Two Young Pacifists

Plymouth, NH merchant to COs working in the area, 1940s

• Edwin Akutowicz, born in Connecticut in 1922, in the 1943 Trinity College yearbook is pictured with its junior class, but he wasn't there; U.S. Civilian Public Service records show that from August 12, 1942 until July 5, 1943 he served in two different camps for conscientious objectors (COs) who refused military duty. Working for the U.S. Forest Service, COs in these camps cleared brush on federal lands, dug ditches, fought fires. The smaller camp ran low on food.  In the larger camp with 350 COs, some men were "guinea pigs" for the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory.

Akutowicz [above] is pictured among Trinity's class of 1944 graduates, same photo as 1943. Phi Beta Kappa, he was voted "Best Student" and "Most Conscientious." The Plath biography Red Comet points out that he was tall, blue-eyed, brilliant, a Harvard Ph.D. (1948), a professor at MIT, and what's more, a pacifist--in summer 1954 impressing Sylvia Plath. (Let me add that like Sylvia's father Otto, he had a cleft chin.) After 1965 Akutowicz taught in France, had a wife and children.

Otto Plath as a young man

• I toured the sites of Otto Plath's schooling. His Northwestern College merged in 1995 with Martin Luther College in Minnesota, and its former campus in Watertown, WI is now Luther Preparatory School, a modern compound with a nice green quad, its oldest building cornerstoned in 1912. Otto, class of 1910, never saw it. 

The Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary that Otto quit moved in 1929 from Wauwatosa, WI, near Milwaukee, to 80 acres in rural Mequon, WI. In Otto's time, Wauwatosa was home to the city's psychiatric sanitarium, orphanages, potters' fields, and a few fine houses for the very rich. A pacifist? Questioned by the FBI in 1918, Otto didn't say so and as far as we know he didn't act like one except with insects. His wife Aurelia later wrote in a letter that Otto said he would take up arms in defense, but not aggression. (ASP to Mary Stetson Clarke, 1 May 1971).

The Northwestern College Club in 1912 funded this music auditorium, the oldest building on what is now a Lutheran boarding-school campus, Watertown, WI.