The founders: Walter and lao Russell
Walter Bowman Russell
(Born: May 19, 1871 - Refolded: May 19, 1963) |
Walter Russell grew up in Boston, the son of immigrants from Nova Scotia.
The Boston of his time was awash with new ideas, but he achieved fame and
fortune when he and his bride moved to New York City in 1894. There he became a
magazine art editor, a war correspondent, and a children’s portrait painter. A
dearth of studio space led him into a joint venture in cooperative apartment
building. In May of 1921 he had an out-of-body experience he called Cosmic Illumination. New knowledge was revealed to him “in the Light.” Debates with scientists and several books followed as he tried to explain his new knowledge. At age 56 he turned to sculpture, rising to the top with the Mark Twain Memorial and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Russell is associated with the New Thought Movement and with the Science of Man. The New York Herald-Tribune called him “The Modern Leonardo,” and to Glenn Clark, his biographer, he was “The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe.”
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Lao Russell
(Born: November 6, 1904 - Refolded: May 5, 1988) |
Lao Russell born Daisy Grace Cook in Buckinghamshire, England. Lao changed her name (after the Chinese mystic Lao-Tzu) when she married Walter Russell in 1948. Lao was a precocious child and entered business ventures as a young woman and found financial success. She married business partner Lionel Stebbing and together they made a fortune. That relationship soured, however, and Lao drifted for some years, meeting people, traveling, and searching for meaning. After World War II began in Europe, Lao sought refuge in the United States, which she entered in 1940. She settled in Boston, did volunteer work, formed lasting friendships, continued her voracious reading, and had a brief mystical experience. She gravitated toward the Boston Home of Truth (Eleanor Mel’s New Thought outpost), read Glenn Clark’s biography of Walter Russell, and called him in 1946. Lao was Walter’s “soul mate.” Together they wrote books, established the University of Science and Philosophy in 1957, and lived and worked at the mountaintop palace called Swannanoa in Afton, Virginia.
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(Written by Charles W. Hardy, Official Biographer for the USP.)
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