Souls at Risk : Extremism at Home in Red Scare Hollywood

Rooms of Nancy Vernon Kelly’s childhood home in Hollywood, California, provide scaffolding for Souls at Risk, a memoir about the roots and consequences of her writer-producer father’s sudden turn to right-wing extremism. Radicalization didn’t occur in a vacuum. Its grip had clear public and personal roots and consequences. The narrative pivots around a 1960 concert the author’s father produced in San Diego for blacklisted folksinger Pete Seeger. When Seeger refused to sign a loyalty oath to use a public high school auditorium, the American Legion accused him of being a communist and protested to the San Diego School Board. Although the concert went on (and Kelly sang along!), the fallout continued for many years, entrenched in Cold War American-Soviet hostility.
Souls at Risk weaves together the long view of a personal, public, and historical story that embodies both the disruption of extremism and the disruption of grace. While remembering the unwelcome parts of life with hateful extremism, the author also delights in the memory of experiences and people who kept her fledgling soul from completely flattening out in a turbulent time. Indeed, the sweetest touch of mercy arrived in Kelly’s inbox almost fifty years after the concert.

Nancy Vernon Kelly grew up in Hollywood, California, during the Cold War. She is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and a freelance writer.

Recurrent themes in Nancy's writings include the complexity of breaking down social barriers, nurturing community, the development of conscience, and the enlargement of the soul. She and her husband Robert live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and have two grown daughters and two grandchildren.

Preface to Souls at Risk: Extremism at Home in Red Scare Hollywood:

"When hateful, anti-communist extremism invaded my Hollywood home during the Red Scare, it didn't get a foothold in a vacuum. Extremism's grip had clear public and personal roots. It seized my family in risky and damaging ways and contaminated our lives with something so unsavory that for many years I didn't want to dwell on it. But neither could I forget it. The story I tell here embodies the disruption of extremism and, no less, the disruption of grace.

Souls at Risk revolves around a two-hour concert my father produced for Pete Seeger, a popular blacklisted folksinger. The concert itself took place in a public high school auditorium in San Diego, California in 1960, but much of the social, political, and personal history I witnessed or heard about occurred in other places long before the concert and long after. Indeed, the sweetest slice of mercy arrived in my inbox in 2009, almost fifty
years after the event.

Summoned now by the future, I tell this story in a spirit of resistance, warning, and solidarity with 'souls at risk' in our present day."