Leo Sonderegger

A wonderful young president that we had who among other things had said once in a speech “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. You should think of what you can do for your country, to help the country and everybody in the country. In the course of those years, I wrote millions of words of opinion that I thought were important for people to know about. I don’t know what affect they really had. I knew that a lot of the little papers did not carry editorials about civil liberties and things like that. Maybe writing about what I thought about the events in and around my life can help guide others.

Leo Sonderegger

My name is Leo Sonderegger. I was born in New York City, it was a long time ago; it was in 1913. That was early in the 20th century and now we are in the 21st century.

I can tell you about my first family. My sister and I and my mother and father, we had our Christmas celebration with exchange of gifts and so on in a way that they did in Switzerland; they would have it on Christmas Eve. So instead of waking up on Christmas morning and rushing out to see what kind of presents Santa Claus had brought, we had our Christmas on Christmas Eve.

We did have a battery radio, but not much radio even. When I was a boy, I think I was about 12 years old when I went to a store and got a little kit that they had to make a radio. In that sense, life was very different. Now you have all kinds of devices. You probably know about personal computers, you know about cell phones, and IPODS and all that; think how we had none of that.

It was very nice and we had a tree with candles instead of tree lights We had candles and we had to be careful, so that the candles would not catch the tree on fire. It was very beautiful and simple.

After I went away, I went to school and finally went to the University in Lincoln, Nebraska, a smaller city, but it was the capitol. Then I grew up and I got married to a girl who was from a little town in Nebraska called York. It was about sixty miles from the town of Lincoln. I almost considered it, the greatest piece of luck in my whole life.

I understood that WWII was necessary. It was probably the only necessary war we’ve had, because Hitler and the Nazis were trying to conquer the world and they had to be opposed. I understood that but by the time the war came, I had become what people called a pacifist, meaning that you don’t want any war, me and my wife Marion as well. According to the law at that time, if you stated that as a matter of conscience you could not bring yourself to pick up arms and kill people; you became what they called at that time a C.O; a conscientious objector.

Well at first, I worked on the Star. I was a reporter. I remember one thing I wrote was a series of articles about censorship in the United States. At that time it turned out that paperback books that were sold all over the United States, on shelves and in stores and so on were being censored originally by the county attorney of a county that encompasses the city of Detroit in Michigan. So I wrote about that, and that brought about some changes in the publishing business.

After about sixty years of being in the newspaper business, I decided to write things I wanted to write, stories, essays, novels and things like that. That is what I have been doing since then.