THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 16, 1994 TAG: 9409160543
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVID M. POOLE AND ROBERT LITTLE, STAFF WRITERS
LENGTH: Long : 206 lines
Oliver L. North, under scrutiny since the beginning of his U.S. Senate campaign over his record on telling the truth, has been captivating audiences with a rags-to-riches story about his immigrant grandfather, a tale North relates to extol the virtues of self-reliance and free enterprise.
But evidence shows the story lacks another basic virtue - truth.
North has embellished his grandfather's life with vivid details that are at odds with available historical documents and the recollections of North's own relatives.
North tells the story like this:
The elder North was a penniless Englishman who arrived in Norfolk at the turn of the century. His passage was paid by Peter Wright, a local businessman. Grandfather North toiled as an ``indentured apprentice'' - working only for room and board - to repay his benefactor.
At the end of the elder North's service, Wright handed him a $50 check and said, ``Oliver, go and make your way.''
``When my grandfather died in his 80s,'' North tells audiences, ``he still had, framed over his desk, that $50 check from Peter Wright.''
At appearances in Norfolk last month, the story took on ever greater proportions.
At an Aug. 8 luncheon at the Omni Waterside Hotel, North told Republican supporters that his grandfather worked off his passage to America after one year.
Then, on Aug. 26, he told another GOP crowd at the Norfolk Waterside Marriott Hotel that his grandfather's indentured apprenticeship lasted two years.
The next day, at the Ocean View Senior Center, the elder North's period of labor multiplied again - this time to three years.
There are other discrepancies in North's story.
North says that his grandfather arrived under the sponsorship of Wright, who paid his passage from England. But U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service records show that the elder North - also named Oliver - paid his own passage to America.
Senate candidate North then relates the story of his grandfather's ``indentured'' toil for Wright. But Wright's daughter - now 94 and living in Norfolk - said in an interview that she never knew her father to hire indentured workers. Rather, she tells a story of a young relative who came to visit, received a little help from her father and then quickly moved on.
North omits a key detail: that Wright was his grandfather's uncle, a man who made a habit of helping relatives who had immigrated to America.
Finally, while he evokes the image of the framed $50 check as a symbol of the family's grit and determination, North's own brother and sister - who for years listened to their grandfather tell stories at the dinner table - said they never saw the check or heard anyone mention it.
Just as the story itself has changed, North's explanation shifted when asked to explain several discrepancies.
Initially, North said through a spokesman that the story was accurate and that he had documentation to back it up.
``I hate to ruin your day, but it's all true,'' Deputy Press Secretary Dan McLagan told a reporter who traveled to Charlottesville on Wednesday in an attempt to talk with North for this article.
Aides said North was too busy for an interview, but he relayed through McLagan that he had unearthed documentation about his grandfather's life while writing his 1991 autobiography, ``Under Fire.''
McLagan said North told him that his grandfather worked as an apprentice at a ``printing or bookbinding company'' for three years.
``I asked him about it today when we were coming over in the Winnebago,'' McLagan said, referring to notes of his conversation with North. ``He said, `I have a bunch of stuff back at the farm. I haven't looked at it in a long time. I'd have to go back and look at it.' ''
McLagan said Wednesday it would take several days to provide the documentation.
Then, several hours later, North acknowledged that some details of his story about his grandfather might not hold up to scrutiny.
In a written statement, North described the story of his grandfather as based on family lore, not documents.
``According to conversations we had around our dinner table (our grandfather ate dinner with us almost every night for several years after his wife died) . . . we always understood that he arrived in Norfolk and stayed with and worked as an apprentice for Peter Wright. It was our understanding that our grandfather was in an indentured status with Mr. Wright.
``. . . If the (newspaper) has new information, we would be happy to add it to the family records.''
North declined further requests for an interview Thursday.
North is hardly the first politician who has found it expedient to bend a few branches of his family tree. But the story of North's grandfather comes from a candidate already on notice about his ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy.
Moreover, North has painstakingly sought in recent months to build a public image of himself as a passionate family man and patriot with a deep appreciation for American values and traditions. His campaign has strived to enlarge that image to the point where it overshadows North's past and his ties to the Iran-Contra scandal.
Central to that past - and to arguments over his fitness for service in Congress - are charges from North's critics that he lied about his role in the Nicaraguan arms-supply operation and that he has shown a tendency to rewrite history. Even the conservative Reader's Digest has documented a number of falsehoods and exaggerations by North.
McLagan, the deputy press secretary, called the newspaper's questions about discrepancies in the grandfather story ``chickenshit.'' He said the variations are based on nothing more than people having different recollections of events that happened nearly 100 years ago.
But the discrepancies are based on more than human memory.
INS records in Philadelphia cast doubts about North's claim that his grandfather arrived in America as an indentured servant.
The elder North, then 20, is listed on the manifest of alien passengers aboard the ``Merion,'' which docked at Philadelphia in 1906. He was interviewed by immigration officials and stated that he had paid his own passage to America, had $75 in his pocket, was a printer and was traveling to the home of his uncle, ``Mr. P. Wright,'' in Norfolk.
INS Historian Marian Smith noted that the practice of indentured servitude had all but ended nearly a century before North arrived in Philadelphia.
In fact, immigration laws passed in the 1880s made it illegal for employers to bring skilled indentured workers into the country.
``Who knows what kind of deals were made?'' said Smith, who has not reviewed the North case. ``Maybe someone did pay his ticket and allowed him to work it off, but it would have been a violation of immigration laws.''
Esther Wright Cawthorne was 6 years old when her cousin Oliver arrived at her family's home at the corner of Stockley Gardens and Redgate Avenue in Norfolk. Still active today at 94, she remembers him as a short, skinny Englishman who was intensely polite and drank a lot of tea.
One of her most vivid memories is watching cousin Oliver eat watermelon for the first time and being amazed at seeing a grown man who had never tasted it before.
Cousin Oliver left during or after his first summer in Norfolk because it was too hot, Cawthorne remembers.
She doesn't remember her cousin ever working for her father, who at the time was part-owner of the Norfolk Dispatch. She also had never heard of her father offering room and board to men in exchange for passage to America, though he was often generous to relatives.
``If Ollie said it, then I'm sure it's true,'' said Cawthorne, who had blown a kiss to the candidate during his Ocean View appearance. ``He's a good man, really he is. His whole family is good.''
Oliver North said it was general knowledge in the family that his grandfather was an indentured apprentice.
That was news to North's sister, Patricia North Balthazor, a speech therapist from California.
Balthazor said she took part in the dinner-table discussions and once, during high school, interviewed her grandfather about family history. She said her understanding was that her grandfather visited his relatives in Norfolk for ``a short time'' before venturing to Philadelphia.
``I don't think he ever had a residence there,'' she said of his time in Norfolk.
John C. North, who volunteers part time for his brother's Senate campaign, said the story his brother is telling on the campaign trail is essentially the same one he heard around the dinner table.
Asked if he would be surprised if his sister never had heard about indentured servitude, John North said: ``Not really, because my sister was a lot younger. If you get in these conversations at the table, she was probably already upstairs getting ready for bed.''
Patricia North, when told that her story conflicts with her two older brothers' version, said, ``Whether my grandfather would consider himself an indentured servant, I don't think he would have used those terms. I never heard him use those words, but knowing what it was like to immigrate to this country and the fact that Uncle Peter was a successful businessman here, it would not surprise me if that were the arrangement.''
As for the $50 check from Peter Wright, candidate North is the only member of the family who claims to have known of its existence.
In Norfolk, Esther Cawthorne said she always heard that her father gave her cousin Oliver $50 - but she always understood it to be ``real money,'' not a check. And it was her understanding that the money was given to him upon his arrival from England.
``He was green, right off the ship, with nothing,'' she said. ``He needed something to get him going.''
In fact, during the Great Depression, her mother complained of Wright having given cousins money while he could not afford to provide his own children with an education, Cawthorne said.
While they do not recall hearing about a check from Peter Wright, the two oldest siblings of Ollie North said their grandfather had all sorts of mementos on the office wall at the wool-combing mill that he and their father ran in upstate New York.
``I know there on the wall at the mill there were several checks framed - and dollar bills,'' Balthazor said. ``It could have been one of them.''
What became of the framed check?
In his written statement about the grandfather story, Ollie North said the family eventually lost track of many of his grandfather's possessions after the man moved to Pennsylvania to live with his daughter a few years before his death in 1967.
Patricia Balthazor inherited her grandfather's prized set of Rudyard Kipling books and a book illustrated by her great-grandfather North, a well-known political cartoonist and artist in England.
John North got the china from his grandmother's side of the family.
Oliver North says the check - which he described as hanging above his grandfather's desk at the time of his death - is now nowhere to be found.
``We have no idea,'' he said, ``where that or other family mementos currently are.'' MEMO: Kerry Dougherty and Keith Monroe contributed to this report.
ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo of North]
This photograph is taken from Oliver North's book, Under Fire (1991,
HarperCollins). North is sitting on the lap of his grandfather, whom
the Senate candidate said was once an ``indentured apprentice.''
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN
Esther Wright Cawthorne, 94, doesn't recall North's grandfather ever
having worked for her father.
INFOLINE
To listen to Oliver North tell the story about his grandfather, dial
640-5555, category 6554 (OLLI).
KEYWORDS: OLIVER NORTH GRANDFATHER U.S. SENATE RACE CANDIDATE by CNB