tanny – about his first marriage and daughter although he did tell me a little. And forgive me if there is information I have left out.

“My first wife, Iris, was sitting at a lunch counter in Savannah, demonstrating against segregation.  A white man came in and stuck a foot-long dagger into the back and lungs of a man (demonstrator?) two seats from Iris,” he said once explaining what it was like in the South during the Civil Rights period.

In later years he become involved in a movement called the Villages for older people -  voluntary non-government groups  where members seek help from one another.

“These new units area all called Village something or other and are therapeutic for usually abrasive city living in U.S.A   A club of journalists inside the Village are engaged in writing memoirs and trading them.”

Tanny was a trailblazing journalist, activist and lobbyist who never received the recognition he deserved (not that he would have cared one hoot) and an incredible friend.

He wrote to me after a phone conversation with John not long before our darling friend died.

“He makes me realize what a boon it is, knowing you and him during my lifetime.”

No, Tanny, the pleasure was all mine.

 # Travel #USA #Politics #Media