A teacher by any other nick..

The stories will not come in any order. Here is the first.


When my grandfather (mother's father) joined the Communist Party in 1929, he took another name. His Communist name was James Casey. My mother acquired the (new) name, at 1 year of age, of Baby Casey.

As James Casey, he then taught journalism at the Rand School for Social Science, the one school where Socialism (in several varieties) was actually taught. Many years later someone said to a friend of his that he learned more from his little Irish teacher, James Casey, in the Rand School than he ever did in any other journalism school. Hehe...wonder how he would have felt if he had known that his teacher was not Irish..

Victor Navasky gets his name wrong in Naming Names. It was James Casey, not Jack Casey (p. 58).