Arthur | The Cardinal Chronicles

Interview with Arthur Ginsburg (b. 1928)

By Anderson Kitzis and Augi Richardson, on October 19, 2025

Okay, I was born in Philadelphia and raised in Philadelphia, and I was born in 1928. And it was the Depression years. And I remember growing up with the Depression and my family lost the houses. We had mortgages, they couldn't pay, and we moved two or three times when I was still pretty young in elementary school, and finally, we began to make a living my father was doing all right.

And so I grew up in Philadelphia, and then I was about 20 and I decided to leave for college. I went to Temple University of Philadelphia because it's the only school I could get into. What you probably don't realize is that after World War II, there were so many GIs coming home from Europe, all of the colleges were full. And if you were not a veteran, you had to wait your turn, so Temple University was the only school that let me in. Actually, I got a very good education there, and I went for three years to Temple, and I became what was a communications major. And in my junior year, I said, "What the hell?” Somebody offered me a summer job in Florence, South Carolina. And I took a summer job as a radio announcer down there doing news and disc jockey and all that stuff. And I went to a little town.

Florence was only 10,000 people in that day. And what was amazing was, the South in those days, was totally segregated, completely. You couldn't drink from anything, blacks could not go into stores, they had to go around back. It was just actually completely segregated. It was amazingly bad. But if you closed your eyes to it, I lived pretty well down there. There were only two Jews in the whole city, and I was one of them. However, I changed my name. I called myself Arthur Glen, instead of Arthur Ginsburg. And I think everybody knew who I was. But I enjoyed Florence very much, I used to go to Myrtle Beach to go fishing and all kinds of stuff. And then my girlfriend, I had a girlfriend by then, from Philadelphia. She took the train down and said, "You better come home, finish college." And since she was she, I did it.

I lived a year down there while I was having wonderful fun. I bought my first car in 1937 floor shift Ford Motor, and it was kind of a truck or something. And that was fun. So I did come back, and I finished college. and I went to work and I did some few things, but I wasn't making a living. So one day, my wife, I got married very young. I was just barely 22 years old, when I got married. In those days, if you want to live with somebody, you got to get married. So I got married, and she was the love of my life. I met her at Temple University. She was a musician and always made her living as a pianist, at chamber music, a pianist, and she traveled with me everywhere. So, let's see, where was I? Oh, so I’m working, and I'm not making a living. So one day, my wife came to me and said, we are not… [you know Yiddish?] “makhn a frnsh”...We're not making a living. We're not making enough money here with you as a radio announcer. And I was working as an actor then, too. I toured with children's theater… Baltimore, and other cities but it was sporadic living. So I did what was necessary, which was go to law school.

I got in Temple University Law School, which turned out to be wonderful, actually. Really great school. And I was in a hurry to get through, and I did law school in two and a half years because I went both summers and went right through and took the bar exam, which in those days was very, very difficult. Less than 50% of people would pass the bar, but I got right through the first time, and I apprenticed, you had to apprentice for six months for a lawyer, and I did that, and then I moved to Washington because I wanted to get away from Philadelphia.

And I got a job working in the United States Department of Labor in Washington as a lawyer. It was a general counsel's office - had about 200 lawyers, actually, in those days. The Labor Department was very large. And I wrote opinions for a while, but under the Fair Labor Act, whether people were covered by the various Acts and so forth. I did that, and I wasn't getting anywhere too much. Government wasn't paying very much. So I went out and looked for a job and snagged myself a nice job at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington as a lawyer and got a big raise and went there, stayed there, worked my way up there to - I became a branch chief and a division chief, which was a really big - I had about 200 people working for me. Very good. And then I was there as a lawyer in Washington, between the various places, about 30 years.

And I'd looked around one day when I was...30 years as a lawyer, I said, "Is this all there is?”- I think I had a midlife crisis. I was then about 54 years old, I had 30 years. So I got on a telephone, started to call up colleges, and I called up several of them, and one or two were actually interested. Call me back, and University of Texas said, "We'll hire you for two years as a visiting professor”, I never taught a day in my life, I had no idea what I was doing. So I became a visiting professor, and I left the government, my wife came with me, they gave her a halftime job - teaching chamber music to students there.

And we moved to, not to Dallas, to Austin, Texas, where the main campus is, and University of Texas is a wonderful school. You can't get in there unless you're top 10% of your class. So the kids were really smart and very good, and the day I went in my first classroom was the first day I ever taught. I never knew exactly what to do. When I got to Texas, they said ”Well, here's a syllabus of the guy who did the class last time." And they gave it to me. And I looked at the syllabus and then made my own syllabus for the course, and I did that. Took me, maybe a couple of months to get used to teaching and I loved it. I really, I thought it was great. But I was only in Texas for two years. The reason is because they only give me a two-year contract and they ran out of money. This was in 1980, when I left the government, and they ran out of money because the University of Texas depends upon oil wells and how well oil wells are doing. And the oil wells were doing miserably, and they didn't have enough money to pay me to keep me going, so they abandoned me, and I got on the telephone again, made some phone calls, and eventually got hired by the University of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona.

So my wife and I moved to, first, we moved to Sedona, Arizona. Have you ever been to Sedona?... It's about 4,500 feet high. There are beautiful red mountains there, and nutty people live there, totally nutty. They're people who believe in crystals and space travel. And they - somebody came in and took them away to Mars or somewhere or other. And it was a crazy living there. But we built a beautiful house there and I taught there for quite a few years. I don't know how long it was, but quite some time. And Sedona was very nice. I started a whole new career there.

The local newspaper came to me and asked me if I would write a column of political satire, which is kind of hard to do, but I never tried it, and I started to write political satire for them. I did that for two, three years while a newspaper was in existence, and I made enemies of everybody in town. Half the people hated me, the other half loved me. I invented all kinds of crazy characters, for instance. There's a creek that runs down from Flagstaff, which is about 30 miles north of Sedona, you wind up to 7,000 feet, where… the school is at 7,000 feet. and a creek runs down there and it's got polluted from all the pollution coming out of the Flagstaff, which at that time was about 55,000 people, pretty good size city. And I invented a character called…Count Dracula. I actually called Count Bacteria. And I created this character, and I've criticized the hell out of the fact they were dumping junk in there, and the rest of it. And everybody in town read that. And it was fun. I did that for a few years. But one day, after I'd been doing that a couple of years, I wrote a really pointed satire. You don't remember, you were too young, but they did a famous hands around the world. They were supposed to join hands and go around the world to do good or something like it. And I thought the whole thing was kind of phony, crazy, so I called it “hams around the world.” And my publisher said, “I'm not going to print it.” So I said, "The hell with you” and I quit. That was the end of that. And so then I did that for a long time and that was nice.

Meantime, my wife was - she started a music festival, classical music festival in Sedona, and it became very popular. I helped her a lot, and did work with her, and she got big crowds and it's still going on, many years after she left there. And so then eventually, we moved to, we used to come up here in a summertime to Oregon, Portland, because of this, you guys were probably not classical music experts, but they have wonderful chamber music here. Reed College has Northwest Chamber music that would go all summer, and we would come up here and rent a house and stay for a month or two. And finally, after I quit the newspaper and the rest of it, we said, "How the hell, let's move up here." So we did that, we came up here, we bought a nice, terrific little house over in the Southeast around 30th and Division, actually 30th and Clinton, just north of the Clinton Street movie house there. If you know where that is…Oh, they're still doing the what's the thing they do at midnight the cult movie that they always do….They play this cult movie, and it was really nice living there. It was great.

But my wife died about 11 years ago. And I was stuck. I had to move somewhere. I was already 86 by that time. And so I came over here and looked at this place at Rose Schnitzer Manor. And it was nice. It was kind of homelike and a nice place to live. So 11 years ago, I moved in here, and I'm still here. And I've enjoyed it here. I'm head of a book club. We read a book a month and I lead the discussion. It keeps my brain pretty active at my age. And I'm also head of the food committee and I meet with the chef and other people regularly to keep the food pretty good here.

And that, I guess pretty much sums up what my life was. It was interesting because I kept changing it. If I was to stay in one thing, you go crazy if you stay in one thing…The change to a college professor was really good, and my second year there - I was only there two years - they nominated me. I was runner-up, second for best teacher in the college, and they’ve got 2,000 professors in that place. It's a huge school. And I got runner-up of the year, and I created several big seminars for them. I brought all the big reporters down to Texas. They gave me a big budget, and I did that. And it was wonderful, and one, I think the first year, I always had played the flute as a hobby. I was in my early teens when I really started to take lessons seriously. Eventually I studied with the first flutist at the symphony at Washington, D.C., the major symphony, and I studied [with] him for about 12 years. And I've always played the flute all through my entire life. It’s been a wonderful, interesting hobby, keep you really occupied, played duos, trios. I played with an orchestra for a while, and I'm probably the world's oldest flutist, I'm still playing. A lady comes in, I play flute duets with her on every Wednesday we do that, and that's been really nice. So I would recommend anybody, get yourself a good hobby, and use something like that. all throughout your entire life. So what questions can I answer?

Did you always know you wanted to be a teacher, like, from the beginning, or was it just because you needed to switch the situation?

No, I didn't. I never took any teaching courses, I had no idea about what to do. I just got tired of being a lawyer and a lot of people depend on me and working for me. And I just wanted to go teach. And I couldn’t have picked a better school. It's a fantastic school.

I was just wondering I feel like… you've done so many things. You're a radio announcer, lawyer, you worked in government, teacher…

Yeah, I didn't tell you, while I was going to law school, by the way. While I was going to law school on weekends, I got a job as a disc jockey, at a station in Philadelphia. and I would work till 2 o'clock in the morning. And I would go in there and work a couple of nights over that, and my wife would come in and bring me sandwiches at 10, 11 o'clock at night, and we'd have sandwiches together, and that was fun, really good. You never know, when you work as a disc jockey in a place like that, there's an engineer, but he's far away, somewhere. There's nobody in the station. And you talk into a microphone, you don't know whether you're talking to anybody, but at any time, they always had several thousand people listening at that time. And that was nice. I really enjoyed that.

All right, so like doing all these things, I feel like now, kids will go to college and they'll really be honed in from a young age at one profession. Do you feel like you were better for doing a broad amount of things?

Absolutely, yes. Really. I got a really good education, general education at Temple University. And it was really great. And I think. keep your mind active. You keep going there. Well, even when I was in the government as a lawyer, I kept changing jobs and advancing up and made more brain work for me. Things I had to do. And everybody in Washington…there's a bar association in Washington that only practices before the Federal Communications Commission. To license stations and do all that stuff - and about a thousand of them. And all of them got to know me, and I knew all of them. And I had quite a bit of power, actually, as one of the senior lawyers at the Federal Communications Commission. It was fun. Anything else?

You lived through so many historical events, like World War II or 911? Which one was the most impactful?

Wait a minute, I forgot. I forgot something. You reminded me. I missed World War II by six months. I was six months too young. I almost got drafted in that. So along came the Korean War, which was directly after in the '50s, very early '50s. And they had the Korean War, and my draft number came up while I was in law school, and they deferred me and kept deferring me. And they finally nabbed me after I finished law school, they said, "Well, you're it, your number is up." I said, "Well, okay." So I went to the Navy, and they were going to give me a commission as a lawyer for three years. I didn't enlist for three years, become a first lieutenant or something. And then I went to the army and they were going to offer me a commission, and the army had to wait a month or two and while they got that all straightened out, and they just said to hell with you, we're going to draft you anyway. They didn't give me any time. So they drafted me, and I went and did basic training in Fort Jackson in South Carolina. God, it was hot as hell. I was then almost 26, and all the kids who got drafted were 18 and 19 in bunks next to me and – they looked at me like a grandfather there. It was a hell of a time to do basic training. I lost about 40 pounds doing that.

But I had a wonderful time in the army, it turned out, because the guy who was in my platoon, another guy was also a lawyer, got drafted like me, and he found out there was something called the Counterintelligence Corps in the Army. And we made an application for that as soon as we finished basic training, and I got into that, and they sent me to spy school. They called it spy school, which at that time was in Baltimore. I went there for about three, four months, and they taught us how to break into locks, how to parachute down behind enemy lines, and do all kinds of damage. We learned how to interrogate prisoners every day we had class work, they hired actors. We would interrogate these guys. We would do all the psychological stuff like undressing them, and making them uncomfortable and all that stuff, and we did that. And then eventually, the Army decided to send me right home to Philadelphia.

They sent me to Philadelphia, where my wife was living in an apartment and I moved right back in the apartment with her, and I was a plain clothes agent. I never wore my uniform after that, because we had to interview generals and all sorts of big people, and they were never allowed to ask what our rank was actually. I was a big corporal, but we were not allowed to tell people because the generals would say, "What's your rank, young man?” I said, “Sorry, sir, can't tell you”. So I did two years of that. I would only go to an office in an Armory, the Philadelphia Armory. Once a week, I'd go to the office, they give me a workload, and I would do investigations. Some of them really very interesting because, for instance, in the Korean War, there were 29 Americans defected to the Korean side. A lot of them guys were communist inclined and the rest of it, and the army wanted to know what the hell, why did they defect? So they sent me to work. They gave me - I had to investigate one guy, one, just one of those guys, and I had for four months, three or four months, I did nothing but investigate that guy. His background knew who he associated with and I knew everything about him. And I wrote a report, which was about as big as a book. And that was fun. So I enjoyed that. It’s immensely interesting life actually. So that's my army experience. Any other questions?

Changing topics here, but is there anything that is still on your bucket list that you've always been meaning to do and you'd really still like to do?

Well, I'll tell you this. I have a girlfriend here. She's 91 years old, and I'm 97. And her birthday is next week, and I'm hoping to stay alive and take her down to my favorite hotel in Astoria, to Cannery Pier Hotel which is a beautiful, wonderful hotel. Sits right out in the Columbia, where it runs into the ocean, out there. We're going to go there for two days, so I hope to stay alive for that. At my age, all you're hoping for is to stay alive. That's my bucket list.

I have a follow up to that. You've got a nice bass voice, by the way. You sing in a choir? I don't, no. You don't sing. You’ve got a really good bass voice. You’d make a good announcer. Have you ever tried it? I haven't, no. Well, you should? Radio. Radio announcer? Yeah, you could. You could try that... When I went down to the radio station in Florence, I didn't know a damn about it, but I learned very quickly to be a newsman, and they used me for all sorts of stuff. When they open up the tobacco market once a year to sell tobacco, they sent me to cover that, and I knew from nothing about tobacco, but I learned in a hurry, you know, where the guy goes and they auction off the stuff….20,20,30,30,40.. he talks so fast, I don't know what he's doing. And I covered that and did all sorts of stuff down there. It was fun. including going to the ocean and fishing, bottom fishing. Well, Myrtle Beach was about 80 miles from Florence, we would drive down there and spend the day on a rented boat, take it up, and fish. [It] was wonderful.

So living here, how would you get to Astoria? Can you drive yourself?

I still drive. I have macular degeneration in my left eye, which I can barely see. However, my right eye, according to the optometrist, is good enough to pass the test. So I drive. And if I keep my left eye closed it's easier to drive. But boy, do I pay insurance price? My insurance is $4,200 a year. For a little, a little car. That's a lot. But I carry about a million dollars worth of liability because it's the best thing to do with my age. Yeah, we learned about that because we kind of deal with the same problems. We just got our license, both of us. And our insurance starts super high and then goes down. You're the worst driving age. Our brains are still developing and then at 25, when our brains are done developing, it goes down, and then right around age 60 it creeps back up. You can imagine what it is at 97? I don't drive at night too much anymore. But I am going to drive down to Astoria. If you can stay alive. Last time I did, I almost got a ticket. I was going 90 miles an hour. Oh, my God. A lady pulled me over, and she said, "I'm not going to give you a ticket,'cause you're the oldest driver I've ever seen." Which was nice of her. Some perks. Well, I'm surprised you should be singing in a choir. I think he's got a great bass voice there. I wish had a bass voice like that. Still do. Still have a great voice. I don't know, you know, from everything I read, the jobs are not going to be plentiful when you guys get out…the way things are going. Yeah, I have to think outside of the box. And AI scares the living hell out of me. And I know some college professors have constant trouble with AI. They think it's very hard for them to tell anymore. Actually, when I began teaching, I could see all kinds of cheating. You know kids figured out ways to go around work. And I actually decided that I was going to give nothing but Blue Book Exams. Blue Book, which means that I would write an essay question, and they had to sit down and write it. I had to read it, of course, but they had to write it. But it didn't hurt them any. They liked it. As I say, they almost voted me the most popular teacher. Yeah, that's kind of the strategy now, I feel like everything when I was in elementary school and middle school, everything was online. Like, we'd do it on our computers, all the writing, and now it's kind of switched back, and we're doing it all by hand again. Yeah, they said to do that. They're gonna take away cell phones from schools, which is a good idea. Yeah, we already have that. I didn't work a computer until I was about 80 years of age. Really? And I had to learn everything at 80. And I only got a cell phone about eight years, six years ago. And I'm still working at how to work that thing. I don't know how to do a lot of things on that. But you're the technology people, you guys know everything. But everything you know, I have to struggle with. Figure out what to do. It's hard to learn. But it keeps my brain growing. I can't do without the internet now. I need that for everything. I use it a lot, I do it for a lot of research for a book club. I look up biographies and all that sort of stuff.. So anything else?

So you mentioned how important the cell phone was as an invention, were there any other major inventions that changed your personal life? Or was that the main one?

I think computers really were really…amazing. Now I had an older brother who's dead now. He was a doctor, and he refused to learn computers. He had nothing to do with it. He said it was the work of the devil, and he didn't do it. And he missed out on everything. I feel like you’re really missing out If you don't get it into the internet and have all attitude. Everything in the whole world is at your fingertips. It's amazing. Also you have to be smart about it. don't get too wrapped up. Don't get too dependent. Well, you guys are going to have to grapple with AI. They can imitate voices, they can do anything. It's really dangerous. And I think it's going to take away jobs when you guys get out of college. There's a whole generation now is finding it's not so easy to get a job. And of course, I don't really get into politics, but Trump is ruining everything for people. Good God. That guy's gonna kill us. I'm gonna go out and demonstrate here. I hate that…Oh God.. He's…

One of the organizations I'm very interested and belonged to is the separation of church and state. Because one of the things I was an expert at at the Federal Communications Commission, was part of my job, was a First Amendment to the Constitution Specialist, which is freedom of speech and separation of church and state. And what has happened in recent years is Trump has completely ruined the division between church and state, and colleges and schools, high schools are putting in ten commandments and all sorts of religious stuff - it’s really just absolutely terrible. And as far as freedom of speech, you see what's going on with Trumpy. He's actually killing freedom of speech if he possibly can. So I'm gonna go out and demonstrate. I made a big sign “Dethrone Trump”. Get rid of the son of the bitch.

So speaking of religion, I agree with you that the separation of church and state is key to our country, but as a Jewish man how is that religion played into your life? Have you been practicing and building your relationship with God? And is this something that's still important to you at 97? How has your religion as a Jewish man played into your life?

Well, you know, all my life I've suffered. When I was young, I was subject to terrific anti-semitism. When I went out to get a job, I looked for work as a lawyer in Philadelphia, there were a lot of firms that wouldn't hire no Jews at all. And that made it pretty damn difficult for me. It's one of the reasons why I went to Washington, because I could get a job there and I couldn't easily get into a law firm in Philadelphia. and there were times through your life, everyone as Jew suffers a certain amount of anti-semitism. I've always been religious to some extent. I don't believe in afterlife, and I don't. There's no heaven, there's no hell. But it's really nice to be here because they celebrate culturally the Jewish holidays. It's nice to be in a place where they do, you know, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and the rest of it, and have that and be together with other people.

But I fear what's happening in the country is terrific. There’s a big rise of anti-semitism again. Just this past week, they got this Republicans, a young group of Republicans were passing out, anti-semitic and racist stuff all over the place over the Internet. And some of them have to resign from their jobs when they got caught doing it, so there's still plenty of anti-semitism out there. It's nice to live here, about two thirds of it is Jewish here.. About one third is not, which is nice... I prefer that.. Anything else?

Do you have any questions for us? What are you gonna do with all this ? So we have a club at our high school, Lincoln High School, and it's a bunch of people who want to do interviews like this and we're planning on maybe sending it to your family if you have any, and we're also going to have a meeting and talk about it so we can just all learn about it. What we can learn since you have so much more experience than us. Well, I think from my standpoint, I've lived 97 years and I had a great life, really. I enjoyed everything that I did. I traveled around, I lived in at least five cities, maybe eight cities. And I always kept busy. I was working right up to my 80s, which was really nice. I didn't really retire as a teacher. When I came to Portland, there was a small Catholic college, went out of business, and I was teaching one night a week to doctoral students there, advanced students which was really nice. I enjoyed that. But I was already in my 80s and still teaching. So never stop working, never stop teaching. And I fear for you guys looking for jobs. I hope you can get some meaningful work. I don't know, with AI how well, they're taking away jobs, like, even law has changed a great deal with AI. Investigations and all sorts…. If a computer can prove the innocence of a person, then the question is, why do we need a lawyer to prove the innocence if a computer can do it? There's a lot of media about that right now. Law is difficult. Becoming a lawyer- it's very interesting to go to law school. It changes your whole thing, the way of thinking about things. The first year is very difficult, but you begin to assimilate facts and things as a lawyer, look at things. Totally different than the public does. That's worth it just to go to law school alone to learn that, but law school was really tough. Contracts the first year - woo. That was tough for me. But again, Temple had some wonderful teachers. We had some teachers who were judges on the Third Circuit court. You know the circuit courts in the world. There are the 13th Circuit courts, which are just below the Supreme Court, the United States, and they were in various regions here. And I got a teacher teaching me torts….you know, with torts - accidents and other things. And he was just wonderful. I got an A plus on the bar exam, because he was such a good teacher. And that was really great.. So maybe you guys will go to law school sometime. Do you know? You can always use it for something else….

I taught law, actually, but people I taught to at University of Texas, and the other schools were journalism students. They needed all that stuff that I taught them about. Freedom of speech, libel, slander, all the things they needed, you couldn't graduate from the University of Texas with a degree in communication without taking my course, or somebody else who taught a communication course like that. That was great. And one year I taught about a flute, I think when I finished my first year, instead of the last class, I brought my flute in and played some Telemann sonatas for them, Telemann being the great classical composer, and I said to them, you see life is composed of a whole lot of things besides what you learn in here. You can become a musician, do this, do that. I tried to get them to do things, wake them up. It was great. So that was my life…

And I still got a girlfriend. I was married to my first wife for 63 years.. We lived a long time together. We used to go to Maine, we lived in Washington, D.C., we would go to Maine. I would rent a house for three or four weeks in the summertime there. And we'd move up there and eat lobster till it came out of our ears. Just great. Those were wonderful years. But I'm still living. It's hard to think of a 91 year old girlfriend, you know. We're gonna live it up... have amazing reservations and a couple of nice dining options in Astoria and we got things to do. They’ve got a great hot tub. We'll dive into that too. Is it getting close to 3 o'clock?…Okay, I'm going to drive. I think I'll drive my car down. We're going to go down to the corner at the highway. Cause there's some traffic there. We're going.. I’ll take a chair, and I’ve got the sign, and we'll wait. I understand that they had a huge crowd downtown today. … Yeah, it was a huge crowd. Several different places... Aren't you guys going to go out and demonstrate?... I live right by the ICE building... That's where they demonstrate…I live on the river and there's a path right on the river and they’ll walk and do their chants and stuff, so I might go out and say hi and stuff. They've been picketing that ICE facility, haven't they?. All this time... ICE is just terrible. Oh, God.,. And such violations of law. The guy just totally ignores the law. You could sue him from now to doomsday. He just does what he wants... I have never seen it bad, so bad as it is now. Absolute utter disregard for the Constitution. Absolutely. And the Supreme Court is worse, actually. You got a terrible Supreme Court. The Chief Justice Supreme Court is a jerk. He's a brilliant guy who's a jerk. And he goes right along with the conservatives. They go right along with everything that Trump wants they give them. And last year, they granted him immunity from anything he does. So he can do anything with impunity. It's just amazing,. Okay, you guys. All right. Well, thank you so much for meeting with us.. It was very nice to hear about all your stories. Were you going to film? No, just the recording. No filming. Unless you want us to film it. Would you like to take a picture? You want to take a picture? …Sure. Whatever you want. Take a picture. All right, sounds good.