Who is the real Gordon Switz?

Family Spy Story #9: Unearthing family secrets

I never knew my grandfather, Robert Gordon Switz. He died in 1951, thirty-five years before I was born, of a brain aneurysm — here one day, gone the next. My mother was only four. My grandmother, Marjorie, ever the pragmatist, greeted his death with relief and resilience. Two years later, she remarried, to a man who would accompany her into old age. 

No one ever spoke about my grandfather. No one remembered his birthday or reminisced about the fun times they had spent with him. It wasn’t just that his children didn’t remember him, because he died when they were young. No one wanted to remember. When my grandmother did speak about him — often briefly, out of earshot of her second husband —I felt myself leaning in to read between the lines. 

Gordon exists as a kind of spectral fantasy in my consciousness. He is my grandfather in the genetic sense — responsible for a quarter of my genetic make-up — but never my “grandpa.” Without first or even second-hand knowledge of who he was, I struggle to extrapolate how or if he lives in me. Do I have him to thank for my proclivity for foreign languages? Is he the source of both my ruthless idealism about the future and my cynicism about the status quo? Is he responsible for my risk-taking tendencies and my deep hunger for adventure? 

He was a volatile personality — prone to deep mood swings and hot tempers. By my own estimation, it’s very possible he suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Though it was never said explicitly, I understood his tempers may have driven him to violence, often towards my grandmother. A few months before his death, he was arrested for aggravated assault. Though he was ultimately acquitted, the fight that precipitated the charge was brutal and bloody, and may well have triggered the aneurysm in his brain that ultimately killed him.

He is both a spectral fantasy, and a ghost, one whom I do not wish to exhume — he is not the point of this story. But he was Marjorie’s recruiter, and an essential player in this story.  

Gordon was the second of three children born to Theodore Switz Sr. and Genevieve. Theodore Sr., who was born in 1857, died in a fire around 1910 when Gordon was only six. As a widow, Genevieve raised her three boys alone, and in spite of the challenges of being a single parent in the early twentieth century, managed to prepare them for opportunity. His younger brother, Paul, attended Yale as a star football player, and his older brother, Ted Jr., attended Lehigh College, where he joined Chi Psi fraternity. Both grew up to be economists — Ted worked for Lehman Brothers as a chemical economist and Paul became an economic development consultant. 

In a family of overachievers, Gordon was the black sheep. After failing out of two northeast private schools, Gordon decided he wasn’t cut out for formal education. In 1921, at the age of 16, he became a “cadet in ship’s company” aboard a freighter, traveling to Venezuela, the West Indies, Bermuda, and Germany as a member of the crew. One of Gordon’s fellow shipmates would later describe him as a “nervy and willful lad,” who was “high strung, with an eye for adventure” who would often describe his projects in a “grandiose manner.” Even then, he was hot headed, prone to tempers, but unafraid to defy convention.

At 22, Gordon moved to France to “improve his French” at the University of Besançon, the University of Strasbourg, and the Sorbonne in Paris, though it’s fairly clear his French instruction more often took place in the bedroom than in the classroom. He took flying lessons in France and after his return, at Roosevelt Airfield in New York. He loved languages and the thrill of flight. It was 1928, when he returned home heartbroken from a love affair in Strasbourg, and began to court Marjorie.

Gordon fancied himself a courageous adventurer, unconstrained by the expectations of traditional achievement that chained his brothers to their desks in New York. He wanted to fly planes in far off places, and stand for principles that could disrupt the status quo of economic suffering. Becoming a spy wasn’t so much a strategic career choice as the downstream effect of his response to tempting promises made by cunning agents who knew how to manipulate someone with such grandiose and self-indulgent impulses.

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At the same time that Gordon was sailing the high seas, Ted Jr. was planning the Chi Psi convention as an undergraduate at Lehigh in 1921. Through planning the convention, he met a fellow Chi Psi named Albert Bard, an unexpected grand entrance into my family history.

Albert Bard, born in 1866, was a highly regarded New York attorney who made a name for himself opposing many of the projects supported by the urban development legend, Robert Moses. A preservationist, Bard organized several successful conservation efforts across the city of New York. Bard, a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, was a very active member of Psi Chi. He was also a “confirmed bachelor,” the kind who preferred the private company of men.