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July 14, 2000/11 Tammuz 5760, Vol. 52, No.44
Up in smokeCherry bomb explodes and a life veers off course
VICKI CABOT
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 Howard Lawrence Mechanic in his high school yearbook picture (inset) assumed the identity of Scottsdale resident Gary Robert Tredway for 28 years, after fleeing a federal firebombing conviction in St. Louis. High school yearbook photo courtesy of Harvey Mechanic |
The federal penitentiary in Florence, Ariz., that is, where time passes slowly in a tiny cell in a pod with 39 other men; where days are spent playing cards and listening to the radio; where an hour outdoors, even in the summer heat, is a welcome reprieve; where 60 minutes in the prison library is something to look forward to; where contact with family and friends is meted out in 10-minute telephone conversations and 30-minute visits, talking through a glass partition.
Surely this isn't what Ralph and Rose Mechanic had in mind for their son, Howard, growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in the 1950s. Surely this isn't what Howard Mechanic had in mind for himself.
Howard Mechanic, a fugitive on a 1970 federal conviction for throwing a cherry bomb during an anti-war protest on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, surrendered to federal marshals in downtown Phoenix on Feb. 10, 11 days before his 52nd birthday. He was immediately transported to Florence to serve a five-year sentence while supporters, including his former wife, Ingrid Gold, and her father, Ray, work arduously writing letters and raising money for Mechanic's defense fund to commute his sentence and secure a presidential pardon.
Mechanic, who assumed the identity of Scottsdale resident Gary Tredway for the past 28 years, had built a new life as a philanthropic businessman and community activist. He gave a healthy percentage of his income to charity and gave as generously of his time to a raft of causes ranging from clean air to clean elections.
A reporter writing a routine profile of the civic leader and then Scottsdale City Council candidate uncovered his secret, and his life exploded, just like that cherry bomb.
"A nice Jewish boy? Yeah, I guess that would apply," Mechanic says during one of two telephone interviews with Jewish News from Florence when asked about the appellation.
"We did well academically, participated in sports, went to temple, learned our manners. It was the 1950s," he says, his Midwestern accent coming across the lines, "everybody conformed to certain standards. We played by the rules."
Howard Mechanic and his twin brother, Harvey, were born on Feb. 21, 1948. Their sister Marilyn was three years older. The family lived in a duplex in Shaker Heights, an upper middle-class Cleveland suburb with a substantial Jewish population. The children's paternal grandparents, Arthur and Gena Mechanic, lived in the adjacent apartment, sharing kitchen and dining facilities with the young family.
Arthur owned an auto supplies business, eventually branching out into home appliances. Gena worked in the business with her husband and Ralph, their only child, eventually joined them. Rose stayed at home to raise the children.
The Mechanic's social lives revolved around their family and a close circle of friends.
Summers they often rented lakeside cottages together; Jewish holidays often found them gathered at each others' homes.
Grace (Shore) Kassoff recalls the closeness of her family and the Mechanics.
"Lots of time it would just be our family and theirs," says Kassoff from her Ohio home. Birthday parties, Rosh Hashanah lunches, Hanukkah gift exchanges are fond childhood memories.
Kassoff says that her mother and Rose Mechanic were best friends and developed special relationships with each other's children.
"Their mom was our Aunt Rose and our mom was their Aunt Rose," she says of the three Shore siblings.
Synagogue affiliation and Jewish education were an integral part of the Mechanic lifestyle. All three children attended Sunday and then "Saturday" school (younger kids went on Sundays, older students on Saturdays) at Park Synagogue in Shaker Heights.
Harvey explains that the family joined the Conservative congregation as a compromise: Ralph was Reform, his parents members of The Temple in Cleveland; Rose had been raised Orthodox.
Marilyn did not become bat mitzvah, but Harvey and Howard shared the honors at their b'nai mitzvah, splitting the Torah and Haftarah readings - a momentous occasion, Harvey remembers, attended by family and friends and followed by a festive party.
The children continued their Jewish studies through confirmation in the tenth grade.
In high school, the boys were known as good students, as competitive with each other as with others. Both were national merit scholarship finalists at Shaker Heights High School.
Both were involved in a raft of school activities, reflecting a shared interest in government and current events. Harvey Mechanic worked on the yearbook and participated in the world affairs and human relations clubs; Howard Mechanic was in the pre-law club and student council. Both were members of the debate team and played intramural sports.
Jim Anderson, a childhood friend, recalls the college bowl tournament Howard organized. Anderson says he and Harvey anchored one of the teams; Howard was the emcee.
"He was the one asking the questions," recalls Anderson. "He was the leader."
Anderson has fond memories of tooling around in the Mechanic brothers' car, an old gray Oldsmobile that their father bought for them. "They called it the old gray mare. It wasn't what it used to be," he says with a chuckle.
Often the boys could be found shooting baskets at the Lomond School, an elementary school adjacent to the Mechanic home. Anderson remembers spirited two on two games, when the Mechanic brothers would take on Anderson and a fourth friend, Bruce Abrams.
Most evenings, says Harvey, of life back then, "We'd hit the books from 7-11."
"Harvey would be a doctor and Howard a lawyer," says Kassoff of family aspirations for the boys growing up.
Harvey became a lawyer; Howard missed out on a law school scholarship and ended up a longhaired outlaw on the lam.
After high-school graduation in 1966, Harvey went off to Columbia University and Howard to Washington University. The Vietnam War was just heating up.
"It really didn't touch on Shaker Heights at that time," says Anderson, who later became active in the anti-war movement at Princeton University. None of the Mechanic children remember discussing the war around the dinner table.
"Home was a place to live," says Ralph Mechanic, who had a medical disability and worked for the federal government during World War II. "We didn't talk about politics."
However, as the conflict escalated, the protest movement exploded on college campuses across the nation. Violence gripped the nation.
Howard Mechanic remembers 1968 as a critical year, during which Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated.
For a young man raised to play by the rules, the rules suddenly were changing.
"My interest in politics bloomed at the time," says Howard. He signed on to Sen. Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, traveling to Wisconsin to work in the primary for the anti-war candidate.
Howard says he opposed the war because he was "idealistic, not anarchist."
"I saw the way the country was going and saw the need for fundamental change," he explains.
Attending the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago with his brother, Howard was caught in the violence that erupted there.
That experience, he says, only reinforced his commitment to the protest movement and the need to work for change.
Anderson remembers seeing a lot of Howard that summer.
"We did a lot of talking," he says. "Howard felt we were fighting the wrong war in the wrong place and he wanted to see it end. He was against violence, for non-violent protest." Anderson adds that he was of the same mind.
Harvey assures that the brothers didn't oppose the war to evade the draft. They both were impelled by a belief that America's involvement was wrong.
"It was a waste of human life," he says.
When rioting broke out on the Washington University campus the night of May 5, 1970, Howard Mechanic became a casualty of the protest movement.
The day before, Ohio National Guardsmen had fired on unarmed protesters at Kent State University killing four people and wounding nine students, igniting student protest across the nation. At Wash U, the ROTC building was burned, and Howard and several other demonstrators were jailed for violating a restraining order against demonstrations at the building. He was arrested and charged under a new federal anti-demonstration statute.
One witness testified that he had seen Howard lob a cherry bomb at police and firefighters. Howard was tried and convicted in U.S. District Court and sentenced to five years in federal prison for the crime.
He steadfastly maintains his innocence.
| Activists work for release |
After exhausting appeals, Howard Mechanic fled.
"My family had an idea (that I would flee)," he says. "They knew it was a possibility."
Marilyn Mechanic says they tried to talk Howard out of running away.
"We tried to tell him, it's just five years and you'll be out."
But one day he left a note and just disappeared.
He got on a bus and arrived in Tempe, reinventing himself as Gary Tredway. Five years later, he met Ingrid Gold, a Jewish Arizona State University student, when she came to buy a recycled bicycle from a friend. They married in 1980.
"He was the first Jewish man I met in Arizona who was smarter than I was," says Gold, a nurse and certified midwife, of her attraction to the soft-spoken vegetarian. "He was a brilliant guy."
The couple were married in a Jewish ceremony at Congregation Or Ami in a Philadelphia suburb, where Gold had become bat mitzvah. The couple marked the birth of their son, Ari, in 1981 with a traditional brit milah (circumcision) ceremony. Rabbi Barton Lee, director of Hillel at ASU, officiated.
Gold says being Jewish is an integral part of her identity; she studied at Gratz College in Philadelphia and belongs to Temple Chai, where son Ari celebrated his bar mitzvah. Howard Mechanic participated in the service, brushing up on his Hebrew for the traditional aliyah given to the father of the bar mitzvah.
The couple, divorced in 1984, shared joint custody of their son, often spending Jewish holidays at Gold's home.
And though Howard is less drawn to organized Jewish life than his former wife, she says that he has always been supportive of her efforts.
Howard Mechanic says that Gary Tredway was Jewish.
"I did not try to hide (my Jewish identity) in any way," he says. "I just didn't advertise it."
But he shied away from talking about his Jewishness. He didn't want to get drawn into playing Jewish geography, talking about which temple he went to as a kid. He felt it was too risky.
"I tried to avoid discussions, or if it came up, I'd change the subject. The past was something I did not want to talk about," he says.
Still, he says, "All the ethics and traditions I learned in Hebrew school were a part of me. Trying to live a good life, helping the community, giving charity."
Gold says her former husband's life reflects his Jewish identity.
"He believes in justice, fairness, community service, working for things you believe in. These are very Jewish values," she says.
Family members, fearing legal repercussions, decline to discuss knowledge of Howard's identity during the years spent as Gary Tredway.
Howard says he kept in contact intermittently by telephone. It was a very stressful time.
"Nobody ever talked about him," says sister Marilyn, who traveled to Arizona in May to visit her kid brother in Florence. "It was something we could not do anything about."
Anderson, a friend of the Mechanic brothers since fourth grade, says it was "a disturbing feeling to just have this friend disappear (especially) when it was someone who seemed like a fairly typical, intelligent Jewish young man."
Harvey Mechanic recalls his wedding in 1984; his sister and parents attended, his twin brother was not there. "It was odd," he says.
Marilyn says the most difficult time for the family were the years during her mother's illness and subsequent death in 1995. "It was hardest when my mother got sick," she says.
She regrets that her mother didn't get to know her only grandchild, Ari, and says that she now e-mails her newfound nephew and hopes that he will come to Ohio for her upcoming wedding this fall.
In a letter Howard wrote to Anderson from Florence a month or so after his surrender, he comments on the pleasures of being able to renew relationships with family and friends.
"If there is a silver lining in my surrender, it may be that I can now contact old friends from high school and college, as well as being able to develop new relationships based on my true self," he wrote.
His son Ari, who visits his dad weekly when home on break from classes at St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M., says his dad's past will only serve to strengthen an already close relationship.
"When this passes our relationship will only be stronger," says Ari Gold. "He doesn't have to worry about sharing things with me."
Also, Ari Gold says the experience will make him stronger.
"This is the time in my life when I am questioning my identity, trying to find meaning." Confronting what he describes as a "tough" situation and the question of his father's identity has made him think more clearly about who he is and what he wants to do with his life.
His dad has not changed, he says, even if he goes by a different name.
"He is the same person I know. He's my dad and I love him."
Howard Mechanic readily admits that running for public office was a risky proposition. He describes his nearly 30 years of communal activism and the resulting pressure from supporters to put his name on the ballot, as a runaway train.
"I felt that I would let my supporters down," he says of the decision that opened his life to public scrutiny. "The people in the community felt it was important for me (to run.)"
Still he agonized over the decision, trying to find reasons to say "no." Ultimately, he took the gamble and lost.
When Scottsdale Tribune reporter Terry Overton began asking about his past, he cracked.
"Life would have gone differently if I had not run," he says now. "There's no way to figure it out."
Life also would have gone differently for the nice Jewish boy from Shaker Heights if he had not gotten involved in the anti-war movement, had not been at the demonstration at Wash U 30 years ago, and had not fled when convicted of a crime he says he did not commit.
But he says he feels no remorse.
"Everybody makes mistakes. There is no reason to be remorseful. They (the authorities) were trying to set an example. I was it."
When asked what he would tell 19-year-old Ari, another Jewish boy whose future is bright, if faced with the same dilemma, the quiet man, who has been described as a gentle soul, doesn't hesitate before answering.
"I'd never advise anyone to go through what I went through."