About 20 years ago I met Saul Birnbaum's daughter, Mary. She told me a remarkable story of what Saul was like, his history, his approach to the world.
I met Mary and her husband, Mark, through a friend in San Francisco. She began by telling me that Saul grew up in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. The ethnic rivalries of that neighborhood were legendary and, if you wanted to survive, you had to be prepared to fight to defend yourself. Saul grew up as a gang leader and a street fighter. His goal was to make sure that he and his family and his people were protected. Along with that he came to identify with the underdog in any unfair battle. As Mary put it, he didn't become a fighter out of political conviction. He started out as a fighter; the politics was a new layer that got added later.
She could only guess at the sequence of events that led him to the Lincoln Brigade, but it certainly would seem like a logical evolution. The end of that war merged quickly into World War II, in which he continued to fight. At the end he was a soldier and a fighter and, otherwise, uneducated. With the GI Bill he got training as an accountant and found work. Accounting was boring but, through accounting he discovered numbers, and discovered that numbers were fascinating. That led to mathematics, and math led to New Lincoln.
One of the things that Mary said about Saul was, as a father (as a person) he could be cold, arbitrary, inflexible. But if anything happened that threatened or challenged the well-being of his family, there was no force on earth that he wouldn't confront.
I remember a visit to New Lincoln, after I graduated. Saul came up to me in the cafeteria and greeted me with an unexpected warmth and enthusiasm. He drew me over to the food counter and grabbed an extra dessert for me, took me over to the teacher's lounge, sat me down & asked me all about my life since leaving the school. What's so funny about the incident is the dessert was just a small bowl of canned peaches. But, in the coin of New Lincoln, a second dessert was a treasured and forbidden thing. It was a gesture of affection from Saul that took me completely by surprise. I will always remember it.
Now to the sad news. I had told this story to Julie Hammid & she wanted to visit Saul. I called Mark & Mary to see if it could be arranged (about 4 years ago). They told me that his mind had been going for some time and that it had got to the point where he really no longer recognised people. Mark said, basically, that it was too late.