Tucker Carlson’s Dad Grew Up In Massachusetts

Conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson’s recently deceased father was born in Boston and spent much of his childhood in Norwood, Massachusetts..Richard Warner Carlson, 84, a newspaper and television reporter who later worked for the Reagan administration, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and King World Public Television, died Monday, March 24, 2025 at his home in Boca Grande, Florida, according to an obituary Tucker Carlson posted on social media.According to the family obituary, Richard Carlson, known as Dick, was born February 10, 1941 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston “to a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl and placed in the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston.”In 1993, Dick Carlson wrote about the difficult circumstances of his early years in The Washington Post.In the column, Carlson identified his mother as Dorothy Anderson and his father as Richard Boynton, and said that Boynton at one point “wanted her to help kidnap me and then run away and marry him.”“Dorothy was a junior in high school; no one but her parents knew she had even had a baby, and she refused. That night, after her refusal, he shot and killed himself two blocks from her house,” Carlson wrote of his biological father.The Boston Globe published a story on April 17, 1942 about a Lynn resident, Richard Boynton, who shot and killed himself in his bedroom in the family home with his father’s U.S. Army .38 caliber pistol, “Apparently dejected over his failure to be accepted for service in either the Army or Navy” during the first few months of World War II. The story doesn’t say how old Boynton was, but it mentions that his father had written a letter to both branches of the military asking that they delay accepting him “because of his youth.”In the Washington Post column 51 years later, Carlson attributed his rickets and “mildly bent legs” to his teen-age mother’s attempt to starve herself to hide her pregnancy. He was about a year and two months old when Richard Boynton died.As a 2-year-old, Carlson lived with foster parents Carl and Florence Moberger in Malden, who wanted to adopt him. But the Mobergers already had three children, and the orphanage staff wanted the little boy to go to a couple with no children. He said that his birth mother visited him once at the Mobergers’ home, but that he never saw her again after that. Her parents also visited once, he said.He was eventually adopted by Werner and Ruth Carlson. They lived at 221 Vernon Street in Norwood, about a half-mile northwest of the town center, according to the federal censuses of 1940 and 1950.Werner Emanuel Carlson, Dick Carlson’s adoptive father, worked as a foreman in a tannery in Norwood and earned $4,500 in 1949 (about $60,000 in 2025), according to the 1950 U.S. census. Werner was born in 1908 in Norwood to parents who were born in Sweden. His wife, Ruth Miriam (Rafuse) Carlson, was also born in 1908, to parents who were born in Canada.Werner Carlson died in December 1953, when Dick Carlson was 12, according to a Freemason membership card posted in an online family tree.After that, Dick “stopped attending school regularly,” the obituary states.“At 17, he was jailed for car theft, thrown out of high school for the second time, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps,” the obituary says.After leaving the service – one online biography says it was the U.S. Navy – he attended the University of Mississippi but did not graduate.In 1962, when he was 21, Dick drove to California, where he “spent a year as a merchant seaman on the SS Washington Bear,” before becoming a reporter, according to the obituary, which continues:“Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period. He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles.”As a television reporter at KABC in Los Angeles, Dick Carlson outed two males who identified as females, including one in 1976 who won a women’s tennis tournament in southern California, according to an obituary in The Los Angeles Times. That competitor was subsequently banned from competing in the women’s U.S. Open.Dick’s adoptive mother, Ruth Carlson, died in 1968. Werner and Ruth are buried in Norwood.Dick married Tucker’s mother, who was born Lisa Lombardi, in 1967. Their first child, Tucker, was born in May 1969, followed by another son, Buckley, about two years later.In 1975, when Tucker Carlson was about 6, his mother “departed for Europe and didn’t return,” according to Dick’s obituary.“He threw himself into raising his boys, whom he often brought with him on reporting trips. At home, he educated them during three-hour dinners on topics that ranged from the French Revolution to Bolshevik Russia, PG Wodehouse, the history of the American Indian and, always, the eternal and unchanging nature of people,” his obituary states.Dick and Lisa Carlson divorced in 1976.In 1979, Dick married twice-divorced Patricia Swanson, an heiress to the Swanson frozen foods fortune, whom the obituary describes as “the love of his life.”“They were together for 44 years, all of them happy. She died sixteen months before he did and he mourned her every day,” the obituary states.In 1977 Carlson joined a savings and loan in San Diego.He had sharp elbows.In 1981, while representing the bank, Carlson gave an interview to Mike Wallace of CBS’s 60 Minutes over the bank’s lending policies. Carlson had the interview privately videotaped, including periods when CBS wasn’t recording – and caught Wallace in an unguarded moment saying that blacks and Latinos might have trouble reading their loan contracts over “watermelon” and “tacos.”The Los Angeles Times reported Wallace’s remarks on January 10, 1982.The New York Times picked up the story, reporting:Neither Mr. Wallace nor bank executives would confirm the substance of the remark, but according to others present, the exchange began when one person in the room said about the people who were reportedly defrauded, ''I wonder why they sign those contracts without reading them.''Mr. Wallace reportedly replied, ''They're probably too busy eating their watermelon and tacos.''Wallace said later that his remark was designed to draw out racism from Carlson. As The New York Times reported: “Mr. Wallace insisted ... that the remark was made in a casual way off the record and was partly intended to elicit any possible ‘latent racist’ views on the part of the bank executive he was interviewing.”Wallace later apologized for his remarks.In 1984 Carlson ran for mayor of San Diego as a Republican. He won the party’s nomination but lost the general election.Carlson joined the Reagan administration in 1985. He served five years as director of the Voice of America, before President George H.W. Bush appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the Seychelles in 1991.Later in the 1990s he became chief executive officer of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and, after that, led King World Public Television.The family obituary states:“The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting. He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues. He knew a number of colorful national leaders, including Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, Aslan Abashidze of Adjara, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and whomever runs Somaliland. He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection.”“He was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights,” the family obituary continues. “He left a library of thousands of books, most dog-eared and filled with marginalia. His reading and life experiences convinced him that God is real. He had an outlaw spirit tempered by decency.”Dick Carlson remained close to Tucker and Buckley. According to the obituary, he “spoke to his sons every day and had lunch with them once a week for thirty years at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, always prefaced by a dice game.”In his final illness, he refused all painkillers, the obituary says, “and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his feet.”

Tucker Carlson’s Dad Grew Up In Massachusetts

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