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Tuesday, June 17, 1997

People loved to hear Ira Einhorn talk -- about the future, about the environment, about ending poverty -- even if they could never quite follow the dizzying path of his thoughts.

Charismatic but ultimately a puzzle to many who knew him during the 1960s and '70s, he had a knack for being ahead of the cultural wave of the moment. In an era that seemed to be bubbling with change, the big, bushy-bearded Einhorn staked out a career as a prophet.

``In those days, he was a part of everything that was happening in Philadelphia,'' said George Keegan, now a self-employed management consultant living in Chester County. ``Everybody knew Ira, and he knew everybody. He had a lot of magnetism, and he drew people into his orbit.''

Spellbinding and colorful, attractive to women and men in different ways, Einhorn was a larger-than-life presence for nearly 15 years. And for a bit longer than that, he has fascinated much of the city even in his absence.
Born in 1940 to a prosperous hardware store owner from Mount Airy, Einhorn might have seemed destined to thrive in the gray-flannel conformity of postwar America.

``We are a typical Jewish family, not excessively religious or excessively anything else,'' his mother, Bea, told an interviewer in 1967, when her son was already a bohemian celebrity.

Always a serious student, Einhorn won admission to Central High, then an all-male school for the city's brightest.

Even in that elite crowd, Einhorn stood out ``because he was so academically oriented,'' said lawyer Stephen J. Harmelin, who was one year ahead of him.

Harmelin and Einhorn both went to the University of Pennsylvania: Einhorn to get an English degree (Class of '61), and Harmelin to prepare for Harvard Law School.

It was a time when only a few beatniks challenged America's self-satisfied complacency, and many college students believed they were there to get their meal tickets punched.

``He went to a U. Penn that was dominated by the Wharton School, where everybody wore shirts and ties and had short hair and wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer,'' Harmelin said. ``But he went off on a path completely different from anybody else.''

There was no counterculture yet, but Einhorn started experimenting with LSD in 1959, he said later. He began reading and quoting from books by Marshall McLuhan and Arthur Clarke.

And when the great cultural protest of the later '60s finally did reach stolid Philadelphia, Einhorn was in the vanguard, the local symbol of everything meant by the word hippie. Naturally, it was he who organized an intentionally purposeless ``Be-In'' in Fairmount Park in 1967; 1,500 people showed up.

He was against the Vietnam War, he was for social justice. A headline over a 1969 op-ed piece in The Inquirer summed up his views: ``Money Stinks of War, Slavery.''

But Einhorn certainly never severed his ties to the Establishment, and it couldn't get enough of him. The patrician W. Thacher Longstreth considered him a friend; George Fencl of the Police Department's Civil Disobedience Squadron praised him for effectively mediating between the authorities and the sometimes yeasty University City neighborhoods.

Sometimes he taught at Penn or at Temple, but mostly he just seemed to get along -- thanks to the many people who found him interesting and stimulating.

``People give me money,'' he once said, ''just for being Ira.''

``It was this unique combination of not only knowledge but imagination,'' said Harmelin. ``When you sat and talked to him, you came away with a vision of the future that you had never even conceived.''

``He was sort of a conduit for information, a trafficker in ideas,'' said Steven Levy, who wrote The Unicorn's Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius about Einhorn and girlfriend Holly Maddux in 1988.

As often as not, his forum was the bar at La Terrasse restaurant at 34th and Sansom, through much of the 1970s the meeting place of choice for the bright people who surround an Ivy League campus. Einhorn rarely had to pay for a round.

He tried to put his ideas in writing once, in a book he described as a meeting of ``Eastern inner awareness with Western outer control of the environment.'' He was going to title it The Marriage of Faust and Shiva but decided instead on 78-187880, its Library of Congress catalogue number.

Whatever the title, it seemed that writing was not his metier.

He apparently did some informal consulting work for Bell of Pennsylvania and other companies in the late '60s and early '70s about the unseen world that computers and changing mores were bringing into being. He described himself in that role as a ``far-watcher,'' describing a horizon others couldn't even see.

Einhorn was not a model of physical perfection -- a barrel chest supported by oddly thin legs, beard and hair both bushy and frequently unkempt -- but he was never lonely, friends said.

``He had a lot of girlfriends over the years,'' Harmelin said. Keegan, who met Einhorn in 1969 when he and Maddux were already a couple, said their relationship barely slowed him down.

``He would go after any skirt that came within view,'' Keegan said. ''He would leave Holly at a party to go with whatever woman came into range.''

But the rules for men seemed a little different 20 years ago; Keegan said it was only after Maddux's death that ``I sadly realized that he did not treat her very well. I think Ira was really totally self-absorbed.''

But at the time, everyone seemed to love Ira. When he was arrested for Maddux's murder in 1979, influential and respected friends lined up at his bail hearing to testify to his character. An Episcopal priest described him ``as a man of nonviolence.''

And then he skipped, and, over the last 16 years, most people have come to an entirely different opinion of Ira Einhorn.

``Shock, disappointment, outrage,'' said Harmelin, one of the bail witnesses. ''I felt personally betrayed.''

Inquirer staff writers Suzanne Sataline and Michael Matza contributed to this article.