I am Toni Hart and I am a storyteller. I tell my stories in performance in New York City and if my audience likes them, I turn the stories into books or podcasts.
Run Out of Town is my story of growing up with a violent right-wing father. My father was a doctor in Minnesota after World War II. He was so violent the people in my hometown feared he would become a shooter. They organized and forced us out. It was vigilantism, yes, but it was non-violent. They boycotted my father’s medical practice and tore down a house he was building. My father refused to leave. He wanted revenge, revenge for crimes against him no one had committed. It took three years to force him out, during which time we were often homeless. Dad finally took a job as a physician on an Army hospital base. At last, we had a place to live. I am telling this story because I hope I can help people understand the extreme right wing.
Gun Culture USA is a book I wrote that is up on Amazon. When I learned what my father had done, which was kept secret from me, I went into a kind of shock. I finally wrote the story but I also understood that what had happened to us was all about gun culture. Gun culture is America’s collective unconscious. We have a horribly violent history and we need to understand it. America now has between 400 million and 500 million guns and a lot of people who aren’t totally tightly wrapped. In this environment, targeting any population as responsible for our problems is setting the country up for horrific violence. We need to talk about anti-Semitism and its consequences.
I Want the Sixties Back Now I came to New York in 1963 when the living was easy and more than the cotton was high. I had run away from an Iowa father who was arranging a marriage for me. People ask me what New York was like in the Sixties and I tell them “paradise.” I lived in Greenwich Village, listened to Jimi Hendrix, watched Francis Ford Coppola film “The Godfather”, toured as a stand-up comic and wrote a comedy called “The Stupid Show” that was produced in New York theater. Then I grew up and went to graduate school at Columbia University and took a job. I heard every rock band that came through New York City at the Fillmore East, Janis shared a bill with the Dead, Joni Mitchell with Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Airplane with the Byrds, 5 bucks a show. I will be telling these stories on YouTube.
Angleton and the CIA is the story of my uncle, James Angleton, the man who ran CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975. I grew up hearing every CIA story ever told and I’m telling them, soon, in a podcast. These are the best stories ever told. Guaranteed.
Substack When I was in graduate school at Columbia University, I got into the habit of writing short papers. I liked the habit, so I kept it up. Substack is the website I post the papers on.
Thank you for reading my home page. I hope you like my stories.
All material is Copyright © 2018 Antoinette Hart Wellman
Toni Hart 