Follow up on last entry about my dad

I'm working on an inventory of boxes and boxes full of miscellaneous things that weren't consider of monetary value by folks who helped break up my parents' last apartment.  Some of it is so lovely, in terms of letters, articles, and family photographs.  I have a lot of scanning to do.

I mentioned my father, John Richardson, in the last post.   I never talked about him with people I know because he was a modest man.  

I came across this material buried in an old box, and I know it was just the start.

The following excerpt is from an editorial in Life Magazine (November 24, 1958).

The events occurred during the height of the Cold War.   Here are links to some contextual history on the 1956 protests in Poland and the Polish October from Wikipedia.

Excerpt:

"Soon after the bloodless Polish revolution of October 1956, a self-starting young Wall Streeter named John Richardson Jr. began to hear about the crying shortage of modern medicines in Poland's grossly mismanaged economy.  He got up a committee of private citizens who saw both the humanitarian and the political point of helping to sustain Polish morale in a tough time.  With help from other private organizations who had contacts in Poland, notably CARE, Richardson made three trips to Poland and finally won the agreement of the Polish government to accept and distribute American medicine as a gift, clearly labeled as such, from the American people.  The American people in this case, also prodded by Richardson's committee, are chiefly some 20 pharmaceutical manufacturers who have contributed more than $2 million worth of drugs, including 900,000 polio vaccine shots.

The impact of this common sense generosity on the Polish people has been terrific.  To the accompaniment of grateful newspaper headlines, more than two million Polish schoolchildren are getting polio shots this fall.  For the free vaccine stimulated the Polish government to buy five million additional shots from U.S. sources.  As a result more Polish kids are getting vaccinated than Russian kids.  (There is practically no vaccine in the other satellite countries.)

Other individuals besides Richardson deserve credit for this project, too many to list here.  It was no easy job to raise the contributions, arrange for their delivery and get the Communist government to concede safeguards for their nonpolitical use.  The men did it, however, and on their own, with the approval but not the assistance of the U.S. government.  We hear a lot these days about "people-to-people" diplomacy.  This Polish Medical Aid project (address:  25 Broad St., New York) shows what it consists of."