Robert V. Andelson

My first teaching job was at Arlington College, a small denominational college of the Church of God (headquarters, Anderson, Ind.), located in a suburb of Riverside, CA, and since merged with Azusa Pacific University. Since the school could not afford to hire an economics instructor, I arranged for the Henry George School of Los Angeles to provide one without charge. This was in 1954 or '55. For a number of years, Bill Truehart and later Morgan Harris drove out a couple of times a week to teach economics, and their teaching was enthusiastically received.

In time, Sid Evans (the "angel" of the San Diego Georgists), heard about this program, and proposed that I contact other small religious colleges in the area, to see if similar arrangements could be made with them. He would pay the teacher. I made the contacts, and eventually we were supplying an economics teacher for four institutions in addition to Arlington College: Southern California College, Costa (Assemblies of God)

Azusa Pacific College, Azusa (interdenominational evangelical), California Baptist Theological Seminary, undergraduate division, Covina (American Baptist), and Los Angeles Pacific College, Pasadena (Free Methodist). This program was highly satisfactory, but was allowed to die out after I left California.

In 1963 or '64, I founded the Tax Reform Association of Louisiana (TRAL). Prior to its official launching, with partial backing from the Lincoln Foundation, my associate, Prof. LeGrand Weller, had done a computerized study of how LVT would affect the city of Natchitoches, where the college where we taught was located. Its conclusions were, of course, positive, and we planned to use it as ammunition. (I still have a copy in my possession.) We assembled a board of prominent citizens, and used the occasion of Churchill's death to launch the organization by blanketing the state with a three-color announcement carrying his picture and endorsement of LVT. The state tax commissioner, Wilma Lockhart; the state president of the AFL-CIO, Victor Busey; and the director of the Public Affairs Research Council, Ed Steimel, were all for us. But shortly thereafter, I received notice that my contract at Northwestern State College (now "University") of Louisiana would not be renewed, and I left for Auburn. A year later, Weller, too, got the axe, and there was nobody left who was able to carry on the work.