Peter A. Sturgeon, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetPeter A. Sturgeon
American political activist
Date of Birth: 22-Nov-1916
Date of Death: 22-Jul-2005
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius 
About Peter A. Sturgeon
- Peter Assheton Sturgeon (November 22, 1916 – July 22, 2005) was founder of the American branch of Mensa and the older brother of American science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon.
- The two brothers were the sons of Edward Molineaux Waldo, a Staten Island paint manufacturer, and Christine Hamilton Dicker, a British writer and political activist.
- Their parents divorced when they were children and in 1927 their mother married William Dickie Sturgeon, an emigrant Scottish college professor.
- Christine and her children relocated to Philadelphia where Peter and his brother Ted were educated in public schools. After high school Peter joined the Communist Party.
- After working for a time as a party activist in a steel industry organizing campaign in Baltimore, he went to Spain and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer with the British Battalion of the International Brigades.
- The writer William Tenn has stated that Sturgeon became involved with POUM while in Spain and fell into disfavor with his superiors.
- After returning to the United States Sturgeon resigned from the Communist Party and associated with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
- In 1941, he was drafted into the Army, serving as a combat paratrooper in the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team until his discharge in November 1945.
- After the war he earned a BS degree at New York University.
- He settled in Brooklyn with his wife Ines, working as a medical writer and writing technical material for the pharmaceutical industry.
- He founded the first American chapter of Mensa in New York in 1960, holding early meetings at his Brooklyn apartment.
- In 1965 he left the United States, taking a job with the World Health Organization in Switzerland.
- In 1968 he relocated to Vienna, Austria where he worked for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.
- He died in Vienna in 2005.
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