Interview | Sasha von Oldershausen on the Crown Prince of Lubbock, Texas

In this episode, Leyla sits down with Sasha von Oldershausen — an Iranian American journalist on the news and politics team at Texas Monthly, and soon to be the New York Times' first-ever Texas culture reporter.

This conversation is a little different from most episodes of Growing Up Irooni: it centers on a single, remarkable story. In her Texas Monthly article "The West Texas Days of the Exiled Prince Who Wants to Lead Iran," Sasha uncovered a nearly forgotten chapter of history — the year that Reza Pahlavi, then seventeen and heir to the Iranian throne, lived in Lubbock, Texas, training as a jet pilot at Reese Air Force Base. It was 1978. Within months, the revolution would sweep away the monarchy, and he would never return to Iran.

Sasha shares how she found the story (it started with typing "Texas Iran" into Google and landing on a Lubbock Facebook post), and the extraordinary details she uncovered from there: the 28-year-old flight instructor flown to Niavaran Palace to meet the teenage prince, the weekend house fitted with bulletproof glass, the flower shop where he bought bouquets for four different women at once, and the four hundred Iranian students at Texas Tech who gathered outside his home to protest — many afraid to show their faces for fear of what could happen to their families back home.

Then Leyla and Sasha bring the story to the present: Pahlavi's return to Texas nearly fifty years later as the unlikely headliner of CPAC in Grapevine, where roughly a quarter of the audience was Iranian; the aftermath of the January crackdown in Iran, which left thousands dead by most estimates; and the harder questions the diaspora is wrestling with right now — about revisionist history, magical thinking, and how the events of 1978 rhyme with the events of today.

Woven throughout is Sasha's own Growing Up Irooni story: raised in Queens by a German father and an Iranian mother from Tehran, no Farsi spoken at home, finding her way to the language through Persian classes in college and summer visits to family in Iran — a life she describes as "one foot in, one foot out," which turns out to be exactly the vantage point this story needed.

Read Sasha's article: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/iranian-prince-reza-pahlavi-west-texas/
Follow Sasha on X: https://x.com/sashavono
More of Sasha's work: https://www.texasmonthly.com/contributors/sasha-von-oldershausen/