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candidates Ron supported and voted for.52 Although Ron shared many of Genora and Sol’s beliefs, it would have been out of character for either parent to indoctrinate him, after spending many years of their own lives supporting freedom of choice, though years after Ron married and become the father of a little daughter, Genora “signed up her five month old granddaughter in the National Organization for Women.”53 “He’s busy on his own terms,” Sol said of Ron. “He’s very busy.”54 It is undeniable that some of Genora rubbed off on Ron. In a sociology class at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he wrote a term paper on “womanhood” and complained that in higher education, one had to produce the “junk” his professors demanded.55 One could see shades of Genora when a professor told Ron that he had “a unique way of looking at things. Your ordering is practically the reverse of everyone else’s. Who’s out of step?” (Genora thrilled at this assertion because it had been said of her so many times.) Ron (getting too old now for “Ronnie”) scoffed at the teacher, saying, “And he represents the hope for Progressive teachers in the future?” Sol, calling himself the “Huffer and Puffer” of the Dollinger Company, frequently challenged Ron, most always to his disadvantage, to tennis matches. (Ron was on the varsity tennis team in high school.) Ron wrote in jest to Genora that “I hope this is no shock to you, but it is very difficult to not make him [Sol] feel like an invalid on the tennis court.” He claimed that he had “been going easy on the old man for nearly 20 years.”56 Genora relished these encounters between father and son. The admirable family life that the Dollingers had created remained full of love and respect for one another.

Privately, they were a loving family, but publicly Genora and Sol were never far away from one cause or another. The war in Vietnam demanded their attention, the threat the world faced from atomic power was worrisome, and the seemingly unabated proliferation of smog and other pollutants endangered people’s health. When one puts civil rights and liberties into this mix, one can see that the Dollingers continued to be an extremely busy couple. One of the most pleasing events in the early 1970s for Genora and Sol and Socialists everywhere was the unprecedented assumption of power—in October 1970—of Salvador Allende as president of Chile. He became the first Marxist ever chosen in a free election, and it was significant to Genora that Allende’s ascension should have been in the Western Hemisphere because she had always believed the Socialist revolution that would ultimately spread to the United States would start somewhere in Latin America.

Genora was attending a UAW convention in Detroit on the very day the Chilean Congress (after an election the previous month by the public) swept Allende into office. She had not been back to the Motor City since her 1966 move to California. To honor her homecoming, about seventy-five people greeted her at a party hosted by old friends, Wayne State University professor Harry Becker and his wife, Frieda. After eating a huge cake decorated with roses and emblazoned “Welcome Home Genora” and imbibing a few spirits, the assembled guests decided to make a tape for Sol and Ron back in Los Angeles. The main topic of discussion was President Allende of Chile. “I feel that we can learn quite a bit from Allende,” Frieda Becker told Sol, “who as a Marxist has been one of the founding fathers of the Socialist party.” Allende, the group believed, would unify and solidify the disparate forces in Chile and mold them into one entity. “Perhaps we can learn from him here in this country,” said one of Sol’s correspondents. Many who spoke on the tape expressed fears that the CIA would spend “hundreds of millions” of U.S. tax dollars to overthrow Allende. They were convinced that the Nixon administration was not going to allow another Socialist government (after Cuba) in the Western Hemisphere. (And, as is well-known, Allende was overthrown in 1973 by Auguste Pinochet.) As the night wore on,