The Robert Scott Bell Blog

“In Honor of Ida Honorof” Guest Commentary By Christopher C. Barr

As a first time father my life was profoundly changed by Ida Honorof in the 1970s.

Ida Honorof was a consumer and environmental activist, award winning AP journalist, book author, and radio broadcaster. Due to her influence all of these with the exception of the “award winning AP” portion have become part of my own life – not holding my breath about Associated Propogandaess.

Only recently did notice of the death of Ida Honorof one year ago this month at the age of 93 come my way by happenstance.

My efforts to locate Honorof through the years to personally give thanks to her were unsuccessful so public thanks on the anniversary of her death is offered by way of this column.

At the age of 5 Ida Honorof was arrested in Chicago with her parents while engaged in a public protest. As a child she also witnessed a gangland shooting in Chicago that “put a permanent fierceness in her,” said her daughter-in-law, Donna Honorof of Seattle according to the Los Angeles Times.

Honorof was often first or one of the first to cover many health and environmental issues.

Honorof was among the earliest critics of DES (diethylstilbesterol) that was a hormone used to fatten cattle found to cause cancer.

The investigation by Honorof into the pesticide Monitor-4 harming crops and farm workers resulted in its ban from use and a national investigative journalism award for her.

Honorof also campaigned against fluoridation of public water supplies, and widespread spraying of the pesticide malathione over densely populated, publicly areas.

Honorof was also one of the first to speak out against the dangers of aspartame (Nutrasweet) after it was surreptitiously approved in 1981.

Honorof seemed to fall off the map in the late 1980s. Only recently did I stumble upon her moving at that time while in her 70s to be closer to family in the far north of California.

It didn’t take long for Honorof to discover two pulp mills polluting the pristine air of her new home area with deadly chemical wastes. Leading the charge Honorof brought about adoption of cleaner processing methods.

Vaccination: The Silent Killer

As a new father in the 1970s while seeking the very best for my children I came across the book ‘Vaccination: The Silent Killer – A Clear and Present Danger’. This was no less than stunning to me as my raising was in a stereotypically traditional American, Christian family that revered medical doctors as those specially anointed by God. I was raised to mock “health food nuts” and anything even remotely anti-medical.

It was my privilege to meet Ida Honorof and receive strong encouragement from the tiny but spirited fiery-redhead. She spared no punches with her straightforward plain speaking.

In her book Honorof mentioned briefly Antoine Béchamp. That brief mention changed my life with my soon thereafter discovery of Béchamp as the preeminent yet largely unknown greatest scientist of modern times if not of all time.

My discoveries about Antoine Béchamp by way of Ida Honorof have resulted in devotion all of my adult life through four decades so far to shining a light of truth through the darkness of the mainstream establishment about health (and other matters). The “people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” to quote The Almighty by way of Old Testament prophet Hoshea.

I have yet a ways to go to fill in the knowledge gap and to fill the shoes of the recently departed Ida Honorof.

My favorite anecdote about the passion and fight for truth by Ida Honorof was about her campaign against the federal government’s swine flu inoculation program of President Ford that she referred to as “Ford’s Folly” with her usual accurate precision as related by the Los Angeles Times:

“For three months she showed up at Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meetings wearing a sandwich board on which she had scrawled, “Demand to know the true hazards of the swine flu vaccine.” The supervisors prohibited protests in the board chambers and ordered her to remove the sign. “I would start to do so, then they would say, ‘No,’” Honorof later recounted, “because it appeared that I was nude” underneath it.

“She was wearing a very skimpy miniskirt.”

An unpayable debt of gratitude is owed by me to Ida Honorof – and by the countless numbers who have been helped through my efforts.

Christopher C. Barr writes Naturally Speaking from Arkansas: The Natural State … naturally! You may write him at P. O. Box 1147, Pocahontas, Arkansas 72455 or by e-mail at mailto:servantofYHVH@hotmail.com.