Company of Heroes, Company of Fools

“Leonard Cohen’s memoir is a piece of history, and therefore a mini-education about the last half-century. I found it both funny and inspiring.”

--Howard Zinn

COMPANY OF HEROES, COMPANY OF FOOLS

True stories from the struggle for happiness, peace and freedom

At the 1969 peace demonstration of 500,000 to a million people that Nixon said kept him from using the atomic bomb in Vietnam, a hat containing money was passed around. As it went from hand to hand, people said, “Take what you need, give what you can.” This book is presented in the same spirit. If you enjoy it, and you feel that you want to make a contribution, please send it to: Leonard Cohen, Parkwest Finance Station, P. O. Box 20423, New York, N.Y. 10025. This is, not a high priority. Much more important, please send your comments to the post office box and tell your friends about the book. Spread the word!

(Don’t worry about the politics or the occasional slow spots (horrors!) They change.)

It wasn’t a very difficult choice: Should I clean my house or write an autobiography?

Before the mind fades and the body returns to its permanent home it would seem to be a good idea to record honestly and faithfully, some of the events of my life and those of my comrades. We were, indeed, a company of heroes and all too often we were also a company of fools. Sometimes we were both at the same time.

Use of the term “heroes” to describe what we did, and in some cases still do, never occurred to me until a friend said to me her son said to her one day, You’re a hero.” She asked him why and he said she was always fighting for the rights of various people, going to many different kinds of demonstrations, putting her body and her energy on the line, She was clearly pleased when she told me about it and I was vicariously pleased, because I was doing the same thing.

But the real heroes to my friends and to me were those who had gone before us, the ones who had fought in Spain, the ones who had organized the CIO and the hunger marches, especially the four young men who had been killed in the Ford hunger march who were only a few years older than I was when I came into the movement.

Thinking about it now, it’s much better to be the kind of hero who doesn’t get killed by machine gun bullets from guns mounted on the roof of the Ford plant where people went to ask for jobs. I still remember some of the names: Joe York, Coleman Leny…The rest are gone into history. I later found out that some, or at least one, of the people who fought in Spain could act like what I shall call dirty rotten people (thus avoiding the male supremacy involved in what we called such people – “sons of bitches” and “bastards,” which put the blame on their parents instead of squarely on them.) These people were still heroes but all too often in other cases than those mentioned somebody would screw up through arrogance or ignorance or egotism or just plain stupidity. Usually it didn’t cost anybody his or her life but enormous damage was done and the work of the heroic, honest people was partially or completely destroyed or wasted.

One of the most common disorders in best described by an old Yiddish song. Before I quote the Yiddish I beg forgiveness from my grandparents, my parents, my sister and all of the people at Camp Lakeland and elsewhere who might have hoped for better things for my Yiddish. The song says, “As a bocher hutn mazel tsu hub tse por gaanse shikh, zol er zein a a shlim shlimazel, zol er zein a gonse ich.” Translated roughly this means: “If a young man is lucky enough to have two pairs of whole shoes, it would be better if he were a “shlim shlimazel” – a complete jerk or fool – than if he is a “gonse ich,” literally a “complete I,” that is if he thinks of himself as a big shot, the only person in the world, the smartest and most important person in the world, and so on.

In these pages I hope to give an honest picture of the activities that were both heroic and foolish and of the people who were both heroic and fools. Personally, I suspect I belong in both companies.

It was after a so-called “race riot” that the Party and the young Communists decided to put out a leaflet urging unity and opposing racism. Good thinking. The neighborhood was a mixed Black and Jewish neighborhood that New Yorkers told me later was like Williamsburg in Brooklyn at one time. So we young Communists found ourselves on 12th Street, the main street in the neighborhood, distributing a leaflet making those points. There was one problem. It was headed, “Fellow Citizens and Jews.” Maybe some of the Jews thought they were also citizen and that our leaflet implied that there were two categories, one, “fellow citizens,” and a second category, “Jews.” This didn’t occur to us because most of us were Jews and we knew damn well we were citizens so we didn’t think any other interpretation was possible. The other problem, looking back at it, was that it was only addressed, apparently, to the Jewish people in the neighborhood and not to others, particularly to the Black people. The neighborhood was still overwhelmingly Jewish, but it was still pretty dumb not to address our Black neighbors in our leaflet preaching unity.

We thought we were getting a few peculiar looks as we passed out the leaflets but people were generally friendly and I’m sure some of them read the leaflets as we read it – indeed, probably most of them did. We thought those who looked at us strangely were probably racists and that only added to our sense of our own superiority or at least our pride in the good and important work we were doing.

Then a man came up to us and said, “Get off 12th Street!” We looked at him like he was crazy. He didn’t offer any explanation, which in retrospect seems very strange. He just said, “I’m from the Party.” We immediately left 12th Street and he went with us. He then explained what was wrong with the heading on our leaflet. I could say we were “somewhat chastened” but that wouldn’t be quite accurate. We went home feeling like shit.

Most people I talk to nowadays just don’t believe that in those days almost all restaurants in Detroit wouldn’t serve Black people. The only exceptions I know of were those in Black neighborhoods and those in the Chinese part of town. (The common term for African Americans in the anti-racist sections of the population at that time was “Negro.” In those more racist or less aware it was “colored.” The term used by most of the several hundred thousand white Southerners and other more backward people were generally such that I, at least, won’t quote them.)

We young Communists decided to try to break the discrimination in our neighborhood by bring a case against Boesky’s under the Diggs law, which outlawed such conduct. Boesky’s was a good delicatessen that we could rarely afford to go to. As I remember it they served delicious corned beef sandwiches. We used what I later thought of as the CORE sandwich, that is a white group would go into an establishment, followed by an African American or mixed group, followed by another all white group. The difference in treatment of the groups could be clearly shown to be based on race and would be the basis for further action. In CORE, or the Congress of Racial Equality, the actions we took were on fair housing. In the case of Boesky’s all we wanted was to eat a corned beef sandwich or something else with friends regardless of the race of our friends.

Everything went as planned. As we sat in the restaurant waiting to be served, we were a little nervous – Boesky’s had a reputation for being a tough place, at least as far as the management was concerned. But we sat at the table confident that we were right, that we had done our job well and the next move was up to the owners.

Meanwhile, people in the restaurant were beginning to look at us and wonder what was happening. After a while, a man came over to us and asked us to go into the back of the restaurant and talk the matter over.

Instead we talked it over among ourselves and decided that we would be crazy to go into the back of anything with the management or any of their friends. We suspected the place was owned by what Sholem Aleichem called, “Our own Jewish gangsters,” and while we were a little nationalist, we weren’t that nationalist or that stupid. I think Ivan Boesky who got in trouble on Wall Street may have been part of that family. The rumor was that the Purple Gang was involved in the place and that the cops had watched the corner for more than 10 years waiting for someone involved in a serious crime to show up. We weren’t strangers to the Purple Gang. My brother had gone to school with one of the boys.(Their name was actually “Purple.” The word didn’t refer to the color or any exotic nickname.) and had had an interesting encounter with him when they were adults; I’ll tell you more about that later. (One of the major disappointments of my life was that the movie called “The Purple Gang” wasn’t better. After all, it was about my neighborhood.

Looking back at the situation now, I think maybe we really were stupid. There were a lot of other restaurants in the neighborhood that could be honestly certified as gangster-free and all of them refused to serve Negroes.

Once we felt we had established that discrimination had taken place and that the restaurant had refused to serve our mixed group, we left. I can only speak for one of our group of young people – mostly in our teens and twenties.. I was damned glad to get out of there with my body intact.

We later brought charges under the Diggs Law. The court case, for

which we had to take off work or cut classes, went quite well. I remember especially Bob, who worked as a parts man in the auto industry and was the neatest Communist I had ever seen up to that time, practically always wearing a suit, his hair disgustingly short. He testified that he had been discriminated against. Boesky’s lawyer (mouthpiece?) thought he had him in an awkward position and asked gleefully: “How could you be discriminated against? You’re white.” Bob answered, “I was discriminated against because I wasn’t allowed to eat with my friends.”

We won and Boesky’s was fined $25.00.

There are two other things that stand out in my mind. One is that while we radicals did a fair amount of sitting-in and bringing court cases, we hardly made a dent in the general pattern in which almost all the restaurants in Detroit refused to serve Black people. It was only when the NAACP carried out a large-scale campaign with large numbers of African Americans involved that the pattern of general discrimination by restaurants was broken. Did our efforts make the NAACP campaign any easier or help to bring it about? I hope so. It makes me feel like a pioneer. And it sure helped to keep me out of trouble during my teens.

The other thing that stands out is Chester and one of Chester’s remarks. Chester was a roly-poly African American man and a particular friend of Bob’s. He was one of the stalwarts in the case against Boesky’s and in many other battles. But the thing that sticks in my strange mind is something that happened at one of our parties where we were doing amateur singing, comedy and so on. Chester was MC and when he came out on the makeshift stage he was greeted with a lot of applause. He said, “Thank you for giving me the clap.” Everybody interpreted that the same way. Chester stood absolutely still for a few seconds like a startled deer caught in a car’s headlights. Then he laughed like hell like everybody else.

Stalin, too, made his appearance on 12th Street. People in the last generation or two can’t imagine, literally, the influence Stalin had on several tens of millions of Communists all around the world. Twenty million Soviet Communists died in World War II. They died fighting bravely and heroically in many cases and, as General MacArthur said (and as we Communists liked to quote to each other and to anyone else who would listen), “The hopes of civilization rest on the worthy banners of the courageous Red Army.” The quote appeared in the mainstream press during World War II and we on the left were thrilled.

It was probably also true. The Soviets bore an enormous part of the fighting and casualties during the war with about 40 million killed in all. Our dead as I remember it were 250,000 killed. Stalin issued a war communique every day and it was carried in newspapers all across the United States. The statements were short, well written, patriotic and inspiring and undoubtedly had a good effect on the Soviet fighting men and women. They also served to confirm what we Communists already knew:: that Stalin was a genius who was essentially never wrong.

I remember discussions among our friends. The problem was that if, as theory said, criticism and self-criticism was the law of development for Communists, who criticized Stalin? We decided that only the members of the Politburo knew enough or were smart enough to criticize him. I learned a lot about criticism and self-criticism later. The operative statement, which was a very truthful joke, was “I’m going to self-criticize you. “ The other important thing to remember was if you criticized someone in the leadership, watch your ass!

But none of the problems was apparent during World War II, at least not to us. I was, among things, a teenage volunteer reporter for the Michigan Worker, a local weekend edition of the Daily Worker. Our editor, who a few years later would deprive me of a chance for one of the happiest experiences of my life through his carelessness, sent me out to 12th Street one day for “Man in the Street” or “Woman in the Street” interviews. (Anybody who gave us the “right” answer would have been more than welcome.) I don’t remember what the statement was, but I was supposed to ask people if they agreed with a statement Stalin had made.

The results were pretty good in this mostly Jewish, partly Black neighborhood. About half the people agreed with the statement and gave their names and a short statement. The only problem from the point of view of journalistic ethics was that we only printed the answers of those who agreed. Oh well, we didn’t print anything that wasn’t true.

It might have been a problem that we selected one of the most progressive, if not the most progressive, part of Detroit. I’m not sure if I questioned the morality of only printing the favorable answers to my questions at the time. I certainly didn’t question it out loud to anyone. I was thrilled to have gotten so many good, and sometimes very radical, answers. I think I also got a by-line. In my own name yet.

BEGINNINGS

How did I go from being sweet, innocent (and no doubt beautiful) newborn baby to being such a great admirer of Stalin’s? My paternal grandfather probably had a great deal to do with itt.

My father’s father had good genes and a bad heart. He did carpentry until the year he died at 97. But he was also a mean son of a – that is, he was a rotten person. Why blame my great grandmother? His rottenness was probably an important factor in my political life. It happened this way: Sometime when my father was a little boy my grandfather did something very mean to a boy about my father’s age who worked for him. I think he hit him and made him cry. My father’s sympathy was immediately with the other boy.

“That’s when I first became a radical,” he told us.

He must have been pretty young at the time because before he was 12 his mother had died, his father had remarried and pa and his brothers had to leave home and shift for themselves. Pa must also have been very radical when very young. He became an anarchist and had committed some kind of terrorist act before he left Russia at the age of 12.He told us he was smuggled out of Russia under a woman’s skirts. He was very short, only 5’4” when he was an adult, but I still find it hard to imagine a boy being hidden that way. Pa never told us what he had done; he didn’t like to talk about it.

He did like to talk about how he had seen Lenin.

“There was this great big crowd, thousands of people,” he said. I tried to see who they were listening to but I couldn’t. People would turn their backs and look through a mirror. Somebody let m look through his mirror and I saw this little pipsqueak up on a hill talking to the crowd.”

For decades I have tried to figure out the physics of that. If they could see him through the mirror why couldn’t they see him by looking straight at him.? But every time he told the story the part about the “little pipsqueak” an the mirror were the same.

I almost didn’t get to be here at all. As far as I can figure out it must have been before or during the Russian revolution of 1905.Pa was a little boy of course at the time so nobody paid much attention to him. “I saw this line of people and a line of soldiers,” he told us. “The people were yelling. The soldiers raised their guns. I got behind the line of soldiers. Then they started shooting at the crowd.” If he had been a few years older or a little bigger you might have been spared the trouble of reading this narrative.

One of the reasons my father had to be smuggled out of Russia was that the Tsar’s army drafted young men for twenty years. One of my uncles, my father’s brother, served in the Russian army in a special Guards regiment, a very rare thing for a Jew. He was, indeed, a very rare person. He wrestled with the tremendously powerful Hackensmit, who was world famous and a European champion. I remember reading something about him in the New York press a few years ago, many decades after the events I am describing. Not that my uncle beat him; to have gotten into the ring with him was enough.

He got in the ring against all odds at other times, too. One time he and some friends were in a local tavern and, as my father told it, “Some anti-Semites said, ‘look at the Jews drinking,’” and attacked them. “He had 27 knife wounds!” my father said proudly.

Pa had 18 inch biceps (Mohmmed Ali’s were 17 inches) so you didn’t question his stories or argue with him. I never asked him what happened to the other guys even after I grew up.

This uncle had a silver plate in his head from World War I and he and his three sons fought in the French underground against the Nazis in World War II. There are many kinds of heroes and many kinds of poets in the world. My uncle was one kind. I don’t think I ever knew his name.

Pa never talked much about himself in any systematic way (I guess most parents don’t) but he did tell us isolated stories from time to time. “After you finished your apprenticeship in those days, you’d go on a “Wanderyar; a ‘wander year,’ in the Black Forest “ he told us.” When I was very young I saw visions of a forest full of witches and branches that grabbed you and darkness everywhere. It didn’t seem like much of a reward for finishing your apprenticeship to me. Later Disney or somebody used my vision of the Black Forest in the movie “Hansel and Gtetel.” When I was old enough to begin to get an understanding of nature I was more appreciative of the Wanderyar. I didn’t understand how come pa went on a Wanderyar when, as far as I know, he never served an apprenticeship in Europe, nor did I understand how he got from Riga, Latvia, where he grew up, to Germany, where the Black Forest is located. (I don’t even know when or how he got out from under that woman’s skirt.)

I did, later on, feel very sorry for those young lads who had one year of glorious freedom between two parts of a life of long, long hours of labor. Personally, I’m glad my father beat the rap and got the reward without serving the apprenticeship.

All the men in our family --my father, my two brothers and I –were sailors. My father sailed in the old days when they worked six hours on and six hours off, that is, a 12 hour work day. One time he was working in the galley and hadn’t had time to eat before his shift started. He started to sit down and eat something before starting to work. His boss said, “You work!” My father explained that he was very hungry and he wanted to take a couple of minutes to eat something before he started working around all that food. The boss said, “You work!” This went on back and forth for a few minutes; then the boss pulled a gun and said, “You work!” I don’t know if I’m stereotyping or if it really was a German ship. In any case he ordered my very, very hungry father to work around food for six hours without eating.

“I grabbed an ax from the wall and cut him in the shoulder. Then I ate. Then I worked,” pa said. It seemed like a good solution to me. I always imagined his using a large red fire ax like they had on the ships I later worked on. I tried to imagine the timing and the logistics of the situation. I’d also look at him carefully when he came home from work to see if he seemed hungry.

Pa had some other adventures and interesting experiences. He took the first copies of the “Socialist Call” into the textile mills of Massachusetts. He was a member of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, the famous “Wobblies” who have been romanticized in the minds of generations of left-wing youth. Their slogan was “One Big Union” and, unlike the old AF, they organized unskilled workers, especially I the western part of the United States. One of the things they were famous for was their tactic when one of them was arrested for trying to organize workers. They would come in large numbers, hundreds and hundreds of them, demanding to be arrested, too, because they were also Wobblies. They would fill the town’s jails in what they called, “free speech fights, which I believe were often successful.

Like the others, pa rode the rails under freight cars, traveling from place to place ;looking for work and helping to organize those they worked with. Once he was in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico trying to organize the workers. Unfortunately, these particular workers had never seen a Jew before. They literally thought Jews had tails. When they found out pa was Jewish they wanted to kill him. He had to run for his life.

While he was in Mexico he saw Pancho Villa, the great Mexican revolutionary fighter. I used to brag that my father had seen both Lenin and Pancho Villa. Actually, I still do. Add to that that both my so and I would see Nelson Mandela and would work on the Nelson Mandela Reception Committee in New York, and that I would meet Malcolm X, shake his hand, and hear him speak the week before he was killed and it’s hard to see how I didn’t become a “gonsa ich” myself.

There is one other thing about pa’s Mexican adventure that interests me and it is still somethiing I haven’t been able to figure out. It’s a postcard, with Russian printing with a picture of two boys or young men dressed almost in rags and a caption that indicates they are poor and miserable. The handwritten message is in English but, as I remember it, there was also printing in Spanish on the card. I don’t remember if the card had a U.S. or Mexican stamp on it. I saw it in the dark, crowded, miserable apartment of my father’s sister in the slums of the Bronx. I wouldn’t say our society has problems but people are still living in that apartment now, decades later, only now it’s a Latino slum instead of a Jewish slum.

I know of two other adventures pa had overseas. “One time we were in Paris,” he told. us.“People were standing around watching this great big guy lift weights. A guy stood up and said something to the crowd. “What’s he saying,” I asked my friend. ‘He’s challenging anybody to lift his weights.’

“I went up and Started with the smallest weight and lifted all his weights. The people began shouting at me. ‘What are they saying now?’ I asked. ‘They’re mad as hell at you’ my friend told me. They’re saying, “What are you trying to do, ruin the man’s way of making a living?”’”

‘

Pa’s great strength came in handy another time when he was overseas. He told us he fought the boxing champ of the British navy. “Of course it wasn’t a real fight,” he said. “We were on the beach and broke so we put up this fight.” I was no boxer so we fixed the fight so it would look good. “ Unlike most of the people I know nowadays who have great strength, pa didn’t get his strength in the gym. He got it the hard way –he worked for it. He was to lose it the hard way, too.

The origin of pa’s strength was bitter. When he came to what immigrants then called America, what Jewish immigrants called “Die Goldina Medina,” the golden land, he worked for one of his older brothers who was a plumber. He was probably 12 or 13 years old. He worked 12 hours a day six days a week for $1,50 a week. One of the things he did as a plumber’s helper was cut pipe and cut thread. You used a circular tool with a sharpened cutting edge when cutting pipe and you put it around a piece of steel pipe. You would cut a thin line on the pipe by moving the tool in a wide circle around the pipe, put oil on it, and then turn a handle that further tightened the grip of the tool. It was hard to tighten and very hard to turn. Cutting thread was similar but with a larger device and was even harder work. I know. I did a little of both in my teen years. The difference was in how long you did it and the size and thickness of the pipe you were working on. “In would do it all day long on inch-and-a-half or two-inch pipe,” pa said. (The numbers refer to the inner diameter of the heavy, thick pipe.) “I would come home with my arms all swollen up.” The next day he would go back to work and do it again.

“I was getting a dollar and a half a week,” pa told us. “Things were cheaper then. You could buy a nickel beer and get a free lunch. I asked my brother for a raise and he said ‘no.’ I was pushing a heavy cart full of tools and fittings down the street. I raised my arms and tipped the cart over with one motion and the tools and the fittings and everything else spilled out all over the street. ‘I quit’ I said and walked away.”

Pa used to show us a muscle on the side of his arm near the elbow and say, “That’s the plumber’s muscle.” You don’t see much of that nowadays. Machines do the work and develop the “plumber’s muscle.”

At 21 pa was the youngest master plumber in the history of New York. It didn’t do him much good financially. As a socialist he refused to exploit labor. Generally he wouldn’t hire anyone to work for him or, if he did, he’d never tell the men to work harder or faster. This created a few difficulties when times got hard and he had to bid for large jobs. He did the right thing. He stopped bidding.

Pa learned a lot from his early work as a plumber. He became what we used to call class conscious. In his case it was manifested in a very direct way. Besides his work with the Wobbles, he was a member of an early collective colony with a bunch of radicals who would later become very famous among leftists in the United States. Mike Gold, who wrote for the Daily Worker and was one of the few among the writers for the paper who was a very fine writer; Bob Minor another radical writer who was, I believe, editor of The Masses or New Masses, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a famous union activist who later became a major leader of the U. .S. Communist Party.

Every time he mentioned Elizabeth Gurley Flynn he added, “and her husband Carlo Tresca.” I’d immediately cringe and put up an imaginary cross as one was supposed to do when confronted with a vampire. Tresca was either a Trotskyite or an anarchist and I was a militant young Communist.

When I saw Elizabeth Gurley Flynn she was a hugely fat old lady who was still a hell of a speaker so I was always a bit skeptical when pa mentioned , as he invariably did, how beautiful she was. Then one day I saw a picture of her when she was a teenager. She was giving a speech to a group of workers. She was young, beautiful, progressive and a good enough speaker so that the workers listened intently. From the way she looked on the picture, I could see that she was just about my age. It was fifty years too late but I didn’t care. I immediately fell in love with her.

Pa used his strength in other class conscious ways, too, some good and some bad. He went around beating up scabs. In addition to his labor union work, he also used his muscles for what could be called personal reasons. One time a guy who knew him called him in the middle of the night, in the rain, to come and fix a burst pipe. When he had finished, he told the guy the bill was a dollar and a half. The guy said, “Sue me.” Pa hit him once and the guy bled from his nose, his eyes and his ears. He took out the money and offered to pay. Pa said, “No.” He wouldn’t accept the money until the man agreed to buy a pint of whiskey and drink it with him. The man did and pa then accepted the money. I never applied the wisdom he gave me about how to find someone and beat him up –namely, find him in the early morning when nobody else was around and slug him, although he didn’t use the word “slug.” I never had either the inclination or the strength to use his advice.

One time, many years before all this, pa also used his muscles –and a steel pipe – for personal reasons. He was walking with a young lady on the Lower East side of New York where there were many ethnic wars, when they were attacked by a group of young men. Pa took out the pipe and smashed bones and flesh, saying,” I’m a plumber, not a tailor!” The gang fled. I can see why. It was inch-and-a-half pipe, that is, an inch-and-a-half in diameter. Here, too, I have spent many happy hours trying to imagine what the scene looked like, especially whether the big piece of steel pipe was concealed, and, if so, how and where. Did they hold hands? Was the pipe in the other hand? Did pa get tired carrying it? Did he carry it all the time?

Here my thoughts go to the horror and permanence of death. I cannot call him and ask these and a million other questions, both serious and trivial. In too many cases, in one sense, neither the good nor the evil lives after us.

Times changed after he was married but when pa was what he called “a single man” he celebrated everybody’s holidays. He was Jewish, although not religious, so he celebrated all the Jewish holidays He worked in Hamtramck, a town within the Detroit city limits that had more Polish people living in it than Warsaw, so he celebrated all the Polish and Catholic holidays. We never discussed it but I would guess he also celebrated any and all the workers’ holidays he knew about.

Things would change a great deal after he was married and after the economic collapse of 1929. He then found that all his strength and skills weren’t enough to manage to live a decent life with his family in capitalist America, Die Goldene Medina.

In intellectual matters, pa was a part of his generation of Jewish immigrant, thirsting for culture, art, poetry and theater. He had only an eighth grade education formally, but he wrote poetry and read and discussed philosophy. He spoke ten languages, learned through travel and contact with many peoples. But hunger and uncertainty about the future have their own philosophy and crying children write poems in blood; the great depression was to have a devastating effect on his confidence and peace of mind and on the life of our family and the country we lived in.

My father clearly loved us as shown by the things he went through for us, but he wasn’t very demonstrative about it. My mother was soft and gentle and most of her adventures consisted of trying to feed four children, her husband and herself on the dollar a day my father left her each day for all expenses. He didn’t say, “Go and work miracles. Turn water into wine, turn bread into cake.” He just left her a dollar a day and expected to be fed. I’m sure the amount varied with his income and the value of the dollar. What sticks in my mind is the dollar a day.

I know very little o my mother’s life before I was born. She was a champion typist. I remember being told that she won the title of Michigan typing champion by typing 120 words a minute on a manual typewriter. It still seems impossible to me. Apparently she was politically active and was the secretary of the local “Free Tom Mooney Committee.” Tom Mooney was a labor leader who was jailed for many years on a trumped up charge. One story that was very popular in my youth was about the landlord who was defeated by a group of radical tenants who were on rent strike. “All right,” he told them, ”I’ll give you heat and hot water. I’ll cut the rent. I’ll paint your apartments. But I CAN’T free Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro defendants!” Yes, we did tie a lot of issues together. So that was the Tom Mooney my mother was trying to free.

Like my father, ma came from a large family; she had two sisters and four brothers and she liked to socialize with them and with her parents. The only other thing I know about her life before she met pa is a story she liked to tell on herself. Apparently she was conned out of some money by a slick crook. She would tell the story with her face red with laughter. “I told him, ‘’you’re wrong. I’ve worked in law offices.’” Then she’d laugh some more. “I’ve worked in law offices!” she said again. Unfortunately, she didn’t trust her own judgment. She gave the crook the money.

Ma refused to use a walker when she was 89 or 90. “Someone might think I’m old,” she explained.

“That’s the woman I’m going to marry,” pa would say., telling the story of love at first sight when he saw ma.

We had a large picture of ma standing at a water pump, apparently in the country, and I decided for some reason that this was when pa first saw her, maybe because it was the largest and most prominent picture we had of her when she was young. They me in Detroit, where ma was born and where she had graduated from high school, which she was very proud of. All of this prepared for a very important event in my life. I was born.

I was, in fact, born on 12th and Taylor, almost in Boesky’s Delicatessen only it hadn’t been built yet. Everybody was bigger than I was. My father was 5’5” tall and weighed 200 pounds. My mother was a little shorter and also weighed about 200 pounds. I weighed about six or eight pounds so I generally did as I was told. At that time my sister Florence was almost four and my brother Dave was two. I was clearly out numbered and outgunned.

Actually, I don’t remember the place on 12th and Taylor. The first house I remember living in was my grandmother’s on 9547 Greeley. I remember the address because it is also the name of a very fine book of poetry my sister Florence wrote. The house had a front yard full of flowers, flags and daffodils and some beautiful orange flowers we called tiger lilies. It was more of a magic jungle than a magic garden, with marvelous colors and vegetation and it seemed enormous to me, maybe because I was probably about three years old when we moved there. Some parts of the front yard were almost unexplored. The jungle was too thick for a little boy, or at least this little boy, to feel comfortable in. But the front yard gave me many hours of solitary pleasure.

The back yard was even larger. It was dominated by three things: our dog, a Fox Terrier, who may have been the first dog ever named “Fido,” a marvelous old truck that was no longer of any value for transportation but was one of the greatest playthings ever invented, and two huge cherry trees. Fido was tied to the back porch. He was very small as Fox Terriers are, but for many, many years all the kids in our family bragged to all the kids at school that we had a dog who “was so strong he pushed my grandfather down the stairs.” It might have occurred to us sometime in our twenties or thirties to wonder if that was very good for our grandfather. Then again, it might not have.

The truck was very old and painted a very old red mixed with some very old rust.It didn’t have any tires or motor but it had a steering wheel and an old seat, and best of all it had an odometer. Sometimes I played with it with my brother Dave, but most of the time I drove it alone. My driving consisted of my sitting on the old seat that was covered with torn black leather or, more probably, vinyl, turning the steering wheel and playing with the odometer. I don’t remember making driving noises or motor noises, possibly because my truck had no motor.

But my favorite part of the truck was the odometer. I found out that it could reach a point where it started over again (100,000 miles?) and that provided hours and weeks and months of solitary pleasure. I’d like to be able to tell you that this led to a major career in higher mathematics but I don’t think you’d believe me.

Even more unbelievable, but in this case true, is what I did with the cherry trees some years later. I was picking cherries for my grandmother to use in baking pies, climbing high up with a container, a small basket or a bag, attached to my waist. I must have been an early Communist even then. For every cherry I put in the container for my grandmother, I ate one; I kept count of how many I ate. I believe the total was 2,000 but it might have been only 1,000.I told my mother how many I ate, but she didn’t believe me –thank God.

When the cherry trees were in bloom they were glorious, clouds of pink against a shining blue sky, lighting up the whole giant back yard, the vegetable garden, which I ignored except for the rhubarb that I loved and watched carefully to see when it would be ready to eat, the middle section with low grass where I was allowed to play, and the remote unexplored territory with its very high grass near the back fence where I was forbidden to go alone. It was in this remote area that my first act of unnecessary and unthinking cruelty started. My brother Dave and my cousin Sidney, who was about Dave’s age, and I went to the deep grass to hunt for spiders. The spiders were beautiful, various combinations of red, yellow and black. We would catch them with an empty bottle and cap, catching them between the bottle and the cap and trapping them in the bottle. There were differing opinions as to whether or not the spiders were poisonous, but in any case it didn’t have any effect on our behavior. We would look at the spiders, add leaves and twigs to the bottle, and watch them move among the debris. This was fun for a while but soon became boring so we burned these beautiful creatures alive and went on to look for other amusement.

The other use for the trees and the truck was that they were excellent to hide behind when I had stone-throwing fights with the boy next door. My sister tells me I had a friend called “Dodi” who lived next door and that we played together a lot. She’s a little older and her memory of that time is undoubtedly better. All I remember is the stone-throwing and that the boy next door was about my age and had blond hair. We were probably both right. I don’t think anybody was ever hit by a stone in those low-tech wars so any friendship wouldn’t have been damaged much, if at all. Ineffective stone-throwing seems to have been the major method of warfare in my neighborhood in my early childhood, at least in my limited experience. It was the method of choice in my first encounter with anti-Semitism. I remember walking on a street covered with pebbles instead of asphalt paving (I think the street was called “Keeler”) and being called a “dirty Jew” by a group of boys some distance away. They began to throw stones at me and I threw back. I may have been fairly skilled by then, having gone through the “Dodi wars.”

When they called me a dirty Jew I answered, “I’d rather be a Jew than a dumbbell like you. “

This clearly indicates that I was either very young at the time or severely retarded. Or both.

One room in baba’s house was dark and mysterious. A giant armoire dominated the room and took up most of the space. It loomed over me like what my son Jonathan was later to call “an Ande,” but without the sunny snow-covered look that gave joy to such a mountain. It had no windows and was gloomy and warm and quiet. It was the downstairs bathroom and I loved it. Not that there was an upstairs bathroom as far as I remember, but I always thought of it as the downstairs bathroom. I must have slept upstairs.

I never looked in the giant armoire or even attempted to open it. I was very young at the time, three or four I would guess, and I don’t think I knew this giant thing could be opened. I loved the quiet and the warmth and the mystery of the place and I’ve remembered it all these years. Later I heard my grandmother made beer in that room but I don’t remember any smell there except quiet and mystery.

Considering that it was actually a bathroom that’s another good thing about it. One other thing about the house itself sticks in my memory. There were grates in the floor that could be opened or shut to allow heat to come up from below. One could look down at the grown-ups below and hear what they were saying. This was to bring little joy but enormous pain and suffering as I grew up.

There was one time of quiet whispering when the adults walked as though they were not walking and didn’t look at me or the other children or at each other when the grates might have done me some good, but they were kept closed during that period. There was a strange man who was there, sometimes at night; when he or the other adults were upstairs, I had to stay downstairs. I later learned that my baby brother Sidney (not my cousin Sidney who was Dave’s age) almost died of scarlet fever one night during that period. The mysterious stranger was a doctor, I believe Dr. Kass who took care of us for thousands of years during our childhood and the only doctor I remember seeing until I was an adult. He was in the house all night during what was then called “the crisis.” I can’t imagine any doctor nowadays coming to a patient’s house and staying up all night with a sick child, especially a poor sick child. I do know a couple of doctors who might, but they would do it, if they did, because they are part of one or another part of the freedom movement and, possibly, in spite of their being doctors.

GROWING UP

Having met anti-Semitism, I now had the honor of meeting the depression, its children, siblings, parents, cousins, die gansa mishpochah, or as they say in the much paler English language, the whole extended family. It consisted of unemployment, pain, hunger, crime, disease, broken families and broken hearts. As Tevye would say, “I could have done without this honor.” Just in case you are fooled into thinking I know Yiddish, forget it I love the language but it would probably be a truer sign of both love and respect if I didn’t use the occasional Yiddish phrase or if I used some other language instead.

Our mispochah was, of course, special. All the children in our family were, beautiful, brilliant and talented. As my mother. Or look at the pictures. There is a picture of my brother David and me sitting on a wagon at about eight or ten years of age. We had black hair and dark eyes and were obviously very good looking. There is a picture of my sister Florence, her graduation picture from high school, a very, very pretty girl with black hair and brilliant eyes, and one of my younger brother Sidney when he was a very young boy, looking handsome and gentle and a lot like Elvis Presley. And of course we were all talented. Florence was a wonderful singer, Florence, Sidney, and I all wrote; and Dave was an excellent student and very good at drawing.

We didn’t know we were special, but at the same time we did. I suspect other families think their children are special, too, but what do they know?

Florence and Dave went to Maybe School but I was too young. Florence describes in one of her poems how she came home from school and asked my mother for a dime because they were collecting money for the poor. Ma could always laugh very hard and very completely; her whole face, body and soul seemed to shake with laughter. The poem just says ma laughed when Florence asked for money for the poor; I can see the laugh, its happiness, its enormity, the despair hidden and overcome by happiness for the moment.

She managed, out of her dollar a day, to find a dime to give to the poor.

In a famous picture, a magnificent stag is being brought down by a bunch of dogs. That’s what happened to the people, and especially to the working class, in the United States and all over the world during the depression. It’s also what happened to my father and, for different reasons and in a different way.

Worldwide production actually declined by 42% during the depression. There was no wok, no jobs, no market. I always wondered who had the money to buy the apples you see people (always men as I remember it) selling on street corners during the depression. Before 1929 pa had $100,000 and some “property,” empty lots people bought in the certainty that they would become super rich when someone decided to build a large building on their property. Kind of like monopoly. In 1930 he had nothing. We had to give up our apartment and move in with my grandparents. All the furniture was put in storage. Everything was lost when pa couldn’t pay the storage bill.

“Edith, I lost my library,” pa is quoted over and over again to my mother, in one of Florence’s poems. “I lost my library!” The poem also says, “When Sidney was born, pa left.”

There is a vast difference between boys and girls. (That probably surprises you.) I don’t know if Florence ever knew it but his friend Alekhel (little Alex), a rubber at the Turkish bath, lent him the money to pay for Sidney’s birth. Pa was only able to pay him back during the relative prosperity of World War II. I don’t know how long he was gone or whether he was just searching desperately for money to pay for the birth of his fourth child. Possibly it wasn’t very long at all since I, busy as I was, would probably have missed him otherwise. Or, possibly, he really left us in fear and despair at having a wife and four children, no job, no home, no real solid hope that he knew about. On the other hand, ma might have been more likely to talk to, or more likely to have been overheard by her eight-year-old daughter than by her four-year-old son. Most likely, of course, ma told her about it many years later. Pa and ma are no longer here so I can’t ask them about it and say, ”Say it isn’t so.”

Alekhel was the center of a couple of fascinating stories. He had a magnificent operatic voice and would fill the small steam room where he worked with glorious music while he rubbed someone down with a brush made of eucalyptus leaves, in the hottest part of the room on the top shelf of group of high, wide wooden shelves, hottest point in the hottest part of the room. For long periods at a time this wonderful singer would work in the extreme heat, sometimes singing, sometimes silent. He was small, bald, and had a little bump on his head. They said he drank and that he had had a great tragedy in his life. I tried to guess whether it had been the death of a beloved wife or child, a great unrequited love or something else. I never knew, but I learned that he had made it possible for pa to pay the bill when Sidney was born and that he was one of pa’s best friends.

Pa had a chance to pay Alekhel back in another way.

One night when pa was in the bath house Alekhel came running up to him in the upstairs are where people sat and talked at tables or ate or drank or played cards, and said, “Fred! Fred! help me! He wants to throw hot water on me!” The man was drunk and wanted to throw boiling water on Alekhel. Pa stood in front of the guy who looked huge to him.

“He was a big six-footer,” my five-foot-four father said. “I said to him, ‘you aren’t so big. There are men a lot bigger than you are’ and I raised my finger and pointed it straight up in the air. He looked up at my finger and I knocked him through a big mirror. “

There didn’t seem to be any point in asking him what came next. That was obviously the end of the story.

During the depression butter cost eight cents a quarter of a pound, which was the only amount we ever bought. I think milk was ten cents a quart and a loaf of Taystee white bread, the kind we usually bought, was also ten cents. We never bought Wonder bread “Because, “ my mother told us,” the son of the owner killed a man during a strike.” In our family these things are not forgotten. I tell my son not to buy Wonder bread, “The son of the owner killed a man during a strike.”

Another family story was about the kid whose teacher was asking the children what they had for breakfast. One had eggs, another cereal, another ham and eggs. The poor kid told the teacher he had had bread for breakfast.

“What was on the bread?” the teacher asked.

The kid answered, “a union label.”

In those days unions labels were stuck onto the breads one bought, in our case in the local Jewish bakeries, the delicious rye and pumpernickel bread that we bought from time to time. They tasted wonderful with butter and pretty good without it. The only meat I ever remember buying was flank and chuck which cost 15 cents a pound. We also had to ask for a soup bone which seems to have been a form of begging, at least to our butcher who always made us feel bad about it.

But that was nothing compared to asking to grocer to “charge it.”

I figured out after a while it was because she was too embarrassed to go herself. I walked to the store slowly, a little boy carrying a planet on his back, waiting at the door, not wanting to go in. When I finally went and handed him the list of what we needed, the grocer would hesitate in turn, just standing there and say nothing while I wondered if he was going to refuse to give me the food. Then he would open an account book, find our name and add the cost of the purchase. I waited in dread, fearing that he would say, “It’s getting pretty big,” as he did from time to time. He would mutter this, knowing that we paid when we could and that he could neither afford to lose customers nor to compete with a chain store. My parents, on the other hand, knew a chain store wouldn’t give us any credit and lived in mortal fear that the store would cut us off. The first time I asked the grocer to “charge it” was a tortuous ordeal of fear and embarrassment. It didn’t get much better with the passage of time.

The stores we went to were called, “The house store” and “Miltie’s grandmother’s.” I still don’t know if it was one store or two names for the same place.

Butter was eight cents a quarter of a pound. That was nice, but who the hell had eight cents?

I don’t remember actually going hungry during the depression but I remember a number of times when there was no food and no money in the house and my father would go out to borrow five dollars. That was always the way it was put: “go out to borrow five dollars.” The phrase stuck in my mind, not burned with a flame thrower but etched with a hot iron nonetheless. I wondered vaguely, being a child, what would happen to us if he couldn’t borrow it. The same question must have burned much more painfully into my father’s proud heart.

Pa and ma fought, not physically, but loud, bitter arguments that seemed to go on for hours. That was probably the origin of my progressivism. I resolved to be so good that such terrible pain for them and for me could never happen again anywhere in the world to anyone, and especially not to children. My opinion of goodness in general and of my goodness in particular was somewhat unrealistic. I suspect, however, that such thoughts may have played an important role in the origin of all the major religions of the world. I’d show the world what goodness was and the world, in reverence and awe, would imitate me. Well, I did my part but the dumb world didn’t follow.

Yiddish was the language of choice for these arguments. Sometimes pa would refer to us, saying, “und dine fier,” meaning the children. That I understood. Sometimes he would refer to ma’s family. He was particularly mad at ma’s brother, Joe, who was a cop and a compulsive gambler. Joe had gotten in trouble with a gambling debt and ma had begged pa to be a co-signer for Joe for a loan of $300.Pa finally agreed against his better judgment. As you might expect, Joe didn’t pay the loan and pa was stuck with this enormous debt (remember the eight-cent butter?) at a time when money was almost impossible to get.

Ma loved her brother Joe very much as she did her whole family. Years later when her Communist children would say or imply something against Joe’s being a cop, she would say, “But Joe never did anything except save that guy from burning.”

It was true. A man was burning and Joe threw his overcoat on the man and threw his own body on him and rolled over and over on the ground smothering the fire.

Uncle Joe told ma, and she told us, how the other cops would say, “Let’s go down to Dexter and give the Jews some tickets. ”Dexter was the main street in the Jewish neighborhood where we lived at that time. Somehow uncle Joe never got promoted. One of the other cops who he broke in rose to become a lieutenant in charge of the motor vehicle bureau. Years later when I needed a job the lieutenant saw to it that I got a chauffeur’s license and a job driving a Good Humor ice cream truck. The Good Humor garage was right next to the motor vehicle bureau but I’m sure there was no connection.

The only problem was that I could hardly drive and could not have passed even the ordinary driver’s test, let alone any special requirements for a chauffeur’s license. One time they gave me a truck with no brakes, that is, no regular brakes and practically no emergency brake. At last I had a truck just like the one in baba’s back yard! I drove the many miles on a main Detroit road to the garage, slowing down with the gears and doing a lot of praying.

I was 18 years old. Talk about on the job training.

The chill winds of the depression roared sometimes; sometimes they were only a cold draft on the back of our necks. Take food, for example.

“This tastes just like mother used to make,” I would tell people many years later. Then I’d add, “But my mother was a lousy cook.” (I didn’t always get invited back for dinner.)

But we did eat out sometimes. I remember once or twice in the early years eating at a Chinese restaurant on Linwood and a few times eating at a White Castle or a White Tower. We would order two hamburgers, milk and pie. The hamburgers cost a nickel each, the milk a nickel and the pie a dime so it was a quarter each for four kids and two adults. That made $1.50 altogether.

One of my most vivid memories is of my brother Sidney causing consternation when he ordered THREE hamburgers, milk and pie. He was too young to know the rules. After some hesitation and mental arithmetic my parents ordered his three hamburgers. It would have been more painful to tell their youngest son he couldn’t have three hamburgers than to scrounge up the extra nickel. But first they had to count their money to make sure they could pay the bill.

That was it, essentially, as far as eating out was concerned. In addition, White Castle or White Tower would run an ad in the papers every once in a while offering hamburgers at two cents each. Then we would become big spenders and order a whole lot. I don’t remember feeling bad about not going to restaurants. We were just happy and thrilled the few times we had a chance to go at all.

Part of the reason was my mother’s cooking. Actually, of course, the fault was not in ma’s cooking but in the strait jacket of a dollar a day limit on what she could spend –for everything! I remember only the high and low points of our meals. She made a wonderful cabbage soup with pieces of fat meat floating in it. We had great –tasting beet borscht with sour cream. Also wonderful was liver fried in oil and served with catsup. Perhaps the best taste of my childhood was the onions, oil, and catsup mixture that I saved for last in our liver meals. But liver, not too well done, was also very good.

The rest was misery. The very worst was a plain soup made, I think, with some kind of meat, that was so salty I, literally, almost couldn’t eat it. We had that often. I remember crying, unable to eat it, with my father taking off his belt (he never hit us with his hands; he was afraid he’d kill us), threatening me, saying ,” Are you going to eat or not?” and “When I get up it’ll be too late!” Then again, “Are you going to eat or not?” I’d continue to cry and he’d continue to threaten. Finally, he’d hit me in the legs with the strap and I’d eat the horrible, sat-saturated soup, or I’d remember the last time and I’d eat before he hit me.

The words, “Are you going to eat or not?” have stuck in my consciousness for many decades, together with the picture of my family sitting at the table and me crying and hoping with all my heart for any other solution than being hit with the strap or, worse, having to eat the soup. Now In can understand a little how pa must have felt after working so hard and worrying so much about how to feed his family when he saw me refuse to eat. What I can’t understand is how anybody could eat that soup.

I tried to make it up to ma. She made a sweet-and-sour fish that was edible. She asked us how we liked it; everybody else told the truth but I said it was good. I added silently, “compared with your plain soup.” For many years afterwards ma used to say, “Leonard likes sweet-and-sour fish.”

I loved my mother very much and never even thought about telling her the truth. After all,, we weren’t talking about her plain soup.

I can still hear her voice many decades later: “Leonard likes sweet-and-sour fish.”

When pa had work we had treats. Sometimes it was fruit that he bought on roadside stands in the outlying parts of the city. We used to laugh because he insisted that the fruit h bought was much better than that we bought in the neighborhood. It could have been true. What did we know about fruit?

“You don’t know how to eat,” he would tell us years later when we were grown. ”When I was young, when a fruit came into season, we would buy a bushelbasketful and

eat it. I’m a little sorry I never found myself near a basket full of fruit at the same time I had money in my pocket.

One of the joys of our lives was watermelon. The watermelon man would drive slowly through the neighborhood stopping in one or two places in each block. When we could afford to buy one, we’d run out to his truck, pay him 25 cents for a melon, and put it in the ice box as quickly as we could. When it was cold we’d slice it and eat it. I learned later that some benighted people ate watermelon with a knife and fork.

The ice box, as I remember it, was made of thick brown wood and was light brown in color. You had to be careful not to keep it open any longer than necessary so you wouldn’t waste ice. At the same time each week we’d har the loud cry,” Iceman, Ice!” We’d call to the man and he’d ask if we wanted 25 pounds or 50 pounds, grab the required amount with his steel tongs, and with a motion I admired for years, swing the big block of ice onto his shoulders in one graceful motion. Carrying the ice on his shoulder, he’d walk from his truck to the house, open the door of the ice box with his free hand, and swing the ice into the box. I wanted to be an iceman for many yeas but was afraid I wouldn’t be able to master the skills.

“Moish, wait.” That was the cry that brought joy to my heart if I had a penny. Moish was the man who walked through the neighborhood pushing a cart with penny candy. When one kid called to him all the others who heard it would either run to the cart with their pennies or run to their mothers to beg for money.

But ice cream was probably the supreme treat for us, especially n hot summer evenings. One night my mother sent me to the store for two strawberry cones, one for her and one for me. On the way back I dropped hers in the dirt. I stared at it in horror for a few seconds. Then I picked it up, brushed it off and put the dirty side down into the cone. I then proceeded to eat the other one. If she noticed anything wrong, she never mentioned it. Neither did I.

My guess would be it didn’t do her any harm. She lived to be 91.

(A question for any of you who happen to be a little sleepy or slow today; how did I know that the one of the two identical ice cream cones that I dropped was my mothers?) This lapse in my goodness campaign is probably responsible for the world’s continuing troubles. Or so I believed until I was 30. Unfortunately, I soon learned that there were other, less obvious causes.

As I said before I started working with pa when I was eight, but most people don’t realize that working in dark, damp, musty basements can be fun. Sometimes it got a little boring but otherwise it wasn’t bad. I’d help carry the tools and supplies from the truck to the place we were working, go back to the truck for parts we forgot or found pa needed as the job developed, hand him tools as he needed them and help carry things back and put them into the correct bins into which the back of the truck was divided. When we worked in kitchens or bathrooms or elsewhere in the house I made a very, very halfhearted effort to pick up and clean up the area when we were finished.

I don’t remember ever getting paid in those early days. Pa might have felt a little guilty about the situation; every once in a while he’d make some reference to wanting me to come along, “to keep him company.” Since we were almost starving some of the time he obviously couldn’t afford to hire a helper and I was glad to help out. What a good kid I was! Not that I had any choice that I knew of.

The images that stick in my mind are of pa lying on his back under a kitchen sink and me handing him various tools as he asked for them, or the two of us lifting a hot water boiler in some basement after I was older, or of his lifting the boiler by himself while I placed the stand under it or guided it into place.

But the image I see most when I think of those days is of me as a little boy sitting on a milk crate next to my father as we drove in his truck all over Detroit to the next job.

Pa, of course, didn’t drive like anybody else, at least some of the time.

“Sunday driver!” he would yell at some guy from time to time when someone committed a sin of the road. Sometimes he would just say it out loud in the truck but wouldn’t shout at the other driver.

He had only an eighth grade education but he knew from experience that the hypotenuse was shorter than the sum of the other two sides of a right triangle. “It’s shorter,” he would tell me. I hadn’t reached the eighth grade yet, let alone high school geometry where these things are taught. I was duly impressed and, being very smart and interested in increasing my knowledge, promptly memorized this valuable bit of information.

A lot of depression-era cars had faulty exhaust systems and large, smelly streams of visible fumes would come out of the exhaust pipe. Sometimes a car with this problem would get in front of us and stay there, not letting pa pass him. Pa would go through all kinds of contortions on the road to get in front of the guy and then not let him pass.

“Now you eat my gas!” he’d say.

It seems surrealistic thinking about it now but there were a very large number of empty houses in Detroit at that time. Maybe people had gone back home to live with relatives like we had to move into baba’s house for a while. A lot of rural people, especially from the South, had come to Detroit to find jobs and had left when times became very hard. Pa’s job was to drain all the water from the empty house so the pipes wouldn’t freeze and burst during the winter.

He was paid a dollar and a half for each house. We drove all over town draining all the water from the pipes for a dollar and a half and were damned glad to get the work. My part of the job, in addition to my regular tasks, was to drain all the toilet bowls with a hollow rubber ball attached to a hollow tube. This, too, got a little boring when the bowl was almost empty. We had to be very careful not to leave any water that could freeze and break the pipes or the bowl.

Things change. Sometimes when pa had work he would bring home pastries, “kichlach,” from the local Jewish bakery and we’d have delicious cake and cold milk before we went to bed. We moved out of baba’s house, first into an ugly brick four-family flat and then into a nice single wooden house a half block from my school. We were living there when pa had his accident.

He was working alone with some very thick crock pipe four or five inches in inside diameter when something slipped, in water I believe, and a very jagged piece of the large broken pipe cut a very large jagged hole in his leg, cutting an artery.

“The blood was coming out in big spurts,” he said later. I took off my belt and wrapped it around my leg. I held it as tight as I could to stop the blood and I didn’t let go.”

Nowadays doctors say you should let go for some seconds every once in a while, to prevent gangrene, I believe. The doctor then said his quick action saved his life.

A lot of good it did him. Pa was laid up for months in the house unable to get out of bed, unable to wok, unable to pay our $15 a month rent for our pretty little cottage.. We had no medical insurance, of course. If there was anybody to sue we didn’t know about it. And pa couldn’t collect workman’s compensation because he was working for himself.

The landlord tried to evict us. He took pa to court and told him

he’d throw pa and their kids out into the street. “I told him right in court, right in front of the judge and everybody, ”I’ll take you inn hearse to the cemetery first!” pa told us.

I can’t imagine pa said it quietly.

The judge apparently believed him, as did I. He gave us some kind of arrangement so we were able to stay in our little house. Thinking about it now, I’m sure the results would have been different if pa had been Black or Latino. He’d still be in jail or under it. Maybe the times had something to do with it, too. It wasn’t a good political climate, I suspect, for an elected judge to throw a family of six out in the street, especially when the father was willing, and, by then able, to work. As I say, times change.

Pa almost met death right before my eyes in one of those dark, amp basements years later. He had taken up electric sewer cleaning so our basements were wetter now, often flooded. When it rained basements became flooded because the storm sewer was clogged up. So we got a lot of calls when it rained and we sometimes had to work outside in a downpour. I was getting paid now, three dollars regardless of how many sewers pa unclogged at $20 a sewer. I thought I was a little underpaid but didn’t worry about it because, s there were few economic secrets in our house, I knew for days at a time there was no work at all. We were like farmers – dependent upon the rain for our livelihood.

Pa had gone into the electric sewer business exclusively after he became physically unable to do much of the routine plumber’s work The reason was typical of hi life: He badly injured his back while carrying a 600 pound laundry tray up twisted stairs when he was 45 year old. He always told the story that way. The implication , and I believe it was true, is that carrying 600 pound laundry trays up stairs was not a problem; the problem was being 45 years old and the fact that the stairs wee twisted.

My son, who knows quite a bit about such things would have said, “He should have stretched first.”

I would have said, “What the hell do you want to carry 600 pound laundry trays for?”

But the matter was serious. After the accident pa could no longer carry the 70 pound motor that drove the steel cables with the sharp knives on the end that were used to cut out whatever was blocking the sewer. I don’t know if they did surgery for such injuries in those days or not but they certainly didn’t do it in pa’s case, which may have been all for the best. What they did do ws give him a strong corset to wear an tell him not to lift anything. They didn’t tell him how to make a living without lifting.

I was fifteen whn he had the accident and had to work with him much more from that time on. So I was working with him the day he almost met death in the basement.

He was gently forcing the cable down into the sewer while standing in the water; I was standing on the other side of the basement holding the cable so it didn’t twist, which was my main job besides carrying the machine into and out of the house. Suddenly pa let out a horrible scream nd began running through the water across the basement AAAAAAAHHHH!!! I stood there not understanding what was happening and not knowing what to do. Screaming all the way, pa reached the other side of the basement in a few seconds and pulled out the plug that connected the machine to the electric current of the house.

He stopped screaming and stood still, breathing hard. I stoo still, too, feeling stupid that I hadn’t moved at all or helped at all, especially since I had been very close to the place the electric cord from the machine as plugged into the wall. My father had almost been electrocuted before my eyes and I had done nothing. I later told myself that the whole episode took only a few seconds and that by the time I realized what was happening the problem had been solved.

There had been a short circuit in the cord connecting the machine to the current. Since pa ha been standing in deep water and everything he had been working with was metal covered with water, it was a miracle he lived.

I think we both realized it. We were very quiet as we picked up our gear and put it in the truck. Pa didn’t yell at anybody that night.

He just drove home through the driving rain.

“A workingclass woman is a slave of a slave.” Marx or Lenin, or both, said it. That went double for ma.

Besides taking of the house, feeding six people on practically no money, washing our clothes and doing a million other things to try to keep us clean and happy and presentable, ma had to keep the books for pa and to stay home almost all the time to answer the phone in case a call came in from someone who had work for pa to do..

Pa ran an ad in the newspaper that included the phrase, “Days, nights, Sundays,” Guess who had to be there “Days, nights, Sundays.”?

In spite of this, when she and pa weren’t fighting she was cheerful and relatively happy, I remember when Sidney was a baby she’d hold him on her lap and say, ”Sidney Harold Quinn, I’ll sock you in the chin,” and laugh ‘til she’d almost cry. She loved us all passionately and was more demonstrative than pa was. She told the story on herself about when she said, “I’ve worked in law offices,” and was swindled, and about her friend Mary Cefaldi who thought the words to the song were “Mary Cefaldi the red, white, and blue,” not “bearing so proudly the red, white, and blue,” as some people thought.

But hers was a losing battle. We had a big linen closet where the unironed clothes of all three boys were kept and we would go there and pick out what we needed or what we could find to put on, Many times I couldn’t find anything and I’d ask ma what I should wear.

She had a stock answer, ”Wear what you wore yesterday.”

One terrible teacher made y life completely miserable day after day for a whole semester, complaining about my appearance, my grooming, and my cleanliness. Maybe she thought she was teaching me something. Maybe she had an unhappy love affair. Maybe she was just an anti-Semitic bitch. None of the other teachers bothered me so either she was a wonderful person who cared about me while the others didn’t or she had a screw loose.

She would talk to me, lecture me, drive me crazy, never letting a day go by without doing her volunteer work of making my life miserable. “If you don’t come to school

Tomorrow looking neat and clean,” she’d say, and then she’d add something she would do to me.

I was terrified I didn’t have the clothes. I came to her class right after gym and sometimes didn’t have the time, or maybe even the inclination, to make myself look perfect, as I thought of it, for her. Once when the threats were particularly frightening I realized at the last minute, when the gym teacher had us sitting on the floor before dismissing us

That I wouldn’t have time to wash before going to the bitch’s class, I desperately licked my hands that had gotten dirty from resting on the floor.

I’ve never forgotten that some mother fucker told that

Teacher, “I saw him licking his hands in the gym class.”

I don’t think the term “mother fucker” had actually been invented at that time. I think it was invented especially for that kid and that teacher.

Finally, I went home crying to my mother and, without telling her why or what was happening, told her I’d have to dress very well the next day. I cried so hard ma didn’t question me too much and dressed me the next day in either the little brown suit of the little blue suit that I wasn’t allowed to wear except on very, very special occasions.

One of the nicest things ma ever did for me, besides not noticing that I had dropped her ice cream cone, was not questioning me about why I had to wear one of my good suits the next day.

After I came to school all dressed up that day the bitch-teacher stopped bothering me. I think she thought shed broken my spirit. Really what she did was increase my burning hatred of all meanness, cruelty, and, when I later learned the word, oppression. On the conscious level, I hated and feared her more quietly and my inner crying and unheard sobs gradually faded away into the slowly passing nights.

The first girl I ever loved was Elsie May Waterlawn, only I didn’t know what love was at the time. I also didn’t know what girls were. I was in kindergarten.

Looking back t it, and being totally objective, I honestly don’t think Elsie May Waterlawn was Jewish. Of course, she might have changed her name but she had, I think, red hair, or reddish blonde hair. She could still have been Jewish but maybe she wasn’t. She dressed, as I remember it, in pretty green or red or yellow thing. I’d never seen anything like her in my life.

That was when I learned not to talk about anything t home. All I sad, being five years old and happy beautiful, was ”I like to hold her hand.”

My brother, Dave, who was seven and also beautiful, let out a loud whoop that I’m sure Elsie May could hear all the way in her presumably goyishe part of town. He then proceeded to tease me mercilessly and unceasingly.

“I like to hold her hand. I like to hold her hand,” he kept saying.

I did like to hold her hand.

Very much.

We were more like David and Goliath than Damon and Pythias, and for brothers that’s not good. Especially when he was both David and Goliath and was bigger, older, stronger, and, I’m afraid, smarter than I was.

We fought a lot of the time through the years and I never won a bout. Now my heart breaks when I think of him for he was a good brother and an honest comrade who gave his life at 22 before he could be corrupted by the “big I” disease.

You paid for an autobiography so I guess I owe you some of the stories of our early battles but I warn you it’s been cut, condensed, and expurgated. His fists, which never hit me that hard anyway, never caused the smallest fraction of the hurt his death brought to us all.

And we didn’t fight all the time. We stopped for breathers of friendship between rounds. We played together a lot and even dated the same girl at different times without rivalry. As we grew older we became more like real brothers are supposed to be. But times, especially in the early years, fighting both David and Goliath was an unbearable burden for me.

The worst times were when we lived at Baba’s house. Since I never went to Maybe school. It must have been before I was five. We didn’t carry out nuclear war against each other. In fact it was more like maneuvers or a rough basketball game but with an insane refusal to lose on each side. I still have no idea what we fought about; I suspect nowadays they would simply say it was case of sibling rivalry and as far as I can tell they’d probably be right.

Dave would hit me once and stop. I’d hit him back and stop. This would go on for a while but since he could hit harder and get away easier if he wanted to, I’d always end up hurt and frustrated. Sometimes when he hit me and hurt me or, more often, when I’d hit him last, I’d run away screaming and faint. This frightened the hell out of everybody except me since I was unconscious.

Ér cholisht!’ they would say. I presume this meant, ”He’s fainting,” since I heard it just before I lost consciousness. I had a vague sense, after being out for a while I would guess, of people fussing over me trying to revive me. It was a scary time for everybody.

It was scary in another way. My grandfather, who we called “zayda,” the Yiddish word for grandfather, had a bad heart and was not supposed to have too much excitement. He also worked nights as a watchman so I often disturbed his sleep as well as made too much noise during the time he was awake. I tried to scream less but with limited success.

Pa tried, with more success in later years, to keep us from fighting.

“Try to get along,” he’d say in a reasonable, almost soothing voice. We tended to repeat ourselves in our family. “Try to get along,” he’d tell us the next time. He also told us about the streetcar. He said if a streetcar was on the tracks and a car hit the fault had to be with the driver of the car because he came to the streetcar. For years afterwards, the main plea in the court of pa’s jurisdiction was, “I’m the streetcar,” and the answer to this mighty argument was the equally powerful, “No. I’m the streetcar.”

Dave was incredibly brilliant. He skipped three times and went to summer school once and started college at 15. I was pretty smart in school, too. I skipped once and, except for handwriting, with which I was unacquainted, I could, and usually did, get an “E” for excellent in any class. I also got a “U” in behavior most of the time but that was clearly due to the teacher’s bad judgment. The only academic problem I ever had was trying to avoid a “U” for unsatisfactory in handwriting, which I did once in while, and, if it can be called an academic problem, trying to avoid an unsatisfactory grade in behavior. I succeeded at that even more rarely.

You might conclude that I was jealous of Dave’s achievements. I could have been but I was generally pretty well satisfied with my marks in school so that probably wasn’t a factor in our wars.

We played together peacefully most of the time as we got older, but sometimes Dave would team up with my younger brother, Sidney, or with my cousin Sidney to pick on me in some nonphysical way. None of this mattered much to the one who wasn’t the victim, and it didn’t amount to much to me either, although I did think it was unfair.

Dave and my cousin Sidney played one trick on me, or tried to, which still tickles me after all these years. I don’t know if it would have tickled me so much if it had worked. “Come on, we want to show you something,” they said to me. I was two years and was rarely invited to play with the older boys unless they were coerced by some parent or other. This changed as we got older and the difference in our ages no longer constituted such a large percentage of our total age.

They took me to an alley behind what I think was a dry cleaner’s and told me to urinate into an open hole or pipe in a brick wall. The hole didn’t point but was in front of me horizontally. I wondered why I should do that but after a short hesitation I unzipped my pants and went close to the wall.

I felt a strong stream of air coming out!

Not being entirely naïve or completely stupid, I zipped up my pants and walked away from the pipe.

Brotherly love!!!

And cousinly love, too!!

My cousin Sidney was part of the family of cousins we played with most, probably as a result of the class struggle. Of course we didn’t think of it in those words. But we knew they were poor and we were poor and maybe that formed a bond between us. Maybe our other cousins, who we saw and played with sometimes, didn’t come around to play as often because they were somewhat snobbish. Maybe we played with Sidney’s family because they lived in the same poor neighborhood that we did.

But on balance, I think we played together more because our standard of living was almost the same –namely, low. They were on welfare and we weren’t and the only difference I ever noticed between how they lived and how we lived was that they got presents at Christmas time and we didn’t. We would get some little thing for Chanukah when we could afford it but as I remember it they did considerable better because the welfare people took Christmas very seriously.

They had seven kids in the family. The ones we played with most were Sidney and his younger brother Miltie and their sisters Sylvia and Selma, who were closest to our ages. Helen and Arthur were their older brother and sister and I think my sister, Florence, who was older than Dave, had more to do with them; Shirley was their baby sister. Their father was a butcher so they sometimes had good meat when he was working. All of them ended up earning decent livings and generally had good jobs when they grew up.

Their mother, Annie, ma’s older sister, wasn’t so lucky.

She was heavy, sang well and joyfully, and had a nice laugh. She had a nervous breakdown and died in a state mental institution.

Ma always believed they didn’t handle Annie’s illness properly. “They put a tag ‘violently insane’ on her bed,” ma said bitterly. “When she saw that…!

The only other time I remember ma’s saying anything about

Annie was when she said some years later, “Annie is gone already.”

Aunt Annie and her kids didn’t starve to death in “die Goldine Medina,” but, like untold millions of others, she was crushed to death by the wheel of life during the Great Depression.

I’ve often wondered what was so great about it.

One of the most glorious days of my life owed its glory to a mud fight. It was during an early Detroit spring. The air was cool and moist. And there was a huge puddle right across the street from the school. In the middle of he puddle was an island that could be reached by a narrow causeway. When I read Prescott’s “The Conquest of Mexico and Peru” many years later I recognized the similarity to the military situation around Mexico City.

We had more fun.

Some of the kids occupied the island. Others would splash them with muddy water by throwing stones in the water near the island. The kids on the island returned fire, or should I say, “returned mud.” Sometimes we occupied the island, sometimes they did. When you splashed someone good, you were thrilled. When they splashed you, you ignored it and looked for a stone or a piece of mud to throw back.

The action was fast and furious. The endorphin levels rose and fell. The rest of the world disappeared. We got muddier and muddier. This was glorious battle in which no one got hurt; we wanted it to go on forever.

Unfortunately, the school bell rang. Still more unfortunately, we could hear it across the street. We threw one more stone or piece of mud and reluctantly left the edge of the huge puddle or walked across the mud causeway from the island to the shore, under mud-fire all the way. Did we think about what the teachers would say? I know I didn’t. It was like a wild love affair, we were happy and the rest of the world didn’t matter at all.

Luckily, I was no longer in the bitch-teacher’s class. Otherwise, I might have smeared mud all over her.

We had other wonderful wars, wars without death, maiming, pain. Dave, our cousin Sidney, and I, and some other kids snuck into a part of the Old West.

It must have been some kind of stone quarry. There were enormous pieces of stone scattered on top of each other by some giant gods for a game of pick up sticks. Many were as big as railroad cars.

Most important, none was small enough so we could move it – or even budge it-and hurt ourselves.

It was a perfect place for a rubber gun war.

To make rubber gun, you made a crude gun out of wood, the main thing being to have a long barrel with a handle. It was natural wood color, no frills, no paint. I don’t think even a New York City or other cop would have mistaken it for a real gun and shot you, unless, of course, you were African-American or Latino. We didn’t have many Latinos in Detroit at the time except for a relatively small community of Mexicans and Chicanos, so you almost had to be Black to qualify for this prize. You might call it a special early form of affirmative action that continues to this day. Incidentally, I don’t remember seeing any cops, except for my uncle Joe, during my childhood and I never saw him in his uniform.

To get back to the major technical job of making a rubber band gun. First, you cut up an old inner tube (I don’t think they have them anymore. You young whippersnappers can just go out and look up what they were) to make large rubber bands between a quarter and a half inch wide.. Then you attached a clothespin of the kind that was held tightly closed by a small metal spring. If you didn’t have a fancy clothespin, you made a substitute of wood with the tension coming from a strategically placed rubber band.

You then stretched one end of the rubber band over the end of the gun and put the other end, folded over, into the tightly clamped clothespin.. When you squeezed or pressed the bottom half of the clothespin, the top opened and the gun shot the rubber band quite fast at your target.

So we climbed on the rocks and stalked each in the sun for hours and hours and hours or hid in marvelously dark natural caves and ambushed each other.

That’s the way wars should be fought.

There were other great wars. In fact, we had more Great Wars than the entire adult world put together.

They were fought with missiles, one with green barrel-shaped things with soft spikes on them; they were about an inch and a half long and about half an inch in diameter. They grew close to the ground and threw well. I don’t remember who fought that war. It remains one of the thousands of long forgotten battles of history.

The better war was fought with crabapples on the way to an important Mecca of learning - the Oakman library.

This guy Oakman was something, smart enough to have a library named after him. The way I heard the story he bought up a lot of property in a horseshoe slice of Detroit and somehow – no doubt completely honestly and without any of what my father used to call figgle-miggle business – convinced the authorities to construct a beautiful horseshoe-shaped boulevard with flowers and flowering trees right in the middle of his horseshoe.

What a lucky guy!

He became so rich, what with everybody wanting to build houses near that beautiful boulevard, that they named the boulevard and the library after him. Now I heard this story many decades ago and I don’t know for sure that’s what happened. All I know is that the boulevard was beautiful and the library was one of my family’s favorite places to go.

We were a highly cultured family and culture was fun – but not as much fun as crabapple wars. Like many thousands of immigrant families we listened to records by Caruso and Galli-Circi. I assume you know who Caruso was. For those of you who don’t know about the other singer, Amelita Galli-Curci was, “an Italian soprano in the U.S.,” born in 1889. I looked it up because I didn’t know how to spell Galli-Curci. It never did me much good but my sister Florence developed a beautiful soprano voice. Maybe if I had tried to imitate Caruso instead…

Part of our cultural activities, indeed the most common one because we could almost afford it, was walking to the library, usually the Oakman branch. At first ma took us. Later we went with .Florence or with older friends. This day I went with a boy named Rinky who had a profound understanding of the relative value of libraries and crabapple wars. For perhaps a half mile we threw crabapples at each other, ducking behind trees, careful not to step on flowers, but considering that the grass was a lower form of life and not deserving of special consideration. My best wars were always in bright sunlight and that day was no exception. We threw a lot and hit our targets infrequently, which, I suspect, was also an important part of a good war.

We took as much time as we needed for the war, which didn’t leave much for the library. That was a shame because some of the happiest days of my life had been wisely spent in a window seat in the children’s section of the Oakman library, reading and looking out the window at the wonderful trees and flowers on Oakman Boulevard.

Cardboard boxes are wonderful toys. They can be houses, forts, hiding places. In a pea shooter war they can make the difference between marching in a symbolic triumphal procession as in Aida, and slinking off to hide your face, perhaps curling your villainous mustache and saying, “Curses, foiled again!”

Unless, of course, your brothers have cardboard boxes, too.

When this war broke out, my parents and Florence were out and Sidney, Dave, and I were alone in the house with all the ingredients for a battle royal. Sidney had grown old enough to be interesting in his own right and Dave and I were friends. It was like cutthroat in pinochle – every boy for himself. We hid in the boxes and bombarded each other with peas. As the war went on new technology was developed. We covered our boxes with blankets from whatever bed we could get to first and fired at each other from our bunkers.

Sometimes we would make a raid under cover of our blankets, scurrying back when the counterattack came. We became sharpshooters, able to hit the smallest part of exposed brother. Fortunately, there were no exposed brother’s eyes.

I don’t remember cleaning up after that war or what my mother said when she came home. In this case, only the happy thoughts have survived the years.

In another war, what started out in earnest escalated, paradoxically, into fun. Either Dave shot me or I shot Dave with a water gun. Let’s say Dave shot me, just to make the telling easier. I answered by shooting him with a small hollow ball with a hole in it. He answered by shooting me with a large hollow rubber ball filled with water. I got tired of this technology and simplified things. I spilled a small pail of water on him.

As the war escalated it also changed its location. By this time we were both pretty wet and were laughing hysterically. We made our way to the back yard where, thank God, we found what we thought was the ultimate weapon. Dave squirted me with the garden hose. I think he was really much kinder than I was. I squirted him considerably more than somewhat with the hose and ran for my ultimate safe house – the bathroom where the door could be locked. (I have spent many anxious hours locked in that comparatively unsafe safe house. An older sister or a parent would eventually order me to open the door, but at least there’d be a witness to my death.) Horror of horrors! He caught me just as I tried to swing the bathroom door closed with a practiced arm, and threw me in the shower and turned the water on full force.

I suddenly had superhuman strength, induced, no doubt, by being soaking wet.

I dragged Dave into the rushing stream of water.

We both stood there in the bathroom, absolutely soaked, and laughed ‘til we cried. Maybe we laughed ‘til we had to use the bathroom for its ordinary purpose, I don’t know after all these years.

What I do know is that wars can be wonderful if no one gets hurt.

Maybe I should write to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, the class struggle went on.

One day pa told Dave and me to get in the truck. It was, I think, black with silver lettering on it. I’m sure of what it said, “Fred Cohen, licensed master plumber,” and below that, :Established 1919.” I Wondered what

“established was but, naturally, didn’t ask It wasn’t that I didn’t know what the word meant but I knew pa must have been born long before 1919 and I had no idea what was established in 1919.

We went to a plumbing supply house and pa went over to talk to the man who owned it, a guy he knew. We heard the guy say, “Can they wrestle a bathtub?”

Instead of slugging the guy or saying something nasty in return, as he might have done if he was working, pa patiently explained that we knew all the things - elbows, tees, nipples, caps ; in half-inch, inch-and-a-half and two-inch sizes –and could be very helpful in sorting out the fittings and putting them in the appropriate containers for the owner who was moving the shop to another location.

I’ve never been sure if the guy agreed that our work would be useful or not but he put us to work while pa went off to “wrestle bathtubs.” This was before he hurt his back and his bathtub wrestling days were over. I don’t know how much we were paid. We never got anything but, on the other hand, we never paid for our food and lodging.

My knowledge of plumbing fittings came in handy in another way. One day pa asked me to bring him a female part of something and later, a male part. I don’t know if pa heaved a big sigh of relief or not, but that was the only sex education lecture I ever got from my father.

It was during these dark days that pa made an important compromise of his principles to feed his family. He was. I believe, “too proud” to go on welfare but he went out many times to find a friend to lend him five dollars so we could eat. He also did something that might have been even harder for him to do. He worked actively for the Democratic Party, or at least for Frank Murphy.

Murphy was a real New Deal Democrat who was mayor of Detroit, with pa’s help, Governor of Michigan, and Supreme Court justice (pa didn’t help in that, Roosevelt did). He did one highly important thing when he was governor. He refused to send in troops – I assume the state section of the national guard – during the auto workers’ sit down strike in the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan during the mid-thirties.

The situation was tense, a stand-off between the desperate auto workers who were occupying the huge plant, and the company. I think this was after the Battle of Bull’s Run, named after the civil war battle of a similar name. In this battle, the workers, armed with chains and steel pipes, kicked the shit out of the local cops and chased them away when they attacked the plant. Demands rose in the press for the governor to send in troops to evict the strikers.

“If you send in troops, I won’t be responsible for what happens” John L. Lewis, head of the CIO, or Congress of Industrial Organizations, reportedly told Murphy. This was before even my time, but the I heard it, Lewis was Welsh and Murphy was Irish, which supposedly had some special significance going back to the old countries. Possibly much more significant was the fact that Murphy’s grandfather was a member of the Sinn Fein, the military Irish freedom organization. Murphy refused to send in the troops and the UAW-CIO, the auto workers union and my first union, was born.

So it wasn’t so bad to work for Murphy.

As a result of working for Murphy, pa got a job doing nothing.

He managed either half the city or the Jewish parts of the city in Murphy’s campaign for mayor. I heard both versions and had no way of verifying either story.. In any case, pa got the job where he was supposed to do nothing. It was easier than plumbing and more steady, but very boring. He worked for the garbage department.

His foreman, whose name, I believe, was Scully, would come over to pa and say,” What’s your job?”

“Ask the mayor,” pa would answer, and Scully would walk away defeated. But a city that could afford to hire a man to do nothing during the worst times of the depression apparently couldn’t afford to hire a first aid person in the garbage department, where injuries were frequent. Nor could they afford to have any other medical personnel. The trucks would come in with injured men (they didn’t hire women for such work in Detroit at the time) or the men would be hurt in the yard; in some cases they lay bleeding where they fell, or stood and watched their hands or arms bleed.

Either through experience or through trial and error, which is essentially the same thing, pa became a pretty good first aid man. I don’t think he was ever given any formal training since no trained person was ever assigned to the job.

“I had nothing to do and I couldn’t just stand around and watch men bleed,” pa said. Scully was probably pleased pa had something to do, too.

The experience was also useful when my grandfather fell and hit his head on the sidewalk outside his house. He had a great big ugly bump on the top of his forehead; pa, who was visiting at the time, promptly put ice on it, made zayda comfortable and warm, and calmed him down and reassured him.

I was impressed, both with the job pa did and by the big round bump on zayda’s head, Where did the material that made up the bump come from? Was there some material missing somewhere else in zayda’s body and, if so, where? Ah, the mysteries of life! I wonder if the doctors know?

Pa now had an easier steady job for the City and was doing useful work that he enjoyed doing and that the men appreciated. He was getting $35.00 a week and could feed his family and have a little left over. Ma was freed from her perpetual slavery to the telephone and could go ut a little more. With our mazel (luck) it didn’t last.

First they cut pa’s salary from $35.00 to $26.00 a week, a devastating cut. Then they stopped paying money at all. They had no money so they paid the city employees in paper called “scrip,” which was essentially nonmoney. You might think of it as a promise by the city to pay when they could. Most grocers and other merchants were very trusting. They would accept scrip but would give less than face value in goods; I think the discount ran about 10 or 20%.

We were desperate, or maybe semi-desperate, again.

Pa had one other political job after Murphy was elected governor. He became chief plumber for the State of Michigan and went to work in the state capital in Lansing. He was paid $1800 a year or $75 every two weeks. He had to pay rent in Lansing where he worked and in Detroit where we lived, and had to commute home on weekends.

Pa asked for a raise.

“The man before me made $65,000 in two years on a salary of $1800 a year,” pa told us. “He’d need a single 20-foot length of half-inch pipe and order a railroad car full. I told the governor, ‘ your excellency, if I want to steal, I’ll go out and get a gun’ He called me “Fred,” but I called him ‘your excellency.’”

Pa couldn’t support his family on the chief plumber’s salary and he quit.

While he was working as chief plumber he installed hot water in the state senate for the first time. Apparently there were some complicated technical problems that “the biggest engineers,” as pa put it, couldn’t solve but pa did.

Dave and I met Murphy when he was mayor. Pa took us down to city hall to meet the big man. When we came home, ma asked us how we liked the mayor.

“Oh, he was all right,” we told her. “But he had a wonderful dog that was half Saint Bernard and half bulldog.” We then went on to tell her all about this magnificent dog.

I knew about bulldogs, which we saw all the time., and about Saint Bernards because there was a beautiful one in the neighborhood that Florence and Dave and I loved to stare at from close up through binoculars so he would look gigantic. We also looked at him through the big end of the binoculars, which made him look very small. I would only do this for a second or two because I thought it was wrong to make him look smaller, It was like cutting the legs off Hank Greenberg or Joe Louis.

So Dave and I knew all about Saint Bernards. We had never seen a dog that was half Saint Bernard and half bulldog before.

The mayor’s wonderful dog was a boxer.

A supreme court justice bought me my first steak.

Actually, he wasn’t a supreme court justice yet. Frank Murphy was mayor at the time and he used to come to the Turkish bath where pa took Dave and me. I don’t think he took the steam. My impression is that he just dropped in and bought steaks for everybody.

It was not only my first steak but also my only steak until I was grown. It was charcoal broiled, rare and juicy and served with dill pickles on an oval wooden board. It was also enormous. We ate it with pumpernickel and drank strawberry soda mixed with seltzer as we always did (it was cheaper that way). It was wonderful. I couldn’t finish all of mine and pa was ashamed of me; He and Dave made up for my deficiency by finishing my steak in addition to their own.

Going to the Turkish bath was an important part of my life when I was growing up. Pa took Dave and me for many years, starting in my case when I was eight. My first trip to the bath house was not a total success. I saw all these men walking around with sheets wrapped around them, thought it was a hospital, and ran out. Pa had to take me home, which must have thrilled him no end.

But later I came to love the bath house. It didn’t look like much. On the first floor people sat around and ate or drank or played cards with sheets draped around their Every night except Wednesday it was all men. Wednesday night was “ladies night, “ or so they told us. Upstairs were beds where you could sleep after the intense heat and sweating left you weak. The building was kind of old and run down looking and was in an old and run down part of town, now largely (surprise!) a Black neighborhood.

But the great part was the basement where the steam room and swimming pool were located.. There were also showers and sturdy wooden tables where you could get a “rub,” a kind of wash, stretch, and manipulation, which pa gave us. The highlight of this for me was when pa crossed my arms on my chest and put some of his 200 pounds on me and I was always afraid he’d break me, or some part of me. When I survived that part of the rub and all of the stretching, I took a shower and felt grateful as hell.

What a wonderful experience. I actually did feel more limber when he was finished. Pa gave us the rub himself since he was as good as the professional rubbers and considerably cheaper. He also gave us our “platesas.”

The platesa (spelled phonetically; you pronounce it as it looks: “plate sa” with the accent on the first syllable) was the heart of the steam room just as the steam room was the heart of the bath house. The steam room consisted of some broad dark wooden benches or shelves, some higher than others. It was like a bar – the top shelf was the best – if you liked to burn.

There were two rows of shelves, one to the left of the door when you came in and one straight ahead. A dim light in the ceiling made it hard to see until your eyes became used to the lighting, or lack of it. In the wall opposite the entrance was an open iron door or box; in the box were red hot stones. Every once in a while a man would fling a pail of hot water on the stones and a burst of steam would flood the room.

It was heaven.

Dave and I loved to sit on the “cooler” side to the left of the door with a pail of cold water and a soft hat like the one Zeppo Marx wore. When we got too hot we filled our hats with cold water and poured it over our heads. This was all preliminary to the major business of the bath house, which was the platesa.

Here, again, pa did the work, that is, he gave us our platesas.

For your platesa you lay on the top shelf near the hot stones, the hottest part of the steam room. Pa would wash you with a brush made of eucalyptus leaves bound together with wire at one end, spreading out into a wide circle at the other. He would stand over you, put the brush into a tub of hot, soapy water and rub it over your body time after time. A cold water spout was near your head, a flexible “Zeppo” hat was on top of your head, and a folded towel was under your face.

When you got too hot you filled your hat with cold water and poured it over your head. Unfortunately, you usually had time to fill it partially before the heat made you pour the water on your head and put the cool, wet hat back on your head. You could also drink some cold water from the tap from time to time and put some on your folded towel.

Oh yes, in case you want to breathe, you’ll probably find it necessary to breathe through the wet towel.

It’s great fun.

When you re properly cooked you climb down, stagger out the door and dive into the ice-cold swimming pool. I did this from the age of eight until I was 12. Then I heard it was bad for the heart and I stopped diving into the pool immediately after my platesa. Instead, I took a shower first, then went for a freezing swim.

I got to be quite good at taking the heat an really did enjoy it. One part was a little tricky for me though, when I had to turn over on my back and breathe only through the towel with no cold water tap within easy reach. Pa knew this wsnot a good experience and kept the time I was lying on my back short. Hot as it was for the person getting the platesa, it was otter for the rubber, the man giving it. He was standing over you and therefore hotter since heat rises. Every once in a while pa would pour a bucket of cold water over his head and continue hid work.

But pa would only do this for Dave and me and once in a while for a friend who would later give him a platesa. Alekhel, his friend, did this for a living and was in the heat all day long. I’m reminded of Countee Cullen’s wonderful line, “Yet do I marvel at this wonderful thing. To make a poet Black and bid him sing!”

I can still hear alekhel’s towering operatic voice filling the steam room with glory and flowers and perfume and rainbows as he worked in the bowels of hell to make other people happy and to feed himself.

He probably would have known how Countee Cullen felt.

The backs of the men who came to the bath house looked like walls, none of the V-shaped high definition stuff you see in health clubs nowadays. These guys got strong from (horrors!) working. They were Jewish plumbers, steamfitters, carpenters and bricklayers and their builds were square.

Their waists were almost as big as their shoulders in many cases and their shoulders were huge. Even the short ones like my father looked like tanks.

Theirs was a generation of starvation and had work.

I remember reading in a book called, “The Jewish Anarchists how some Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms in Russia went for three weeks without food in London, their first promise land. I found that almost unbelievable but there it was in print in book, so it must be true. These men looked well-fed, maybe too well-fed, suffering from a disease that afflicts many, if not most, immigrant mothers of all nationalities – trying to make up for past starvation by pressing food on those they loved.

Who knew when the tap might be cut off?

A few of the men didn’t work with their hands. One man pa knew was some kind of contractor who owed pa money. He was a “wise guy,” not in the modern sense of a mob member, just a guy who thought he was smarter and better than everybody else, the kind you find at or near the top of most organizations, including left political organizations.

“Double or nothing,” the guy says to pa.

Pa had worked hard for that money and needed it. He wasn’t a gambler, but the contractor kept pushing until pa agreed. They flipped a coin and pa won.

“Double or nothing,” the guy said again.

Dave and I were both pretty good at arithmetic and logic so we both knew that if they kept doing that. pa would eventually end up with nothing for all his hard work. Pa knew it, too.

“Come on, Fred,: the man said. “One more time.”

Finally, pa said reluctantly, “O.K. One more time.” They flipped the coin and pa won again.

“Double or nothing,” the guy said again. Dave and I looked at each other. We thought pa was going to kill him. Pa looked grim.

“O.K., “ pa said, “One more time.” They flipped the coin and pa won again.

“Double or nothing,” the man said again.

Pa said, “No.”

Dave, who unlike me could write legibly, made up a bill, writing with a pencil on a piece of wood he got somewhere. I’m not sure of the initial amount, but the bill looked something like this:

Amount owed: 20..00

Double or nothing. Double 40.00

Double or nothing. Double 80,00

Double or nothing. Double…...160.00

Total amount now owed: $160.00

The man not only had a large amount of money to pay, he had to pay it in response to a bill written on a piece of wood, while being watched by two giggling young boys. Pa was quiet, but his face was very serious.

The guy paid. As someone who was dating my sister Florence many years later put it, ”You don’ argue with Fred Cohen. I would be the last to disagree with that. Later at home, Dave and I laughed like hell, let out giant whoops, and kept repeating, “Double or nothing, double or nothing, and then we’d laugh and carry on some more. Florence and ma and Sidney soon joined us, although I’m not sure Sidney was old enough to understand what was going on. Pa told the story a couple of times to make sure everyone understood it, laughing all the time. None of us ever told him we’d heard any of his stories before. You didn’t argue with Fred Cohen.

But pa was more aware than anyone I ever met of the fleeting nature of strength and life.

“You see that man, “ he said to Dave and me one day in the steam room, indicating a skinny old man sitting on the top shelf of the cooler part of the room. “That man is 75 years old. One time when he was a young man a guy fell under a wagonload of hay. He was screaming for help. That man lifted the wagon and the horse and everything and saved the guy Now he’s just a skinny old man.”

“A man is like a fly, He can die in a second,” pa told us. He also talked about strength sometimes. “Nobody is strong, nobody is tough; there’s always a better man.” Later when I began to work out and would swell up my chest to make myself look stronger and my build look better, he took the wind out of my sails a little.

“You’re not even a pimple on a good man’s ass,” he told me.

With my confidence restored, I let my chest fall into its normal position and changed the subject.

One other incident at the bath house confirmed pa’s ideas on the fleeting nature of life and health. The men played cards quite frequently and took their card games seriously. I don’t know if they played for money. If they did I never saw any signs of it, no money, no chips. One of the men who worked at the bath house was named “Shopsa,” which I remember because Shopsa is a much more interesting name than Leonard. I don’t know how it would have felt living with it in the modern United States, but he, apparently, was quite pleased with it.

He wasn’t pleased with the card-playing, however.

Pa told ma and Florence and Dave and I overheard, that Shopsa had been dealt a thousand aces in single pinochle and got so excited he had a stroke. We weren’t there at the time and I’m not even sure if it happened at the bath house or somewhere else. He recovered gradually over a long period of time but he was never the same again.

But most of my memories of the bath house are happy ones and happy pictures live in our hearts for a long time. I can still see Dave and me, two little boys with black hear and dark eyes with sheets draped around hem, sitting at a table in the bath house drinking strawberry pop (which New Yorkers call “soda”) and seltzer and playing with a miraculous pepper shaker. It was made of what looked like a gray metal. When you pushed it over onto its side, it sprang up into the upright position all by itself! We would sit at one of the tables and push the little pepper shaker over and watch it right itself for a long time every time we went to the bath house. We were happy, secure, content, and entertained.

I told you I was retarded.

Generally speaking, school was much less interesting than the bath house although it had its moments. My first two schools were named after the notorious general Custer, who I didn’t know was notorious until much later, and the wrong Roosevelt.

Well, what can you expect from schools?

Custer was a school in harmony with its name. I didn’t mind flunking kindergarten (not literally). I was lousy at cutting and pasting and still am. But what was that compared with the infinite happiness of seeing my flaming redheaded girlfriend, Elsie May Waterlawn every day?

School was a marvelous place!

In the first few grades almost everything went well except that I couldn’t write legibly. My homeroom teacher never corrected my holding the pen facing in the wrong direction. She said I did that because I’m left-handed. I didn’t learn to write at Custer but I did learn something very important.

I learned to be afraid and to shut up and do what I was told. fortunately or unfortunately the lesson didn’t last long.

Like everyone else at Custer, I had heard of the whipping machine Miss Boston, the principal, kept in the office. Like everyone else, I firmly believed in its existence. It had a marvelous effect on our behavior.

In the early grades we hadn’t learned to be naughty yet anyway. When we weren’t writing or doing something else that required our hands to be in any other position, we had to sit with our hands on the corners of our desks with our backs straight and our eyes straight ahead. Maybe if Custer’s men had been allowed to look around they wouldn’t have been wiped out.

However, at the time I didn’t see anything wrong with any of this. It was simply the way things were at school.

In the big empty lot outside of school things were different. That was where we had our great mud war, where we wrestled with big kids, five or six of us against one seventh or eighth grader, who was, thank God, very careful not to hurt us. Here, too, we “lot kids” gathered the snowballs that we bombarded the “door kids” with as they waited for the school doors to open.

We had great fun outside of school, if not in it.

The only African American kid I remember at school was the champion at ledge wrestling, in which you stood on a narrow white ledge that ran around the school building about three or four feet off the ground, held on to the metal protective screens on the windows, gripped the hand of your opponent, and tried to pull him off the ledge. I was much too small to be a competitor in this game, but I always enjoyed watching the big kids, giants to me, who were in the seventh and eighth grades, do ledge wresting before the bell rang to call us to class and the iron discipline of Custer school.

I remember most of my fights but have no idea what caused them. At Ciister I fought the kids I remember as the two German brothers. I fought them both at once. I think they were twins and remember wondering if that gave them the right to both fight with me at once. I was in the second or third grade and we fought in the playground behind the school.

Then there was the kid named “Scott.” I don’t remember what he called me, but I called him “Scott tissue,” but that was after we knew we were going to fight. His brother, who was watching along with members of both families, kept telling him, “Hit him where grandpa told you.” He didn’t. I won. I lost to Russel who knew something about boxing, which I didn’t, and who somehow always managed to hit me when I was standing near a brick wall in the alley where we fought, so that my head kept hitting the wall. As you may have gathered, I lost that one. I grew up faster and stronger than Russel did and could have beaten him quite easily by the time we were in high school but by that time, unfortunately, we were friends. On the other hand, I beat Jack Rosberg but by the time we were in high school Jack had become a body builder and could have killed me; fortunately, in this case, we, too, had become friends by then.

The two most memorable fights, if you can call them that, had to do with fried bacon and 16-below outdoor temperature.

As I said, I quickly unlearned the lesson about keeping my mouth shut or at least thinking before I spoke (I still have trouble with that one). One day I was walking near the school and saw two boys pressing a Y-shaped stick against the groin of a kid I knew named Alan Simon. His back was against a large tree. I must have been in the third or fourth grade since I was still in what they called at Custer the “lower platoon, “ which only included the lower grades.

“Let him alone!” I yelled as I approached them.

They did. They left him immediately and began chasing me.

They kept on chasing me all through the fall semester and through a long, cold Detroit winter I don’t know how many of them there were but it turned out there were a gang of them. Nor did I ever find out why they were bothering Alan or what they were doing to him. I was too busy running.

My main escape mechanism was going out the wrong door after school so they couldn’t find me. To do this I had to break a major school rule. I went out a door reserved for members of the upper platoon.

I dressed light so I could run faster. My favorite outer garment was a blue sweat shirt with bright yellow around the upper arms and shoulders. It was tight-fitting and didn’t hinder rapid movement; indeed, it seemed to enhance it.

“Leonard, put something on,” ma used to tell me.

“I’m fine,” I’d answer.

This went on all winter. We only lived a half block from the school or I’d have frozen to death. The snow was on the ground from late fall to early spring. In fact one of my favorite gams was walking on the large piles of snow between the sidewalk and the curb or playing “king of the mountain” on huge mountains of snow. (Of course a mountain to a third grader wasn’t the same as it was to an adult, but, then, a third grader wasn’t the same size as an adult either.)

On the day it was 16 below ma said, “Leonard, put something on,”

“I’m fine,” I answered.

I could see by her face that she had some misgivings but knew that she had concluded a long time before that I was, in her words, “a stubborn mule” and it would be useless to argue with me.

So I flew to school and flew home like some yellow-winged bird until my pursuers finally caught on. One day as I was going out the upper platoon door a fairly big kid named Vargas, I think, was there waiting for me.

I still remember the crunch as I hit him in the face.

No scientific boxing here, just caught him by surprise; no “lead with the right if you’re left-handed”; no feints, no jabs. I just smashed him full in the face with my left hand with all the power and anger of being chased for months, all the fear of a chased and trapped animal.

That ended it. Not that it was a one-punch knockout. We were caught by monitors and taken to the office where Miss Boston kept her dreaded whipping machine. In the inquisition that followed one clever little bastard was a subtle stool pigeon.

“I don’t blame him for going out the upper platoon door, “ he squealed, thus getting his information out and trying to blame the victim and make himself sound like a good guy. As far as I know the whipping machine wasn’t used in this case. Whatever Miss Boston did to any and all of us is gone into the clouds and snows of that long-ago era.

The upshot was that I didn’t go out the upper platoon door and they didn’t chase me any more.

That seemed fair to me.

The “fried bacon” thing was shorter and more painful.

Fred Barron was a young version of pa: short, fat, broad, and powerful. One day we had a substitute teacher. When she read the role, she made a slight mistake. “Fred Bacon,” she said.

Ever quick and brilliant, I called out so the whole class could hear, “That’s ‘FRIED bacon.’” Fred hit me immediately in the upper arm. Hard.

It still hurts.

When ma wasn’t a prisoner of the telephone we had fun.

One of our favorite things to do was to walk to baba’s house. Ma would set out on a Saturday with the four kids, walking the three miles, partly along the streetcar tracks. Since the fare was six cents we could not have taken the street car in those dollar-a-day times. Six time four is twenty four cents, a prohibitive amount even in the days when Sidney was young enough not to have to pay on the streetcar but old enough to make the walk. And six times five was thirty cents! Out of the question!

Besides, baba and zayda were orthodox and they wouldn’t have tolerated our riding on a Saturday.

I don’t remember resting when we got to baba’s house but I do remember playing with my cousins, the Goldmans, especially Sidney, Miltie, Sylvia and Selma. I think my aunt Jean and her husband, uncle Jack, were living there for part of the time and aunt Annie, the mother of the Goldman kids, was often there. Sometimes my richer relatives were also there, but we mostly saw them at Pesach (Passover).

We would play all day, indoors and out. Florence and the girl cousins, sometimes with their older sister, Helen, would spend a lot of time in the kitchen talking with baba or among themselves. Sometimes our older cousin, Arthur, would be there and he would join in the general singing that we sometimes did. He, like a number of the others and especially my sister, Florence, had a beautiful voice. Ma would talk to baba and zayda and to the other adults mostly. Zayda would joke with the kids and baba would give us treats. When it began to get dark we would all watch to see when the streetlights were on, so we would know when the Sabbath was over and it was all right to turn on the lights.

“Leonard, go see if the streetlights are on,” they would tell me. Sometimes they used another name and another kid.

Very biblical. I’m sure it started with Moses, “Moses, go see if he streetlights are on,” That’s why he went to Egypt in the first place.

Zadya loved to talk and joke with the kids. He would ask us, “How do you spell ‘lakhlakhlakhis’?” It wasn’t easy. You try it.

Sometimes pa was there, too. He and zayda and the other grown-ups would play double pinochle or a game called “Klaberyash.” Nowadays nobody in the world knows how to play it.

They would say in loud voices, “Got it?” “Make it!”

Sometimes they banged their cards down on the table, an essential part of the game.

We kids, too, would play cards when we came over on Sundays or, after the lights were turned on, on Saturdays. We played a lot of pinochle and hearts after we graduated from fish and war. I loved double pinochle; it was so easy to get big scores.

We played our cards on the original round table, inherited directly from the Jewish knights who served with King Arthur. It was very big, made of sturdy dark wood, and would probably be worth a fortune today. It was worth a fortune to us then, a center of happiness.

If it wouldn’t make me throw up, I’d say it was a center of family values.

An oil company contributed to our family values, too.

Zip gas was 10 cents a gallon. On summer nights pa would say, “Let’s go for a ride in the tin can,” or ma would say, “Let’s take a ride,” and we’d we off. Often Florence’s friend, Ethyl Abelkop, who, I’m sure, spelled her name somewhat differently, would come along.

We would ride out the old Norhwestern Highway, since named Frank Cousins Highway. It was dangerous if you sat in the seat behind the driver; while it wasn’t exactly a death seat, it wasn’t pleasant when pa spat into the wind and you had the window open.

But the main thing about these rides, besides the cool, if sometimes moist, breeze on a hot night was the singing. Florence and Ethyl had wonderful voices. I don’t know for sure if they were both sopranos, but I think they were. I know they sang beautifully. Pa had a rich baritone. Ma and he rest of us sang pretty well with one exception.

My singing was lousy.

It didn’t matter. We all enjoyed it tremendously. We sang the songs from all the light operas, what I would have called the Nelson Eddy—Jeanette MacDonald songs if I had been sure of the spelling. We sang the Italian Street Song, and the Indian Love Call, and all of the songs from “The Desert Song,” and “New Moon,” and all the rest. I think we also sang popular songs, too, but the ones that stuck in my mind are the ones from the operettas where Florence and Ethyl’s voices soared and sounded unimaginable beautiful.

We also sang Wobbly, or IWW, songs and other labor and political songs and I loved them, too.

We sang “Long Haired Preachers,” and “Joe Hill, “ and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.” Pa’s powerful (what else?) voice roared off into the night. “Long haired preachers come out every night, every night. Try to tell us what’s wrong and what’s right, and what’s right. When we ask about something to eat, something to eat. They will answer in voices so sweet, Oh, so sweet:’” (We really hammed it up on that chorus, with a million variations on “Oh, so sweet.”) “You will eat. By and by, In that glorious land above the sky, a way up high. Work and pray. And live on hay. You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

Here our voices on the chorus became a little loud as those of the wandering unemployed wobblies must have done a long, long time before, “THAT’S A LIE!”

And the next verse:

“When you work hard for children and wife, children and wife,. Try to get something good out of life. You’re a sinner and bad man they tell. When you die you will surely go to hell.”

“GO TO HELL,” we all sang at the top of our lungs.

And the rip-roaring last verse, “Working men of all countries unite. Side by side for our future we’ll fight. When this world and its wealth we have gained. To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain: ‘You will eat, By and by. When you learn how to cook AND HOW TO FRY. Chop some wood. T’will do you good. You’ll get pie in the sky when you die’”

‘THAT’S A LIE!” we all roared. It made for a glorious night.

Some of the other Wobbly songs were terrific, too, but in none of them could we sing “Go to hell” at the top of our lungs and not get in trouble for it.

Thank God for Zip gas. I knew oil companies were good for something.

Pa also sang workers and revolutionary songs from many countries. He sang one particularly stirring song that shook the heavens. It also shook me to my soul.

“You can just HEAR the Russian revolutionary spirit in that song!” I said with a voice loaded with revolutionary spirit and enthusiasm. Pa said, “It’s the Mexican national anthem.”

Mothers are strange creatures.

I loved my mother very much but in her case the evidence was overwhelming. I wrote my first poem when I was eight years old, the same year I first went to the bath house. It went like this;

LINCOLN

President Lincoln was very great

He used his brain to concentrate

On important issues of the day

Our great Lincoln used to say,

With slavery we must not toy,

This great evil we must destroy.

He planned with Sheridan, Sherman, and Grant.

To him there was no such word as ‘can’t…’

I don’t remember the last two lines but I can’t imagine they would have saved this great work. Imagine any last line you like. (Also imagine the poem is centered under the title.)

Ma loved it, or at least she said she did.

Now, Dave was excellent at drawing and ma encouraged him as she should have. Florence had a very fine singing voice and ma loved it and encouraged her as she should have. Florence was also a fine poet and wrote two wonderful classic books of poetry, “9547 Greeley,” and, “Moving Away,” among others, but I don’t know at what age she started writing. Whenever it was, I’m sure ma encouraged her as she should have, especially since pa was a poet, too.

But “Lincoln!:” Come on!! Did I get better as time went on? Not for the next few years. Recently I came across a group of poems from the next four or five years, during which she continued to encourage me and praise my poetry.

As I say, mothers are strange creatures.

Here is a more recent poem:

HIROSHIMA NO MORE

(After seeing the ballet, “No More Hiroshimas–A Lone Star Shining”)

I was all right

Until I touched her hair

And then I cried

You didn’t notice

We knew the story

They danced, Their

faces spoke

The music rose and fell

The children played the

Parts of all the

Children

My tears were not

Of blood

They weren’t many

A tear or two

And while they

Danced and died

Upon the stage

My old karate fist

A hardening of the soul

I didn’t cry

Until I

Touched

Her

Hair.

I’m kind of glad my mother was strange.

Going to Roosevelt after Custer was like being a balloon as the air

Rushes out – you shoot around out of control in all directions.

My grades continued to be good except in behavior only now the infractions were more serious in the eyes of the teachers. They couldn’t have been very serious really or I’d remember what they were. I loved having more freedom and a little more variety in what we did. We went to the radio station where “The Green Hornet” was broadcast and met Michael Axford, or the actor who played Michael Axford, I’m not sure which. They told us what an ‘electrical transcription” was (it looked like a giant black record to me) and showed us how sound effects are made for radio broadcasts.

Roosevelt was part of a three-school complex with green grounds and a track and playgrounds and even swimming pools in the intermediate school and the high school. It was a step up. Now there were more rich kids for us to be poorer than, but there were also plenty of poor kids.

Not much else happened at Roosevelt that is worth mentioning. I did fall in love with one of my teachers, Miss McMillan, who was pretty, smiled a lot, liked me, and let us read whatever we wanted to from a great library she kept in the homeroom for a whole period if we did well in spelling. The way it worked was this: she would give use what was called an inventory test and if we spelled all the words right we could go to her class library and have “free reading” for the spelling period all week. On Fridays we had an achievement test and all the kids who had been studying spelling all week and all the kids who had been reading all week were tested on the same words we had had to spell on the inventory test.

One of the most memorable events of my life was when I got everything right on the inventory test and misspelled a word on the achievement test. And in Miss McMillan’s class, too! What a shandur! (Yiddish for shame, only it always seemed stronger maybe because it was Yiddish and therefore, since I didn’t really know much Yiddish, exotic.)

Miss McMillan knew I liked her so both of us were very embarrassed. I never did that again.

But the big thing about the class was the adventure books she had in the library, since adventure stories were my main reading. Miss McMillan’s books fit right in with what I read at home, which I did for hours, lying on the floor in the living room under a big floor lamp. Howard Pease’s stories of the sea, Joseph A. Altschuler’s large series on the Revolutionary War and his even larger series on the Civil War (since he felt he had to have one of his heroes from the North and one, his cousin from their Kentucky home town, on the side of the South) were a large part of my reading during one period.

Ma said I was wild because of the adventure books I read and threatened to make me stop reading them but my reaction was so clearly horrified, and, I assume, pathetic, that she relented. I don’t remember being wild or even knowing what wild behavior in a pre-teenager was, but I guess those around me did.

There was also Jack London, who I tried to read completely; in addition to his well-known classics like “The Call of the Wild,” I read “The Iron Heel” in which he predicted fascism, when I was 10, and “The War of the Classes,” which described the horrors of poverty under capitalism, while lying in the sun on a hillside near the swimming pools at River Rouge Park. I also read a lot of animal books, travel books, sports books, and every other kind of book I came across in the vast treasure house of the children’s section of the library, usually the Oakman branch.

But I mostly loved adventure stories and was, therefore, wild.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” was a big hit in our family. I don’t remember any poetry in Miss McMillan’s library, but outside of that she was a perfect teacher with a perfect library at an almost perfect school.

Nobody ever mentioned a whipping machine at Roosevelt.

“Don’t come in the bath ROOM.”

The shout had to be rhythmic with the accent on the last word. The door had to be swung shut in one motion, letting go of the doorknob at the last second so that the momentum caused it to close.

Other families had locks on the bathroom door; we had a magical formula for keeping our private parts private.

Actually, we sometimes had a lock on the bathroom door but the times that made the biggest impression on me were those when we didn’t.

We also had toilet tissue most of the time. But the words that linger through the decades, always delivered in a voice that was brave and plaintive at the same time, are:

“Slide some paper under the door.”

It wouldn’t help in many cases but it might. In my ideal society everyone who wanted to run for president or other office of any union, political party, branch of government, or any other organization (except corporations – we wouldn’t have any) would have to shout, “Don’t come in the bath ROOM,” and say “slide some paper under the door “ at least once a day. Maybe twice a day after being elected.

In front of a large crowd, of course.

Pa was an atheist. His views on religion could be, and were, summed up in three words: “It’s all bullshit.” We didn’t discuss it often and those are the only words I ever heard him say on the subject. Ma never went to synagogue as far as I know except for a wedding of some close relative like a grandchild.

So, naturally, I had to have a full orthodox bar mitzvah.

Zayda was one of the 50 top Jewish scholars in the country so he taught me what to say and do. By this time he was very old, which may explain why he didn’t tell me anything in English or even Yiddish about what it all meant. I never knew what he did for a living except when he was old. Then, this gentle, brilliant old man was a night watchman. If I was a burglar his would be the place to rob. On the other hand, he was so highly moral and principled to die trying to save whatever he was supposed to watch as to surrender it meekly.

Come to think of it, I think it was a building.

“O.K., sonny, take the building if you feel you have to. But you must know it’s a terrible sin.”

Actually, he wouldn’t talk like that at all but I’m not sure he wouldn’t think that way. It’s hard to predict how highly moral people are likely to act. You meet so few of them. I knew very little about biology and hormones so I was convinced that I grew three inches in height that year due to my sitting very straight on the streetcar on the way to zayda’s house to study and memorize the Hebrew text I had to sing and to learn about the religious accessories I had to know how to put on for my bar mitzah.

Er hut nicht kain stimule.” I didn’t know much Yiddish, but it still hurt (unlike Fred Barron’s punch, the pain has long since vanished). I knew the first part “He has no,” and I guessed correctly that the last word must mean “voice.”O.K. I knew it was true., but I didn’t think it was that bad.

Florence said I had a pleasant voice but my ear wasn’t so good. How do you say that in Yiddish and why didn’t the unknown guy who said that put it the way my favorite sister put it?

The other highlight of my bar mitzvah was much more memorable and much more unpleasant.

A few days, if not the actual day before, my bar mitzvah I didn’t have a suit to wear. Ma and I went downtown on the bus to tr to pawn her wedding ring for enough to buy me a suit. I had always hated going shopping with ma, being dragged from boring store to boring store looking for boring things to buy if they were cheap enough. And such trips always came after the unpleasant experience of wearing out a cheap pair of Thom McCan shoes (the only kind they had I think; that’s why we shopped there and that’s why they wore out so fast) or wearing a hole in the knees of a pair of cheap pants,“Why do you have to play on your knees?” ma or pa would ask, their voices full of pain and anger and frustration. Parents didn’t understand anything.

So shopping trips downtown with ma were always bad. The only good thing was when we had lunch at the dime store. I usually had a hot turkey sandwich with string beans and mashed potatoes and gravy, the highlight of which was the cranberry sauce. Sometimes we had dessert. I believe we sometimes had only dessert. Ma loved lemon pie and coffee. Her face would light up with happiness and mine would reflect hers. It was a pleasure to watch her eat her lemon pie.

But there was very little that was pleasant that day. We would go to a pawn shop. The man would offer ma ten dollars on the ring. Ma would ask if he couldn’t lend a little more and he’d say: “No.” So we went to another pawnshop. And another. And another. Finally she took the ten dollars, which seemed to be the universally established price for ma’s wedding ring..

By then it was very late and we had to find a store that was still open, with a suit that fit or could be altered that day and most important of all, cost ten dollars or less. Finally, after unspeakable aggravation, humiliation anxiety and heartbreak, we did.

The rest of the bar mitzvah went all right. We had enough food and drink for the guests. I got presents. Everybody lied and said I sang the Hebrew (which I didn’t understand at all) very well. I got a watch, a Benrus, which I ruined shortly afterward when it was rudely shocked when I was batting in softball. Apparently their slogan, “Ask for Benrus, the shockproof watch” wasn’t quite accurate. If you hit the ball hard it might, and in fact did, shock the hell out of the watch.

I was particularly disappointed because I had considered taking the watch off when I batted because I was afraid I might harm it but decided not to because of that catchy slogan, “Ask for Benrus, the shockproof watch.” So I left it on when I batted.

Did I get a shock!

The memory of that day of pawnshops, seeing ma rejected by pawnshop after pawnshop, our desperation and fear that I wouldn’t have a suit for the big day and our potential shame before everyone we knew, seeing the pain it caused ma, did more to radicalize me than the Wobblies, Jack London, our general poverty or my rapidly developing hatred of injustice in the world at large.

I don’t remember if the suit was brown or blue. It could just as well have been red.

YOUTH AND POLITICS

I attended my first meeting of the Communist Party when I was 14, joined the Young Communist League at 15, and the Communist Party at 16.You might say these organizations had an important influence on my life.

During my pre-teen years and early teens, however, the political influence wasn’t that great. Sports, school, and politics, playing and family life, reading and music went on side by side.

Sports, for example, were among my must important activities. Dave and I used to play touch football 12 hours a day. We were lucky. We lived in the middle of the block so we were able to play with the kids on one corner for six hours and with the kids on the other corner for six more hours. I can’t imagine why the kids from one corner didn’t just go to the other end of the block and play wherever there was a game but they usually didn’t. We were lucky – we didn’t have to make such a long journey to find a game. And we loved football..

It made for a good life. Dave was a good passer and I was a good receiver and we almost always played on the same side. Naturally, we developed certain trick plays that weren’t exactly tricky by today’s standards. My favorite was to just let anybody know how fast I could run. So I would go out for a long and suddenly run much faster than I had been running and get ahead of the guy and catch the touchdown pass. How subtle! Just to make it harder for the other side, once in a while I’d curve back toward Dave or even cut across the field toward the right.

It had to be toward the right. I couldn’t catch on the other side.

We were very successful. In this case our opponents were the ones who were retarded.

Before my time, or a least before my football-playing time (thank God), Dave played tackle on the asphalt streets without equipment. Maybe he wasn’t such a genius after all.

Football, and tackle football at that, gave me one of the two pieces of evidence that convinced me there really was a God. I was playing one of my few games of tackle in a nice soft field near our house and had put my glasses on the running board of a parked car. I looked over toward the car and saw to my horror that the car was gone! We were still very poor and the loss of my glasses would have been a major disaster. Could we afford to get another pair right away? Could I see well enough to go to school with enormous trouble and embarrassment? What the hell was I going to do?

Naturally, being very smart, I ran around like a chicken with his head cut off. I also writhed in pain like a snake with HIS head cut off. I obviously didn’t cry visibly in front of my tackle-playing friends. Inside, however, I was full of enormous fear and pain, like a smart chicken who knows what’s coming when she’s invited to step outside the henhouse for a minute.

I ran to the street and tried to catch the car. I knew, I thought, which way the car had been facing. I ran as fast as I could to the corner. No car. A quick guess as to which way he might have gone. I ran to the next block. Again no car. Now I headed back to the field where we had been playing. Maybe it fell off the running board. Maybe someone had found it. I also had to be sure I wasn’t crying when I reached the field. I could feel the tears fighting to come out only they seemed to be coming out of my chest. I ran faster.

When I got back to the field the car was parked in the same spot it had been in before. My glasses were still on the running board. I retrieved them immediately, put them on and left the game.

I concluded there must be a God after all. But why should he be so nice to me? I searched my memory for something good I had done.

God obviously sees things the rest of us don’t see.

The other incident between God and me also had to do with sports. I was riding my small bike outside a synagogue on Yom Kippur, trying to make a complete circle in as small a square as I could on the sidewalk Boy did God give it to me!!!

The front wheel became twisted so badly it couldn’t be repaired.

It wasn’t intentional disrespect. After all my grandparents were orthodox. I just found it a convenient place to play. God didn’t buy it. He wouldn’t let me take it back. He wouldn’t fix my bike. NOTHING1

I’m not fooling with him again.

A much more serious event having to do with bikes happened a few years later. Thirteen year old Beverly Lee, a Black youth, was riding his bike on the street in his neighborhood when he was shot and killed by a white cop. I was very much affected by it. I wasn’t too much older than Beverly Lee and I loved to ride my bike on the streets of Detroit. I knew that if my skin was darker I could be lying dead right then. I wrote a song about it, most of which I remember:

THE BALLAD OF BEVERLY LEE

When a boy is young and he rides his bike

He rides a fiery steed

And he thinks he can ride

As quick as the wind

And so did Beverly Lee

When a boy is young and he rides along

He’s happy and careless and free

And he loves the wind as it tickles his face

And so did Beverly Lee

Beverly Lee was a strapping lad

Though he wasn’t very old

And Beverly Lee though he wasn’t bad

Is lying stiff and cold.

Here again, some of the words are lost in the mists of history and pain, but the last line is:

But a policeman’s bullet is quick as the wind

And it killed poor Beverly Lee.

In the early days everything was sunshine and lilacs.

Here I was, a 14-year-old youth welcomed into a company of brilliant older people at the invitation of an older friend. I was treated with respect and friendship by grown-ups. And what a group! There was Art, who looked like a bear with his black hair and huge body. He was the oldest, probably in his mid- to late-thirties; he was a professional folk singer and artist. There was Barbara, in her early twenties, who looked like the young Jane Fonda, with blond hair and a perfect body. She was also a folk singer. I remember her asking one of the other members (not all were Party members; some were friends of members or people interested in social issues or in Barbara) how to say “Scram Wolf” in Yiddish.

The answer she was given was: “ Scrahm Volf!” As far as I know, and in the case of my Yiddish it isn’t very far, that could be right.

The group included another folk singer, a sculptor, and other poets, artists, singers, and students. Only one member of the crowd was an African-American, a massive sculptor named Oliver. I remember thinking he must have gotten those muscles from working on big pieces of rock.

Unfortunately, he seems to have had other less benign interests than working on big pieces of rock, interests that would be very harmful, indeed, other Party groups or clubs in Detroit in those days had many workers, especially auto and steel workers, both African-American and white. This particular club was in the midtown area near Wayne University (now called Wayne State University), where I was to become an open, public representative of the Party. It was also near the main library and the art museum, and its membership reflected its location.

I was invited to attend a class given by the Party club. Originally the job of teaching was supposed to rotate among the members but Art was so brilliant that he became the regular teacher. We talked about art, history, philosophy, economics, labor. Art (the teacher, not the subject) dissected the most common sayings and showed their contradictions, even their relations to class content.

He did the obvious ones:. “Too many cooks spoil the broth; two hands are better than one.” “Haste makes waste; he who hesitates is lost.” Then he said, :”Great oaks from little acorns grow,” and asked us if that was true. Someone said, “Yes.”“No,” Art said, “Great oaks grow from acorns and soil and air and water and sunlight. In the same way, big businesses grow from taking from the labor and resources of many people.

He then held his hand high in the air and dropped a piece of paper from it. “That affects the situation in China,” using this example to illustrate the principle of dialectical materialism that everything in the world is interconnected.

I think the principle is probably correct but the example could have been better. It didn’t matter. I was in heaven again (just like in the mud fight). The whole world was opening up before me and I had a chance to become a knight in shining armor.

Sunshine and lilacs filled my days.

With strawberry ice cream on the side.

But lilacs fade and sunshine can cause skin cancer.

And even strawberry ice cream can clog the arteries of the brain.

One party remains in my memory.

It was on Second Avenue in midtown Detroit, in an apartment I had helped to paint, with one red wall and one black wall opposite it. The other walls were gray, opposite each other. Very chic.

Detroit at that time was divided into various ethnic neighborhoods: German, Russian, Jewish, African-American, Polish, Italian, and so on, and some mixed neighborhoods of various composition. A block away from Second Avenue was Woodward, the main street dividing the East Side from the West Side of town; it was a dividing line in more ways than one – on one side were 350,000 African-Americans and on the other side were 100,000 white Southerners.

It was an explosive mixture, a mixture whose explosiveness was nurtured by the powers that be – or were – in the city.

I remember a cop coming to my school, for some public relations reason I imagine, when I was too young to know what the song meant, and singing a song with the chorus:

‘Who am I, well I’m the guy

From down on the East side of Brush

Where women are six and seven feet, too

They kill off their husbands to make kidney stew

When they get tough we get tougher

Way down on the East side of Brush.”

The people who lived on the East side of Brush were, as you probably have guessed by now (but of which I had no idea in my second or third grade classroom), African-Americans, and Brush was a main street in the Black community at the time.

Second Avenue was a few blocks from Brush.This part of Second Avenue was a poor neighborhood near Wayne University, much like City College in New York. When I was there some years later 80% of the students worked full time. A little further down Second Avenue was a neighborhood where, my friend Patty Lee said, most of the people were prostitutes and small-time gangsters or students and artists, and where all the gangsters and prostitutes tried to look like students and all he students tried to look like prostitutes and small-time gangsters.

Both Second Avenue and Brush were fairly far from the auto plants, the major industry of the city, the center of life for rich and poor, Black and white, but in vastly different ways.

To me at that time Second Avenue was a lovely and interesting neighborhood, much more so than the lower middle class mostly Jewish neighborhood we now lived in.

The people at the party were all beautiful (like my family). There was, as I remember it, singing and dancing and food and drink and games. They sang like professionals, which some of them were,. The jokes were funny, the food good and plentiful.

Some of the songs were memorable. One, called, ”Slav Girl” had a beautiful haunting melody. Some of the words were:

“Slav girl, Slav girl, where will you go

Tell me where will you sleep tonight?

‘ ‘Mid the rocks and the pines

Where the sun never shines

I’ll shiver the whole night through.’”

It was a song of wartime struggle. She tells of a place: “My family

is buried there,” and concludes after she has succeeded in avenging them, “I waited and watched them die.”

As I remember it, some decades later, the last verse is like the firs:

“Slav girl, Slav girl, where will you go?

Tell me where will you sleep tonight?

‘Mid the rocks and the pines

Where the sun never shines

I’ll shiver the whole night through.”

The whole room was silent when the song was finished.

Then, other songs, jokes, games.The charades were, to us at the time, hilarious, although some of them would not be considered funny today. The two that stick in my mind are, “Judge, it was rape, rape, rape all summer long.” And “Cunnel Shapushnikov, ah presume?”

“Well, said the man who thought of the latter phrase, everybody knows Shapushnikov is from Georgia.”

I didn’t. I didn’t even know who Colonel Shapushnikov was. It was a magnificent night anyway.

I remembered it often on the many dark, tearful nights that were to come.

My friends in my preteen and teenage years were Seymour Berman, a tall athletic youth, Stu Komer, who was heavy and whose father had the great distinction, for us, of owning Sweet Sixteen pop (soda), which owed its distinction to the act that it was sold in 16 ounce bottles and therefore very popular; and Joey Metzger, who was a little smaller than Seymour and Stu, but strong and what we used to call “wiry,” and whose overwhelming distinction was the puzzling and frightening fact of his father’s death while we were still young schoolboys. We played sports together, helped each other with schoolwork, and studied for the spelling bee together.

Danny Hoffer was a special friend. He was rich but that wasn’t the reason we were friends; Stu was probably richer. I had never thought much about it until Danny said to me one day, “The rich can buy things cheaper than the poor,” and gave the example of the price of paper in large and small amounts. He didn’t say it to put me down and I didn’t take it that way. M y feelings weren’t the lest bit hurt.

What hurt my feelings was the way he played ping pong.Danny’s father owned Perfect Cleaners. He had thre stores and made $150 a week, Danny told me. Pa might have been making $26 a week at that time, or, before his pay cut, $36. None of this mattered to me. It was the ping pong.

Danny lived in a beautiful brick single family house (80% of the people in Detroit owned their own homes a few years ago, or, rather, were paying off mortgages on them. And many of them were two- or four-family houses.) It had lovely grass and flowers, front and back, and a ping pong table in he basement. Ah! That ping pong table!It didn’t matter what the weather was, if we had an opportunity or could make one, we were down in the basement playing ping.pong. Sometimes there were several of us, sometimes only Danny and I. The problem was Danny’s brother Julius.

Julius was a perfectly nice guy, a little conservatively dressed, Tall, with glasses. Hell, I wore glasses myself, and I didn’t care how he dressed. The problem was his friends. One of them was the third best ping pong player in the country, according to Danny. That wasn’t a crime. He had taught Julius to play ping pong. That wasn’t a crime. The crime was that Julius had taught Danny how to play and Danny was almost unbeatable.

Danny had a backhand slam and a forehand slam and a good serve and an assortment of slices.He was a monster.I, on the other hand, had learned all my ping pong from Danny and he was either holding something back or he was a lousy teacher. He was a good friend but, now that I’m older and wiser, I’m not so sure about which it was.

No matter how often we played or how much, I couldn’t beat him.

I had a good serve and a decent, if unconventional, backhand slam. But I didn’t have a forehand slam, which is like playing tennis without a racket. Danny was, for me, unbeatable. One of the very few advantages of being old is that you can claim for things. Vitas Gerulitis is reported to have said, “Nobody beats me 18 tunes in a row.” Is that all? I beat him by several decades and 22 games. I said, albeit to myself, “Nobody beats me 40 times in a row.”

But Danny did. In one day.

We played chess on his back porch and the game I remember, somehow, is the one in which I had three queens and beat him handily. We had a friendly rivalry in running, too. We chased each other in a game of tag until we both had bad stitches in our sides but neither would give up.

Ma used to laugh about Danny with maybe a little heartbreak thrown in. “Look,” she’d say as Danny left our house on a cold Detroit winter day. “He’s got everything on!” I wondered for a minute what she meant. “Hat and earmuffs and scarf and overcoat and boots and gloves,” she said in amazement. I agreed with her. If our kids had had any or a few of those things during any given Detroit winter we were lucky.

We wouldn’t have known how to act.

I remember these and other friends, like Moses Gindi, with great, fondness. I mention their names because they weren’t politically involved. Friends who were part of the movement, more specifically, those who were Party or YCL members, are not mentioned by name or their names have been changed unless they were public representatives of the Party or publicly known as members. On this, I am fully willing to follow the Party line. It would be unfair and unprincipled to expose people to attacks or reprisals or any other kind of unpleasantness because of their political ideas.

“I’ll give you one, O, red fly the banners all…”

I was sitting on a bench in Detroit’s beautiful Belle Isle park with two pretty older women (they must have been 18 or 19) and they were singing to me.

“Do you want to give the educational or shall I?” Ellen asked.

“No, you go ahead,” Mary said.

A song with an “educational?” I had leaned something already.

Deer wandered through Belle Isle in those days. On that day I saw a deer, the birds sang, and the sun was, obligingly, shining. And Ellen and May sang very well.

“I’ll give you one, O, red fly the banners all

What is your one, O?

One for workers’ unity which ever more shall be.”

No educational was necessary for that. They continued.

“I’ll give you two, O, red fly the banners all

What is your two, O?

Two to the opposites interpenetrative all…”

Whoa! Hold on there! I need an educational. Maybe two of them..Ellen and Mary did their best. Maybe they did it right. I wouldn’t know after all these years. It had to do with the dialectical principle of the unite and struggle of opposites. Serious students of philosophy are referred to the works of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin.

The rest of you can read Howard Selsam who explains it all very well and who had white hair and a beautiful smile that warms the heart after many decades. I almost wish he had been there that day.

“I’ll give you three, O, red fly the banners all

What is your three, O?

Three, three, the Comintern

Two to the opposites interpenetrative all

One for workers’ unity which ever more shall be.”

This time the educational was easier. The Comintern was the

Communist International which was the third international

(therefore three in the song) after the first founded by Marx and

Engels and the second run by the Social Democrats (boo!) O.K

. That was clear. This isn’t so bad. Will there be a test?

“I’ll give you four, O, red fly the banners all

What is your four, O?

Four for the four great teachers.”

The four great teachers, it turned out, were Marx, Engels, Lenin

And Stalin. The song continued: Five was for the years of the five-

year plan; six I never could remember and still can’t; seven was the

seventh world congress of the Communist International where

George Dimitroff proposed the policy of the United Front against

war and fascism (I did pretty well on that one but I still don’t

know what six is for); eight is for the eighth route army, the Chinese Communist army; nine is another one I don’t know; and ten is for the ten days that shook the world (the Russian revolution).

I sure learned a lot from that song.

I think it was on nine that I saw another deer. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember what it was about.

The song went platinum. I decided to join the Young Communist League (YCL) at the age of 15/

It wasn’t easy.I had read :”The Soviet Power” by the Dean of Canterbury, and “Where the Ghetto Ends,” which described how anti-Semitism had been eliminated in the Soviet Union and how Jews now had many more government, scientific, and other important positions than their proportion in the population, and several other books and pamphlets. I had also met some nice people and heard some terrific, strong songs. I was told that despite the Civil War and attacks by 14 countries including the United States and Japan, production and the standard of living of the people were 13 times as high as they had been before the revolution.

I figured out how much pa would be making if his income increased 13 times. It was more than he was making now. And how hard could it be to make a revolution?

But I had a problem the first time I went to meet Adeline Cole the head of the YCL in Michigan. She was a tall, strikingly good looking brunette I found out after I met her. Meeting her was the problem.

I was given the address on Grand River, a major street in Detroit, and told what time my appointment was for. Usually people didn’t say. “I’ll see you at the YCL headquarters” or “at the League headquarters.” They said, especially if they were talking on the telephone, “I’ll see you at Selkers.” They were being clever or subtle. The assumption was that the FBI, which was assumed to be tapping their telephones because they were considered to be subversive Communists wouldn’t know that the YCL headquarters was next door to the Selkers Moving Company. Further, the FBI was assumed to be ready to conclude that these people weren’t really young Communists, even if heir agents in the League said they were, but were simply all very interested in moving companies.

Some of the YCL members laughed at the stupidity of heir own “deception” but they kept on doing it.

On the day I went to meet Adeline I left on time and took the appropriate bus in order to get to headquarters, some pretty drab offices it turned out, with time to spare. However, I didn’t count on the diagonal nature of the streets involved and got off many blocks before I should have. I was desperate. How could I be late for my first appointment with the leader of the YCL in the whole state! I had many blocks to go and I didn’t have money to take another bus. I began running, slowing to a walk when I got too tired, my progress both helped and hindered by my anxiety. I tried to look at the clocks in store windows as I ran, getting more and more desperate as I saw each clock. Finally, when I thought I was within the last few blocks, I put on a burst of adrenaline-driven speed and got to the place where I could see Selkers’ trucks but no giant sign (somehow) saying “YCL headquarters.”

After a few minutes of looking without breathing (because I couldn’t) I burst into the right office and asked, gasping, for Adeline.

“She’s not here right now,” the young woman in the office said.

“But I have an appointment!” I said, shamefacedly naming the time we were to meet. My future comrade was very kind. “I’m sorry she’s not coming in at all today,” she said. Adeline had forgotten our appointment.

The song’s sales dropped from platinum to gold but I still joined the YCL. Maybe she was out preparing an immediate socialist revolution or something even more important. But for one brief nonshining moment I thought my father’s income might not increase 13 times.

Naw.

Ping pong was different at the Wiedenbaums. Morry was the older brother and he had younger brother whose name I can’t remember. The Wiedenbaums, Jerry and Murray Altman, and Dave and I were the usual suspects.

Dust was the main ingredient in those games, hanging over the table, dancing in the overhead light, leaping up from the floor when we moved. There was also junk, junk of all kinds and sizes and materials surrounding the homemade dead table that had a piece of solid wood instead of a net.’

We played for pennies and the prize, in our circle, was worth fighting for. The fierce competitive spirit developed in those games proved valuable – the group produced a state champion in tennis and ping pong and a state chess champion who won a former champion’s business in a marathon series of games. ‘

I got Murray Altman started on body building and he passed me like I was an ant. We had a trick where you had someone stand on your forearm and rest his hand on your back “for balance.” When you started to lift he would instinctively press down on your back so you were actually lifting only a fraction of his weight. Murray, my student, (ahem) didn’t need that. I stood on the palm of his hand, with my hand barely touching his back and he lifted me off the ground easily, smiling all the time.

I was very much into stupid machismo in those days – before I took classes in “the woman question” in the League.

As a result Bruce Hamilton ruined a good part of my future social life and almost broke my neck – literally. Bruce weighed 133 pounds and played fullback (well) on our high school football team. In those days when all the backs did many different things his passing proved invaluable. He could throw the ball almost the length of the field. Every day he would come into the gym and do 12 perfect chins. I would do eight or 10 with my feet out in front of me to strengthen my abdomen at the same time. Bruce didn’t bother with such baby stuff. He would lie on his back with an 80 pound barbell in his hands, with his hands resting on the ground. Then, without getting up or moving his body, he would raise the weight over his head and down to his waist. He had six little muscle packs in his stomach to prove it.’

He was not the guy to wrestle with but I was fairly stupid in those days. Besides, he was a friend.

Bruce and I would wrestle while the smart kids were having dancing classes.

As a result I suffered for the rest of my life. More importantly, my poor wife suffered. I was, to put it modestly, the world’s worst dancer. But that was long term. An immediate result was that Bruce almost broke my neck.

He got me in a full nelson, his arms under my arms and his hands pressed against the back of my neck. I heard wo cracking sounds but felt no pain. Bruce was a compassionate guy, actually very shy and gentle except in sports. He stopped pressing..

For the next three weeks I held my head straight up, unable to bend my neck. Half the kids thought I had the best posture at Central High; the other half thought I was the school’s biggest snob.

Naturally, I never saw a doctor. I’m sure pa saw a doctor, probably in he emergency room, when he cut his artery, but I don’t remember seeing a doctor come for any follow-up treatment during the months he was sick in his bed. I remember that he was told, presumably by a doctor, to wear a strong corset after he hurt his back, but no doctor ever came to the house even in those dark ages when doctors made house calls.

It was simple. If you were poor you either ate or saw a doctor, kind of like paying rent today.

I sure am glad Bruce wasn’t an anti-Semite.

Everything we did in the YCL and the Party during my high school and college years was good/

In fact one of my strongest arguments in support. of the Soviet Union and of socialism was, “How could people who are doing all these good things be bad?” It didn’t make sense..

After I’d been the League about a year a fellow I knew who was in both the YCL and the Party asked me to join the Party.

“Why should I join the Party,” I asked him. “We’ve got great classes, activities, sports, socials, struggles. What do I need to join the Party for?”

I was 16 and knew everything. Besides somebody had told me I was smart in school. I knew he couldn’t possibly have an answer.

“Don’t you want to know what’s going on?” he asked.

Hm. Maybe he had something. I certainly wanted to know what was going on. Were there secret activities I didn’t know about.

I joined the Party.

I was 16 years old.

In one sense there were secret activities, somewhat more so than in the League. Some Party members had important jobs in unions, universities, and other places and felt they needed to protect themselves by keeping their Party membership secret. They had every right to do so. Known Party members faced both physical and financial dangers long before the McCarthy era and afterwards as well. Some of the most valuable work was done by Party members who were not publicly known.

There wasn’t much difference, as I remember it, between what we did in the Party and what we did in the League. The League had more and better parties but I met a lot of additional interesting people in the Party. The League had better socials except for the Party picnic which was great, with sports and music and good food and usually a speech by a national leader who was, of course, a real rabble-rouser. And I was a very easily roused rabble.

At least one Party club had tea and delicious pastry after meetings. It was heaven.

As for activities, we went to classes a lot. Lenin had said the task of the youth was “to learn, to learn, and to learn.” I memorized that. He also said “theory is not a dogma but a guide to action.” I memorized that, too. I believed in the lead soldier theory of Marxism-Leninism. We had made lead soldiers when we were kids (not so long before the time I’m talking about now, actually). The soldiers were made by pouring hot lead into molds. My idea was that if I poured enough Marxism-Leninism into my brain it would put wisdom into my brain and steel into my backbone.

Nice theory. I wonder if it worked.

We went to classes on The woman question” and “The Negro Question” (sometimes “Negro liberation”) and “The History of the C.P. S. U.,” among other subjects. The initials stood for Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The name of the course was also the name of the book, which cost 50 cents in hardcover and was presumably highly subsidized. The textbook or at least the chapter on dialectical materialism, was reputedly written by Stalin.

My memory was pretty good in those days. I knew all about Trotsky, Bukharin, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Lenin and Stalin.. I learned more and more about the two interpenetrative opposites. All was right with the world!

We continued our campaign against restaurants that refused to serve African –Americans. We had a sit-in in a small restaurant on Linwood avenue where they turned out the lights and said they were closed, as would countless other eating places during the main Civil Rights movement some years later.

The two opposites were struggling. It was simple when you understood it. The good guys were fighting the bad guys.

I may not have been the cause but the YCL dissolved shortly after I joined.

As a delegate to the convention that did the deed I was given the job of writing a skit to entertain the delegates In previous cultural activities I’d been an actor in one immortal classic. In the climax of the skit a man is saying, “We didn’t have a union then. Didn’t figure we needed it.” He then brushed his black hair to one side and held a black comb above his upper lip with one hand. With the other hand he gave the fascist salute.

Our audience was sharp. They immediately recognized this anti-union boss as Hitler. I got to play the part.

Since I was writing this one, my part should be better. I recited my own immortal words to our group of subversive radical youth:

Evylyn came to classes to learn to lead the masses

Jim learned how to fight the fascist brute

But a smart guy like me

As you can plainly see

Came down because the teachers were so cute

Meet Ad and Margy

Came down because the teachers were so cute.

On “Meet Ad and Margy, “ the two women danced across the floor. Margy was tall, like Adeline, and a very good looking blonde. She was a good, smart person, but you had to learn to pronounce her name with a hard “g.” After a few months I got it right. The phrase “came down” referred to the location of our classes or offices, which were downtown from where most of us lived.

We were told there was a proposal, obviously supported by the

leadership, to dissolve the YCL and replace it with a broad youth

organization that would work to strengthen democracy in our

country. The proposed name was American Youth for Democracy,

or AYD. That sounded good to me. Maybe we wouldn’t have to

sell our paper, “The YCL Review: or just “The Review.” What I

was sure of is that the paper was perfectly awful.

People would buy it sometimes because we were young, earnest,

And in teams of Black and white together. But they practically

never wanted to try it a second time no matter how cute they

thought we were. I liked selling “The Worker,” the weekend

edition of the “Daily Worker,” because it was a good paper and

people would want to buy it again a fair proportion of the time.

In fairness to “The Review,” it probably would have sold better to young people than to whoever happened to answer the door, but it still wasn’t a very good paper and I don’t remember ever selling it to young people.

However, there was one question in my mind about the proposed change, As a firm believer in the lead soldier theory of wisdom, I wondered what effect this change would have on our Marxist-Leninist education. I asked about it. One of the leaders, I think it was Adeline, told us this change would mean much more Marxist-Leninist education, not less. This kind of unsupported assertion that often later proved to be very wrong was fairly typical of our leaders.

At the time, however, I believed what Adeline said.

I remembered her at a conference, I believe sponsored by the League of Detroit Jewish Youth, where some people had been red-baiting. Adeline stood up in a dark blue dress or suit, perfectly groomed, a tall beautiful young woman with black hair and a shining smile and said, “I am one of those horrible creatures, a Jewish Communist.”

She made quite an impression.

Of course I believed her.

My first night baseball game and my first night in jail coincided.

In fact, they were intimately connected.

A number of Black journalists, the Communist Party, the YCL, and the Daily Worker had carried on a strong campaign to have the major leagues hire African American baseball players. Paul Robeson, among others, played a major role in this campaign.

Detroit was one of the last teams to join this move to hire Black players so we in the YCL (before we became the AYD) set out to do something about it. We went to a night game with a giant banner, carefully concealed, intending to unfurl it at the first opportune moment. The banner called for the Detroit Tigers to hire Black ballplayers.

It was my first professional night baseball game and I was overwhelmed by the picture of the sparkling green grass that shined like diamonds or cat’s eyes under the giant lights. I forgot why we were there. I didn’t care much about the game that was about to begin, only about the lights and the magic color.

The next thing I knew we were unfurling the banner. A few minutes later we were under arrest.

I don’t remember what our crime was but we were obviously criminals/

They put is in the police wagon and hauled us off to jail. We were booked and fingerprinted. By this time I was taking notes like mad. Some time before I had sent a letter to the Worker attacking the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie,” which had carried a redbaiting segment. In my angry letter I suggested that servicemen and women and vets should send their medals and combat ribbons to the man who wrote the comic strip along with their letters of protest. It wasn’t quite as stupid an idea as it sounds now, as we were in a war with the Nazis and allied with the Soviet Union and redbaiting was less fashionable then than in most of our Country’s history.

It was, nevertheless, pretty stupid. The editors cut that part out, published my letter, and invited me to write for the paper.

I agreed enthusiastically.

The job didn’t pay anything, of course, and I was so pure (or so stupid) that I refused to take any expense money on the very few occasions when it was offered. I’d done a few stories good enough to make the front page of our several pages of local news, and quite a few other stories.

This story promised to be a good one. Besides, I had my new clipboard with me, which made notetaking much more interesting. Billy Allen, the main writer and, at that time, assistant editor of the Michigan edition of the Worker, had showed me how to fold a piece of paper into three equal parts vertically and take my notes on it. It did make me feel like a professional newspaperman, but I had bought or been given the clipboard and I loved it.

The cops took it away.

Not only that, they took my pen and paper away. What about freedom of the press? I was too busy being a prisoner to worry about it, but I kept writing the story in my head. We were about 10 or 15 young people, Black and white, male and female. The night was a little uncomfortable, not unlike the other minor jail experiences I would have, but not bad for most of us. One of our young men, a slight, blond guy who walked with a limp, was brutalized by some big cop for no apparent reason. The next morning we got out of jail but still faced a trial for our crime.

I knew what to do at a trial. I had read about Dimitroff.

George Dimitroff, the head of the Communist International, had been tried in a Nazi court on trumped-up charges of setting fire to the German Parliament building, the Reichstag. He stood up in front of the court and said, “I stand here as the accuser, not as the accused.” He conducted his defense so effectively that the Nazi court was forced to acquit him. The Nazis intended to murder him after the trial.

The Soviet government suspected that Dimitroff would never get out of Germany alive unless something was done. They declared him a Soviet citizen immediately after the trial and gave him an escort armed with machine guns to a Soviet airplane and flew him to Moscow immediately.

Oh boy! A trip to Moscow! I came to court proudly and defiantly wearing a very, very red tie.

I didn’t quite get to the courtroom in my tie. Ernie Goodman, a brilliant civil rights lawyer, a partner in the firm of future congressman George Crockett, said quietly, “I’ll trade you ties.” He took my beautiful red tie and I got to wear his ordinary non-red tie. I guess it just goes to show you that you can’t trust your mddle class allies.

We packed the courtroom with friends and allies and had a decent person as a judge.

He said, “I’m sure they wouldn’t have arrested you if your banner had said, “Hurray for Mickey Cochrane,” and dismissed the charges. Mickey Cochrane was the Tigers’ manager at the time. Most of our group were jubilant.

I was glad I didn’t have to go back to jail but disappointed that I wasn’t going to Moscow. My story did make the front page of the Michigan Worker. That was some compensation.

But my heart still aches a little when I think of that shining green diamond on a summer night when I was young, fighting the good fight with a group of young and beautiful friends.

It was called Chrysler Boys’ Town.

Most of the boys are gone now, ghosts or cripples, or if still healthy and solvent, living what’s left of the good life in Florida or California or Arizona, or they’ve gone home to Kentucky. The plant was called DeSoto Warren. Both the plant and DeSoto are also phantoms; almost nobody has ever heard of either of them. But Chrysler is still around and still making money.

They were making good money during the war on a cost-plus contract where they don’t care if you worked or not because Uncle Sam was paying the bill. The more it cost to make something, the more they made. I’m not sure now what we were making but I think it was aircraft.

“Where’s Bill sleeping?” Charlie, the foreman, would ask. His instincts from many years at Chrysler would make him want to bother us to work harder even though the company didn’t give a damn if we worked or not. When we saw or heard him coming we’d sing, “Buckle down Winsocki, buckle down,” as a signal to pretend to be working. We’d also bait him by singing, “You’d better get Wildroot Cream Oil, Charlie, it keeps your hair in trim…” Charlie didn’t really appreciate that. He was bald.

‘When we get that guy Roosevelt out of there you guys will work for 15 cents an hour,” he’d tell us. We were making 97 cents an hour at the time.

Our job was to move stuff and find stuff and we did what we were told. But we also shot out the lights with rivets shot from tubes that were part of the materials we were in charge of. We’d put each other in a very mobile four-wheel truck and rush the truck toward a wall, stopping it at the last second. Some of the guys would box, others just sit around doing nothing. Charlie couldn’t be everywhere at once. We thought we were very smart but Chrysler was smarter. The less we worked the more they made.

It was at DeSoto Warren (Warren was the street the plant was located on. There was also a DeSoto Wyoming located on Wyoming Street. DeSoto was a kind of car.) that I first experienced the wonderful workingclass game of trying to make a person throw up by saying as many disgusting things as you – in this case the whole group of old employees – could think of to say while he (or she?) was eating. I knew that to yield and throw up would be disastrous since they would do it all the time. I also suspected that throwing up my lunch would be a little unpleasant..

I passed that test but would flunk another test later. I wasn’t racist enough.

We were an interesting group. There was Andy, who bragged that he was a White Russian and supported the KKK; either Art Akoff or Roy Akoff, the country western singer, but I don’t remember which was which; he was our shop steward; a young woman named Ruth who was always pleasant to me until the crisis; a guy who was a judo instructor in the National Guard; a young Polish-American guy who was a small scale body builder like me but whose black hair was even blacker and who was a good boxer. We were friendly and I gave him a dime for the nuns every week.

There were a few others I don’t remember much about. I do remember that there were no African-Americans in our immediate group.

A new older woman was hired and put to work with us. She must have been about 35 or 40, making her at least 10 or 15 years older than any of us. She added a little spice to the group, In fact she added a lot of spice. She told great dirty jokes. We all enjoyed talking and laughing with her and she was an immediate favorite.

Then all hell broke loose. Everybody was very excited. Our new, joke-telling woman had disappeared. Everybody was talking about what had happened.

The story was never entirely clear but as near as anyone knew, what had happened was that the woman had been telling her jokes to two young African-American men and “they took her up on it.” I didn’t know what the source of the story was or what the phrase meant or if anyone else did either, but the phrase stuck in my mind all these years and was the one that was repeatedly used.

The two young men had been fired and the woman was nowhere to be seen . All my co-workers were furious at the two young men and the atmosphere was getting pretty ugly, at least in words.

“But we aren’t even sure what happened,” I said. “Shouldn’t we try to find out what happened?”

One of my co-workers, it might have been Andy, the KKK supporter, or Akoff, the shop steward from Kentucky or Tennessee, said belligerently, “You’re not siding in with them, are you?”

I replied immediately, “You’re God-damned right I am!”

The Party and the League had taught me well, if not tactics, at least which side to be on in case of doubt in a crisis. I don’t know what they would have tried to do to the two young men or what they could have done since they had no idea where they were or who they were. They couldn’t ask the woman because it turned out she, too, was fired.

But I was there.

A round of increasingly angry anti-Semitic stories began. “I knew a Jew who did so and so,” one would say, and the next would tell a similar but more lurid anti-Semitic story. Farakhan would have been proud. Even Ruth, who wasn’t part of the group we ate lunch with and had seemed a decent person, joined in. My black-haired Polish American boxer friend didn’t say anything at all. Finally, one of the guys started a fight with me.

He wasn’t one of the more dangerous ones. I hit him or pushed him and he went down. I was feeling pretty good about my prowess until the judo instructor said the guy had tripped on something and he just went down because of the leverage, being pushed on the top of his body and tripping at the bottom. I was very much inclined to believe him. He was the one I was worried about. He was bigger, stronger, and infinitely more skilled than I was. He certainly knew more about this and anything else connected with fighting than I did.

It never occurred to me that they would gang up on me, being somewhat simple-minded and too much influenced by the middle class people I sometimes associated with, but I was worried about this guy. The slander continued. They talked in front of me but didn’t address me directly. Then Andy, who was six-two or six-three picked a fight.

I was five-eight, 17 years old, and fairly athletic.

I kicked him in the balls.

It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Andy went down; I found Charlie and told him I was quitting. Since Chrysler made money on every person who worked there and every hour he or she worked, and since there was a labor shortage, Charlie told his supervisor I was quitting and the supervisor, who seemed fairly intelligent, found out what was happening and why, and tried to talk me out of it.

I therefore got a chance to hear Chrysler’s version of anti-racism, or at least of anti-anti-Semitism. I also got to hear their version of anti-anti-Irish prejudice and anti-anti-Italian prejudice, and so on.

The supervisor sat us all down in a small room and solemnly repeated all the derogatory epithets he knew about all the various nationalities he could think of. He then pointed out that there was prejudice against all people and that none was justified. Not bad for Chrysler.

Nevertheless, not wanting to get my neck broken by the judo instructor, I quit.

I was long gone by the time the rest of the guys got out of work, my neck and my honor intact.

Florence married a young man called, with good reason, brilliant Cal, on December 6, 1941. This so angered the Japanese government they attacked Pearl Harbor the next morning. .

Between brilliant Florence and brilliant Cal they sure had a lot of brains. They also had a couple of brilliant kids, a lot of brilliant grandkids, and, so far, fourteen brilliant, if still kind of young, great grandkids.

We didn’t know any of this at the time. We only knew that they were 19 years old and very much in love. I remember their wedding most for the delicious corned beef sandwiches and cold soda and for endless games of 500 rummy I played with Cal’s brother, Kenny, who was pretty smart himself.

But I won most of the games as I remember it.

Over the next few years Cal found himself in the navy in the Pacific theater; he also found himself rushing home, hitch-hiking on whatever planes he could find to greet the birth of their daughter. A few years ,later they were living in a Quonset hut on the former tennis courts at Harvard and Cal was studying philosophy while Florence and Cal both took care of their little boy and little girl and Florence augmented their GI Bill income by slinging hash at a local restaurant.

Sidney finally became old enough to be interesting so we played with him more as he grew. He was three-and-a –half years younger than I was and missed some of the good things that come from having older siblings and academic competition. Maybe. Maybe there was some other reason for it. He just wasn’t that great in school. He was gentle and very funny and looked a lot like Elvis Presley when he was grown.

Sidney dropped out of high school in the tenth grade. He went to work on a farm that summer and carried a hundred pounds of something on each shoulder at the same time. He grew very strong and confident. When he tried going back to school, he was much too big and strong and confident to take any shit from the teachers.

He quit again, this time for good.

The leadership of the AYD deteriorated compared with that of the YCL. They put me on the state board.

I didn’t know what a state board was.

It happened this way. The liberal New York newspaper PM put out a short pledge that said the signer would not accept anything in the way of public accommodations and so on that was not also available to Negro Americans. AYD took up the pledge in a national campaign. As an active member of AYD I took a stack of the pledge cards to Central High School. Just about everybody I asked to sign the pledge cards did so. Why not? The school was 80% Jewish and this happened during World War 2. It would have been unusual for any young Jewish person or any young person going to such a school who was not Jewish not to sign such a pledge.

The general assumption among Jewish youth who I knew was that discrimination was a criminal thing Look what the Nazis did to the Jews! With me it went a little farther than with most people. I felt it was obvious that the Black people WERE the Jews of the United States, that is, African Americans were treated like the Jews of Germany or the Catholics of Ireland and for the same reasons: to split the working people, to scapegoat them for the troubles the people had, and to screw them in matters such as wages, working conditions, schools, medical care and so on, and therefore make it possible to lower the standards for all poor and working people and save a lot of money in the process.

When I turned in my signed cards people acted as if it was a big deal. It wasn’t, as I have just explained. But what did the leadership of AYD know? They thought I was someone special and put me on the state board.

That’s about all I remember about it. I think I was invited to a meeting or two and may have said something intelligent – it could happen. They didn’t send me to the national training school, if they had one, or give me any special instruction. Maybe the meetings would have been more memorable if I had attended more of them. But that was not to be.

I remember being a little unhappy about not going to the national training school (which I knew the Party had and thought the League had, but I wasn’t sure about the AYD) but then I remembered what I had memorized from my reading of Lenin about what he called “Bolshevik modesty,” a quality sorely missing in our ranks, especially above the rank of private.

I didn’t think of it until just now, but the national training school might have been like the hotel where they first found Legionnaires; disease –one of the places where the germs of the deadly “big I” disease lurked.

The rest of my high school life wasn’t too different from those of my fellow students.

I was on the track team and the swimming team but didn’t earn a letter in either, possibly because of other activities, possibly because of lack of talent or being too lazy to practice day and night. And I didn’t exactly get lots of encouragement at home.

“Drek man,” (shit man) pa would say. That didn’t help my motivation. I was still working with him and maybe he thought I wouldn’t have the energy to work if I put in all my spare time running around in the beat up old track shoes I was so proud of. They had real spikes and were the first piece of relatively expensive sports equipment I ever owned. I never had a baseball glove and therefore never played hardball; even my softball games were limited since there weren’t many lefty gloves for me to borrow and I didn’t play the field too well without a glove. I therefore didn’t get picked on a team often enough to get good at it.

On the other hand pa never made any cracks about my swimming and he didn’t say anything often about my running. Maybe it was the way he put it that makes me remember it so vividly. Pa was a runner himself. He showed us the little leather bag with $20.00 gold pieces he had won in a “fat man’s race.” He was also an excellent swimmer and had saved a man’s life when he was drowning many years before. This would have a very valuable result for pa later when he had a serious health problem.

Pa loved to swim and relax in the water. Dave and I had a great time playing cards on pa’s rather large round stomach as he floated on his back in the pool at the bath house. Although he never said anything derogatory about my swimming, I had the feeling that as a man who had been working since the age of 12 he couldn’t appreciate sports activities by his teen-age son.

Ma was encouraging and loved almost anything we did as long as our grades were good. (She didn’t expect any good reports in conduct, and I didn’t disappoint her.)

But my main problem was that I tried to do everything. “These rich kids aren’t going to do better than I do,” I’d tell myself long before I joined the YCL. The arrogance of some of them was sickening. A couple of guys named Prince and Kozlov were the worst. At 16 each had his own brand new car, convertibles yet!

Recently a hockey player named Kozlov played, and played well, for one of my favorite teams. I pretended I didn’t see him.

Besides keeping up with the rich kids academically, my greatest accomplishment was coming in second in the chess tournament. I also won the checker tournament, but no one read books about checkers, at least not in high school at our level. Some of the kids I beat in chess had read a number of chess books and I had never even heard of chess books before the tournament.

Girls existed in high school, but I was too dumb to realize it, or almost so. When some of the girls, including some very pretty ones, made it obvious that they were happy to kiss me at graduation time, I realized, too late, that I had wasted a lot of time during my high school years.

One of the ways I wasted my time was horsing around and wrestling, both in the gym and in the classroom. One of my wrestling partners and friends was a huge guy named Gerry Tepper, who was about six-four and weighed about 250 pounds. Obviously, I didn’t have a chance of beating him but we were friends and were both just playing, kind of a throwback to childhood. When Gerry found out I had joined the YCL he took it very hard. “I ought to break your neck,” he said quietly.

Thank God he didn’t mean it. We remained friends.

Playing at wrestling with Bruce Hamilton might have had more serious consequences. I had taken Latin because the other “smart” kids had; they did so because at that time Latin was necessary to get into medical school or law school and their rich parents had told them to take it to prepare them for their future professions. It was hard as hell and, although it didn’t improve my brain as it was reputed to do, it did teach me that in some courses you had to work your ass off and if you were smart you found a way to avoid such courses..

This wisdom came in very handy in college.

One day Bruce and I were wrestling in Latin class (he wasn’t rich but may have wanted to prove he wasn’t just a dumb jock) after the teacher had left. When she came back unexpectedly, both she and we were shocked. Our shock was greater. She was a tiny gray-haired harridan who was an excellent teacher and a very strict disciplinarian. ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” she said in a lion tamer’s voice.

“We’re just playing,” I managed to whisper.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Playing,” said Bruce, who really was playing since he could kill me at will.

“No you weren’t, you were fighting, “ she said sternly.

The result was that she made us write notes to our parents. After carefully correcting the grammar and spelling of the notes, in which we said, truthfully, that we had been playing at wrestling, she told us the next line to write.

“It ended in a hand-to-hand struggle.”

She wrote well, just as she taught well. Neither Bruce, who was a genuine athlete, nor I, who played at being an athlete, had the stupidity or the nerve to question her instructions in any way.

We wrote the notes exactly as she dictated them and brought them home to our parents.

Then there were the Trotskyites.

In this case it was about Eddie, the Trotskyites, and Eddie’s beautiful sister. She had the blackest hair I ever saw and the bluest eyes. I noted her looks very carefully, but didn’t do anything about it. After all, everything I knew about sex I had learned from plumbing fittings.

Eddie was another story. He had black hair, too, and a pasty face and was a pain in the ass. He and I were practically the only two boys in our mid-teens in our YCL group and people tended to treat us the same, only maybe they treated me a little nicer because I was smarter and better looking. That’s a retrospective opinion; I had no idea there was a problem until the day Eddie tried to kill me.

The Trotskyites were always a problem. At that time they were only a tiny clique in the United States and not very big in most countries, as I remember it. But they were anathema to all Communists and our allies and anybody else who would listen. They were the fifth column of traitors who had plotted to betray the Soviet Union to the Nazis until they were caught, and they didn’t support the war effort in the United States in the fight against the Nazis, which was the main concentration of the U.S. Communists during World War II. They saw little, if any, difference between fascism and capitalism, and therefore considered the war an imperialist war that the working class should not support.

“Look for yourselves,” they said. “All the big capitalists are supporting and making money from the war.”

That part, of course, was true. I don’t think they plotted with the Nazis against the Soviet Union, although I firmly believed they did for many years. But I know from my own experience they didn’t support World War 2, and that to me is a terrible burden to bear. As one of the left agit-prop songs we sang at the time said, “When a burglar tries to break into your house, you stop fighting with the landlord and you throw him out. “

True. But the Nazis were burning people alive and torturing them to death and enslaving millions, including a large part of the world. That’s a hell of a lot more than breaking into your house.

I once wrote a dramatic piece on the Holocaust that started, “Blood, and ashes, and children’s toys.” Since that time, many decades ago, I haven’t read or watched anything on the Holocaust and still refuse to do so. I did my research too thoroughly then. I have, of course, learned more about what happened to other people who weren’t Jewish during that war. That only makes me more of an anti-fascist.

So the fact that the capitalists also supported the war for their own reasons doesn’t in any way make it right not to support it.

So the Trotskyites were anathema. But who the hell ever saw any Trotskyites?

Not only were they a rare breed, but we were forbidden to talk to them. In fact, you could be expelled from the Party for talking to Trotskyites and this was strictly enforced.

Being expelled from the Party was something to be feared, a fate that shouldn’t happen to a dog. Here is one of the cutest, strangest contradictions in what might be called Party life. We tried everything we could to recruit new members. We sang them educational songs, invited them to parties and various activities, gave them things to read, sold them subscriptions to the “Daily Worker” or other Party publications. In a million ways, as Shakespeare said, we bound them to our hearts with hoops of steel. Then, when we had succeeded and they wanted to join, we told them to apply for membership.

The membership applicant wasn’t treated like a Jew being questioned by the Spanish Inquisition. It just felt like it, at least in my experience.

I went through this experience twice, many years apart, and was “accepted” both times. In the first examination of my political soul, I was invited to a meeting in someone’s living room. A number of people, some of whom I knew and some of whom I didn’t, greeted me in a friendly but serious way. They asked various political questions but the one that stands was, of course, “Why do you want to join the Party?”

Looking at it retrospectively, there are a lot of fun answers I could have given, such as: “ I couldn’t resist all the pressure to join any more. Please! No more! I give up! I’ll join! I’ll join! That might not have gotten me in, however. I might have said if I had already seen Eddie’s sister, “I really just want to meet the girl with black hair and blue eyes,” but even that might not have been a good enough answer.

In fact, I gave the only logical answer. “I agreed with the policies and ideas of the Party.”

Some smart-ass prick said contemptuously, “Oh, he agreed with Browder!” Browder was the head of the Party in the U.S. at the time and, of course, was half-god, half-genius. Some of the members in the room kept a straight face. Some laughed openly. Since my behavior had never been very good anyway, I was tempted to say, “Shove it,” but I controlled my usual behavior (which had been improving anyway, for better or for worse) since I really did agree with the Party and did want to join.

In the long run, agreeing with the political genius Earl Browder wasn’t such a good idea. He was later considered by Communists all over the world to be one of the greatest political opportunists of all time. Naturally since he was the head of the U.S. Party at the time, he was considered almost infallible by almost all Party members. His major “contribution” was to depart completely from Lenin’s positions and preach what he called “progressive capitalism.” I couldn’t have understood him very well, honest I couldn’t, honest! But we all read and studied his writing and, with very few, exceptions, believed them until a letter from Jacques Duclos of the French Communist Party blasted Browder’s opportunism. Then we all discussed this in great detail and almost everybody agreed with Duclos.

It turned out that William Z. Foster, a strong workingclass Communist labor leader, had been saying right along that Browder was taking a very wrong path, and had resigned from the leadership to fight for his position some time before. Who knew? Nobody I knew.

So the guy who laughed at me for saying I agreed with Browder laughed for the wrong reason.

The point of all this is that in some ways it was hard to get into the Party once you were convinced to join, and that you could be expelled, and didn’t want to be expelled, in fact were very anxious not to be expelled. This gave the leadership an enormous lever of control over your life.

Which brings us back to Eddie.

Eddie and I were together in various activities, classes, meetings. I noticed at one demonstration that he was talking to Trotskyite young women. Big deal. I wouldn’t talk to such horrible creatures because I believed the Party leadership must have some reason for this rule, or at least must think they had, but I didn’t think it mattered much either way. Also, I had noticed a guy named Byron something, who had, I think, artificially wavy hair and was a Party leader of some kind, flirting diligently with a couple of attractive young Trotskyite women.

Well, it was his soul that would rot in hell, not mine.

But I thought Eddie had at least as much right to Trotskyites as Byron did. The problem was that he tried to kill me.

Not that he didn’t have good reason. I might have done the same for him under the same circumstances.

We were both 16 years old, studying Marxism-Leninism, and spending a lot of time together.

About 14 times a day I would say, “My boy Lenin says’ first things first.’” O. K. once or twice is not too bad. 11 or 12 times a day is not terrible. But when you get up into the 13 or 14 times a day range all he needles are in the red zone and all the alarms begin to sound. Eddie indicated, I think, that this repetition of a somewhat stupid expression all day long was annoying. I was 16 and convinced I was brilliant.

I ignored my only warning.

Both Eddie and I had heard some expert say, shortly before the almost fatal day, that striking someone with only five pounds of pressure over both ears simultaneously with cupped hands would kill him.

He tried it on me.

I don’t know if he did it badly, if I blocked one of his arms at the last minute or moved suddenly, or if the expert was wrong or had given incomplete information.

I didn’t die. Instead I brought Eddie up on charges of talking to Trotskyites, which was obviously a much more serious charge than trying to kill me and, more importantly, much more likely to get Eddie expelled. I was, in fact, genuinely scared. It was the first time anyone had intentionally tried to kill me, but not, unfortunately, the last. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I could not dare to have Eddie at my side, or, more importantly, at my back, on a day-to-day basis.

Eddie was either expelled or resigned from both the Party and the League.

From that day to this, I have never again said, “My boy Lenin says, “First things first.’”

The next Eddie might have a lower breaking point.

I never saw Eddie’s sister, with the jet black hair and the blue, blue eyes again.

Shortly after being put on the state board of AYD I left Detroit for Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan.

At that time tuition at Michigan was $70 a year for states residents and $300 a year for nonresidents. Except for some of the scurvy Republicans who lived in Ann Arbor, who were a definite minus, the tuition was worth the price. It was a pretty, green town with some lovely buildings and a well-hidden poor section. And Detroit had some lousy people, too.

I went to live in a housing co-op. First, I had to apply and be admitted, just like in the Party, but the admitting committee wasn’t so tough. The house I was assigned to was called, “Mich House,” short for “Michigan Co-op House,” which, of course, not even the freshmen called it. The house was founded in 1932 and was the first college student housing co-op in the country. Its first name was, “Michigan Socialist House,” since the alternative name, “Michigan Communist House,” had been defeated by one vote.

Aw shucks! Lousy opportunist Socialists!

The house was a large wooden structure with a long, thick rope hanging out of an upstairs window. That rope was both important and very necessary. We -all 25 male residents of the house—slept in an attic dormitory and the rope was our only fire escape. Besides the 25 young men who lived in Mich house, renamed by some other opportunists after the depression had ended, no doubt, we generally had three or four boarders who didn’t live in the house but, out of grim necessity, ate there.

Room and board had gone from two dollars a week in 1932, when they reportedly ate mostly soy beans, to four dollars a week, probably due to inflation. We also each had to do two hours of work a week. My job was cooking a roast for the 29 of us, along with baked beans and a salad, mostly lettuce as I remember it. I learned how to baste the roast and how to pick the pebbles out of the beans before I put them out to soak the night before. Every Tuesday I cooked the same meal; dessert varied but it was usually some kind of day-old donuts.

The donuts were my responsibility, I’m afraid. For some reason )partly because I was Jewish?, I just now, for the first time wonder) I had been elected assistant food buyer. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t because I was Jewish. My leader, who I was assisting, was a guy named Paul who would go off to become a Christian missionary after graduation. Paul taught me about donuts. Also about bread.

In Ann Arbor at that time they seem to have been unable to calculate correctly how many boxes of donuts or how many loaves of bread they would need on any given day, so they often had day-old bread and donuts left over. Especially donuts. I think the price was the same for bread, but I’m not sure. I am sure of the price for the donuts. It was a dime for a huge Northern Tissue box – about four feet by four feet by four feet, I think. It was always sold in the same kind of box and the price was always the same.

So donuts became “guffable.”

Under the co-op rules if something was guffable (no, I have no idea of the origin of the term) it could be taken from the pantry at any time and eaten. Other food in the pantry could not be. The only other things I remember that were guffable were our day-old bread and margarine, which we called “oleo.” It was white and, when eaten on white toast by a very hungry 18-year-old student, unbelievably delicious.

But the donuts were the problem. Even healthy, active young men could get sick of an infinite quantity of donuts. We had them almost every night for dessert. We ate them when studying late at night or talking late at night when there was no bread or no oleo or we wanted something that wasn’t bread and oleo. We made bread pudding out of donuts and served it as a “different” dessert. Paul and I, as the buyers, racked our brains trying to invent new uses for donuts.

It was much harder than any of the courses I took the first year.

There was a good reason for that and it had to do with wealth and poverty.

As far as rich or middle class kids were concerned applying for scholarships was something they did automatically if they thought they had a chance of getting one, or even if they didn’t in some cases. And they applied on time. Their families did the work academic counselors do in good high schools now. (It suddenly occurs to me that even at that time Central might have had an academic counselor. If they did, I had never heard of him or her.) I knew nothing about scholarships at graduation time. When I did learn about scholarships, too late to apply for one my first year, I did the next best thing: I took courses that were very easy for me so my grades would be good enough to get a scholarship next year. And I got a job working 20 hours a week in the school’s science library, mostly at night so I could study while working.

My courses the first year were ridiculously easy: English (I was already a writer and a poet of sorts), history, and political science (I had already been a Communist for four years and therefore knew all there was to know about history and political science), and French, which accidentally fell into a category that was to be one of my strongest academic fields.

I got all A’s and was given a scholarship the next year. I also made the Dean’s list. When I found out what the Dean’s list was, I was appalled. I was smart enough to know that people getting B’s in tough math or science courses were probably much better scholars than I was with my all A’s. I’m sure there are people who have a gift or aptitude for such courses, or for (gulp) hard work, but there must be many more who are better scholars than I was who struggled through tough courses and got B’s.

Having learned from my Latin course, which did, indeed, make me smarter, I never took a math or physics course in college. I did, I think, take one semester of chemistry, which was really interesting and would be very useful in my future work, but I soon tired of spending five hours a week in the lab without getting credit for those hours as class time.

Besides, I was really majoring in political activity. Not intentionally. It just worked out that way.

I would have begun to suffer from my chronic disease, thinking I was smart, except for two incidents in which my other chronic disease, stupidity, manifested itself. (Is this an example of what the Marxists call the ‘unity and struggle of opposites’?) One happened the first day, in fact, in the first few minutes after I had walked into Mich house. A guy named Al Godley was in the kitchen. Al was an African-American from the South who was in medical school at Michigan because his state wouldn’t admit him to their medical schools and, under pressure, paid his tuition to study in the hated North. It was a clear example of the inequality of of ‘separate but equal’ concept now being embraced by some Black nationalists. The white students got to study near their home if they so chose. The Black students had to face a strange new world while tackling the great difficulties of the first year of medical school.

Indeed, they had to put up with dummies like me.

I walked into the kitchen and said to this big guy I had never seen before ,”Hi, handsome.” I don’t remember what he said. But I do remember, over all these decades, that he hung his big fist under my jaw and said something. In this case, the music was enormously more important than the words.

The other incident also involved an African-American, only I don’t think I knew he was an African-American. In the first session of my English class, the teacher asked us to write some kind of essay. He liked mine and sent me to a special section for students with better writing skills (didn’t notice that, did you?) It was only afterward that I learned that the teacher was Robert Hayden, a distinguished African-American poet, who was also, I believe, the only African-American on the entire faculty of the enormous University of Michigan.

I believe he was also very light-skinned, which may have made him more acceptable to the school administration. After all, they didn’t want to carry this integration thing too far.

Actually, my mistake in this case may have been due more to ignorance than to stupidity. I didn’t know who Robert Hayden was until it was too late..

There was no AYD at Michigan, but there were two Party clubs. I wasn’t in either of them.

For whatever reason, I hadn’t arranged for a transfer to a U. of M. club. I didn’t even know If there was a club at Michigan. It was a low priority at the time.

Everything was caught up in the excitement of going to college, registration, finding a place to live, finding a job, picking out my courses. I had studied a pamphlet on “what it takes to make good in college,” and followed it carefully. The two things that were most prominent, which I stuck to with great precision, were, “make a schedule and stick to it,” and “engage in occasional large bull sessions.” Most of the time the other guys were too busy for bull sessions. I tried to arrange one by brute force but had to give up the effort because my brute force was much smaller than their brute force.

I did stick to my schedule, sometimes saying, “I’m sorry. I can’t do that. My schedule says I should study.” Once in a while someone would tease me about saying that, so I stopped.

I remembered Eddie.

After a while, when I had settled into my schedule, with classes from eight A,M. until noon on most days, studying in the afternoon, and working most evenings, I found that I had time left over, mainly because I could study on my library job. Also, I must add, because I was fast and probably didn’t care too much about my appearance most of the time. In retrospect, I now realize that the greatest achievement of my college career was that I was able to get up at eight o’clock for an eight o’clock class without being late. I would shower, dress, shave, eat breakfast and ride my bike to class, almost always getting into the classroom before 8:07 A.M. when we were officially late.

With my confidence officially restored, I decided to look around this strange and beautiful world. I discovered a room with high fidelity record players for student edification, and the “Daily Worker” on the newspaper rack in the main college library, put there, no doubt, for the same purpose.

“Well now there then!”, as my wife was to say many years later.

The game’s afoot! If the “Daily Worker” is here in this beautiful green town, was it possible there were Communists here, too?

Naw!

Nevertheless, I began to hang around the library, both to read the “Daily Worker” and to see who else was reading it.

My brilliant strategy worked. One day a fellow student saw me reading the paper and began talking to me. Shortly thereafter, I joined the student club of the Party without benefit of an inquisition.

As usual, what we did in the Party consisted mainly of working for peace and Civil Rights (or for “Black Liberation, depending on whether or not we believed at that time that the African-American people in a specific part of the South constituted a nation). In Detroit we had supported a “Second front Now” rally during the war and worked sometimes at Russian War Relief. Our people in the plants did union work. But my work had been mainly writing for the paper, selling the YCL Review, and trying to help break discrimination against Black people who wanted to eat in restaurants like everybody else. In Ann Arbor, on the Michigan campus, things were somewhat different.

This was a time of murder of African-Americans, both by individuals and by state governments, a time of lynchings and legal lynchings of Black men who thought World War 2 had been about freedom for them, too. The Party club and African-Americans on the Michigan campus tried to lend support to the fight against these outrages, as well as to the fight against local racism.

I joined an organization called the Inter-Racial Association (IRA; no, not THAT IRA), and we worked on all these issues. The members of our Party club generally belonged to other organizations as well and often were able to persuade the members of the other organizations to join in our anti-racist activities. Probably the most effective work we did was to set up card tables on campus, and especially at the main diagonal across the quadrangle in the center of the campus, to collect signed postcards protesting the latest lynching or trying to stop a frame-up legal lynchng on a trumped-up charge of raping a white woman.

These campaigns were generally sponsored by a number of organizations and we would collect about 4,000 postcards on a campus of 20,000 students. Since not everybody signed, this means we were speaking or giving out material to a large proportion of the entire student body.

One unsuccessful campaign was something called “operation haircut,” and it reflected a major weakness of our club – we didn’t have any Black members. At that time in Ann Arbor, as I understand it the campaign failed because the Black student population did not consider the problem of getting haircuts in every barber shop in Ann Arbor to be a major priority issue.

If we discussed why we didn’t have any Black members, I don’t remember it. The 10 or 11 co-op houses at Michigan were integrated; the IRA was integrated; the Party club in the town of Ann Arbor (nonstudents) was integrated, if small. But the student club was not.

I don’t think we did much recruiting generally, which is no excuse, considering all the good work we were doing. Our members had been members before coming to Michigan, often from New York, or Boston or Wisconsin. I think we did recruit a few new members, but none of them were African-Americans.

One reason we probably didn’t recruit more new members was that at that time, ever before the McCarthy era, Communists faced severe reprisals in many ways, including financial and physical. For this reason, people generally had no idea of the key role the Party often played in fighting for things like peace and Civil Rights because most people never knew who the Communists were. Most Party members were reluctant to be known as Communists.

This was even more true of our faculty club.

We called them “culture vultures” and had very little respect for them. We thought they were too worried about their jobs, correctly as it turned out, although not specifically on our campus.

The exception was a guy known as “Rats” Sheppard, a psychology professor in his sixties or seventies, who was famous for some work with, obviously, rats. We student Party members were thrilled and full of admiration when he told a large lecture hall full of eager students, “It’s going to come to a battle in this country between fascism and communism. You guys better get a gun and be on the right side.”

Not exactly the best way to formulate the question, I would say. He should at least have given a clearer indication of which side he was on and made no bones about the fact that this would be an important question on their final exams and that their answers would have an important bearing on their grades.

The rest of our faculty members, whoever they may have been, probably did some good work, but we never knew about what it was or who they were. This is more of a reflection on the state of democracy and freedom of thought in our country than on the caution of the people we called “culture vultures.”

I should add that the chairperson of my Party club at Michigan when I first joined it was also the chair of the Ann Arbor Democratic Party. I suspect both organizations had about the same number of active members in that strongly Republican town,

As in many college towns at that time, students either didn’t or couldn’t vote.

Maybe our guy was the only person the Democrats could find who would take the job.

It was during this period that I met my first Socialist without horns. His name was Terry Whitsitt and he was an officer of the IRA, the president, I think. Terry was a tall, thin African-American who was utterly charming, what we used to call a personality guy in high school. These guys would use their charm for various opportunistic purposes, to get ahead, to get as many girls as possible, to get elected to school office.

Terry wasn’t like that. He was like the rest of the members of the IRA, a serious and effective fighter against racism.

What kind of a Socialist was that? Where were his horns?

I was both pleased and puzzled, but didn’t worry about it too much. Terry was a terrific guy doing a very good job. I vaguely decided there must be something wrong with him since he didn’t conform to what I knew was the truth. I’d look at him every once in a while to see if his horns were retractable, but if they were they worked very rapidly when someone looked at him, maybe by an electric eye.

I never did see the horns or find him doing anything unprincipled while I was at Michigan I had an interesting encounter with him some years later. The first thing I did at that time was look curiously at his head.

Still no horns.

We did have a Socialist boarder at Mich house with horns, and very big ones at that, but if I had been a worrying man I would have been seriously troubled by Terry who defied my stereotypes about Socialists.

Fortunately, I wasn’t. I was too busy working with Terry and following his leadership in the IRA.

Below the attic at Mich house were study rooms on the second floor and part of the first floor, generally containing desks and places for three students to keep their clothes and personal belongings.

In my case, my roommates were Bob, and Herm Hudson. Bob was a progressive guy but was cold and unfriendly. As you might have guessed, he later became a doctor. The only good thing I can think of about him is his girlfriend, later his wife. Her name was Anna, a marvelous Greek-American young woman. Bob and Anna spent a lot of time in the front closet at Mich house since there was practically no place for young couples to be alone in Ann Arbor.

A few years before I came to Michigan the co-ops had an old hearse that the university allowed them to keep in spite of the general rule that students could not keep cars in Ann Arbor, since the co-ops needed a vehicle to carry supplies they sometimes bought for all 11 houses. It was considered a great place for couples to go when they wanted to be alone

Alas! by the time Bob met Anna, the hearse was no longer available. Into the closet! Bob must have had something on the ball or Anna wouldn’t have married him. For the sake of his patients, I hope he changed to be more like her rather than the other way around.

Herm Hudson was a remarkable person. He was a very smart African-American who had bee left almost blind by spinal meningitis when he was a child. He had built up his body so he had a very powerful build, was going to college and doing very well academically, and was an outstanding debater. He had done something to make the student manager of the house and he was expelled from Mich house.

Like the rest of us, Herm couldn’t afford to live anywhere but in a student co-op. What was he to do?

He did pretty well.

Herm convinced the co-op to let him live in the now hearseless garage so he would have a place to live without violating his expulsion. I don’t know who paid to fix it up, to co-op or Herm, or who did the work. I do know that when it was finished he had the best living space in the house (out of the house?), that the garage was winterized and very attractive, and that he continued to eat at the house as a boarder. We had a terrific party in Herm’s garage that featured pure alcohol, stolen by our enterprising science students from their labs, mixed with grapefruit juice.

Naturally, I don’t remember much about it.

There was also a formal dance held in Herm’s place but I didn’t go since I didn’t have any good clothes and couldn’t afford to rent any. I did buy a white or off-white jacket for a quarter that I loved until I looked at it closely and saw that it was too dirty to clean.

Oh well. Another quarter shot to hell!

Herm was a Romance Languages major and listened to Spanish radio broadcasts daily and spoke Spanish with Mr. Gallo almost every day. The last I heard about him he was teaching at the beautiful University of Puerto Rico.

Other guys at the house included my friend Bill Byrnes, who majored in engineering and after graduation sang up and down California under the name Bill Byrnes, the Irish Troubadour, and Jack Weiner, another friend who had red hair and a good-looking baby face that flipped the young women. He married a charmer named Roz and they made a beautiful couple.

I remember standing by a jukebox with Bill while he played Frank Sinatra’s “Nancy with the Laughing Face” 18 times in a row. We both enjoyed it, but Bill was insane over it. He must have been. At a nickel per play he spent 90 cent, almost a quarter of what we paid for a week’s room and board.

I can still hear the song and see Bill;s face as he listened. Bill was one of our guys and he often used to smile his magnificent smile and say, when he heard of something terrible that had happened, “What a society,” and then he’d repeat, “What a society!” He was a hell of a guy.

Come to think of it, maybe I should have put some money in the jukebox.

Among the more conservative guys was Shelkun, who bragged that he was a supporter of the Chetniks, the right-wingers in Yugoslavia who committed numerous atrocities during World War 2; the house manager, whose name was, I think, Gordon; and Roger Appleby, who got up every morning at 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. to make oatmeal for the house. He was a very nice guy. So nice that I accompanied him to a Methodist church one Sunday morning.

The service lasted about six months and spawned one of my first prejudices – I developed a very deep hatred for Methodist church services.

But I still think Roger was a nice guy – definitely a masochist, probably a sadist (why else would be have invited me to go with him?) but, still, a nice guy. I have only the deepest admiration and respect for the unlimited strength and spirit of self-sacrifice of Methodists, at least those who attended services in Ann Arbor in that long ago time.

If I had to sit through a service like that every week I wouldn’t be able to stop sinning; every time I thought about last Sunday’s service, I’d sin.

It’s a lucky thing for the world I’m not a Methodist.

For the next several decades I stayed away from Methodist churches. The next one I set foot in was the Washington Square United Methodist Church in New York City.

That was a different kettle of fish altogether.

John Blur was a sinner but I liked him anyway. He was a Black man who had been kicked out of the army as incorrigible I supported the war and was to make every effort to actively participate in it, but I loved the word “incorrigible.” For some reason it reminded me of me.

One day Johnny and I were tossing a frozen egg back and forth when Gordon came into the kitchen . He didn’t know it was frozen and almost had a shit fit.

“Don’t do that,” he screamed.

He was a big, strong guy and the house manager, but Johnny and I were incorrigible. We ignored him.

I tossed the egg to Johnny,

“Stop it, I said!” Gordon growled.

Johnny tossed it back to me. We both managed to keep a straight face, while watching the powerfully built Gordon.

“God Damn it, I said stop it!” Gordon yelled.

“O.K.,” I said and threw the egg against the wall.

For one quick second Gordon almost had apoplexy as he watched for the egg to splatter all over the kitchen wall and the floor. We could see the bombs bursting inside his overheated brain, or what served for a brain in his case. We could see the muscles tense as he prepared to leap for our throats.

“Oh shit! What if I threw the wrong egg?” flashed through my almost paralyzed mind, or what was left of it.

The frozen egg dropped harmlessly to the floor.

God must be a Methodist.

Johnny and I burst into loud, hysterical laughter, colored in part by unbearably strong relief. We couldn’t stop cackling, giggling, roaring.

“YOU GUYS THINK YOU’RE SO DAMNED SMART1’ Gordon’s roar was louder, more dangerous.

If we could have thought, we would have stopped, but we were beyond thinking.

Gradually, the three eruptions subsided, and the three volcanoes – one considerably larger and more explosive than the other two – became silent.

Finally, Gordon muttered something that was, at that time at least, unprintable, and walked away.

Being incorrigible sure was fun.

Our political life went on. Questions of war and peace were becoming very important in that postwar era. There was still a massive feeling in favor of peace and brotherhood (and sisterhood, but most people didn’t think in terms of brotherhood and sisterhood then, or at least most men didn’t and men were running things in most cases).

Along with other progressive people, we arranged to invite three young European peace activists who were touring the U.S. to visit our campus. Their visit was sponsored by 10 or 15 organizations and was a huge success. The group included a young woman from France and two young men, one from Denmark and one from Yugoslavia.

The young man from Yugoslavia was a raving beauty, kind of like a good-looking Pierce Brosnan. (Note to Mr. Brosnan and his lawyers: That’s a joke. It’s irony.) He had perfect thick black hair, and perfect thick black eyebrows; he played the guitar and he sang, perfectly of course. As you have probably guessed, he was a tenor.

I don’t know if he was a Communist or not, but if he was he could have increased the membership of Yugoslav Communist leader Tito’s party by at least 10,000 members from the Michigan campus alone just by asking people to join after he finished an evening of singing, provided, of course, that all the students on campus could have heard him sing.

The new members would all have been women.

He sang at a number of small meetings and parties during the week, leading up to the very large meeting to be held just before the group left for the next campus. He also spoke a little, but the big thing was his singing – and his looks. The others also spoke at a number of small meetings, but only briefly.

He was the big attraction, and he took the campus by storm. All of his appearances were packed with excited former Republicans and Democrats, all music lovers, all now convinced that they were really strong peace advocates, Communists, whatever it took to be like him, to be near him. He was interviewed by the campus paper, the Michigan Daily, he met with faculty members; he was lionized wherever he went. The local Communists were ecstatic.

The night of the big meeting sparkled with heavenly lights for everyone. It was both a big success and a somewhat smaller failure.

The young woman from France spoke first. She made the case for peace, spoke of the horrors of war, the need for all peoples to live together or die together. She was applauded strongly.

The man from Denmark made the same points, naturally enough, since they were the only points to be made. But he made them brilliantly, sharply, clearly. He reviewed recent history, the massive sacrifices, the concentration camps, the occupation of his country and of other countries. He explained how it was only possible to defeat the Nazis through the alliance of peoples and nations of different ideologies, systems, values, but who were all anti-fascists.

He said the world could not survive another world war, and that we were the only ones who could put an end to the threatening catastrophe.

In her introduction, the young Frenchwoman had told us that he had been a hero of the underground, had undergone all kinds of hardships and tortures. And yet he was only a few years older than most of the young students who were listening to him.

When he finished, many people in the audience, including the Communists, were crying,

He got a standing ovation.

The beautiful young man from Yugoslavia was a in tough spot. This was a very serious night and someone had decided that he would speak, but not sing, in order to emphasize the seriousness of the meeting. (Obviously, the soldiers who sang as they marched to the front didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation.) Under the circumstances, he did pretty well, giving a good, but not outstanding speech. He, too, was strongly applauded when he finished. But, after his colleague from Denmark, his talk was anticlimactic.

It wasn’t that the God had feet of clay.

Most of us were just surprised that he had any need for feet at all.

Among the other young men in the house were two Jewish students from Holland, both science students, who we rarely saw except at mealtimes. I believe they had survived the Nazi occupation. They were very serious, indeed. They went to bed at 7:00 o’clock every evening and got up at three or three-thirty every morning so they could study in peace without being disturbed. Naturally enough, they ended up science professors, one in physics and the other, I believe, in math. One was very tall and strongly built, the other small and wiry, but they were both very strong human beings.

Danny Feldman, who was six-three or six-four and very athletic and had hit me with a snowball in the back of the neck when we were neighbors in Detroit, had his room on the first floor with Lou Cote, who was probably the most respected guy in the house. Cote had served in the air force in the Far East, in India among other places, was a physics or math major, and had a terrific sense of humor. He was modest, thoughtful, and friendly. He also had a very large anti-VD poster above his desk, which was the first thing you saw when you entered the room.

The poster, distributed wherever U. S. armed forces were found in substantial numbers during World War 2, was of a beautiful, very young, very innocent-looking blond. The caption, in large bold letters, said, “SHE MAY LOOK CLEAN, BUT.”

Cote explained that it was aimed at both the “enlisted swine” and the “officer swine.” He had been an officer but didn’t appreciate the aristocratic and superior attitude of the army brass toward the troops.

Some of the guys would visit the room just to look at the picture.

The third roommate, whose name I can’t remember, was a smoker until Cote and Danny decided to form “Nicotinous Anonymous.” They didn’t smoke but decided it was a good organization and they forced their roommate to join. They also, of course, forced him to stop smoking.

He struggled, he suffered, he tore his hair. The whole house suffered with him. Finally, he won. He became an ex-smoker.

By that time he was drinking a fifth of whiskey a day.

I’m not positive, but I think they also cured him of his drinking. This may, in fact, have been the origin of alcoholics anonymous.

Danny and Cote, who were completely nonpolitical in our sense of being a member of any organized political movement, did a couple of valuable political acts, and many years late Cote did not do something that could have done me enormous harm for no good reason. It was during the McCarthy period when the government would use any tiny thread to unravel and wreck someone’s life.

What they did at this time was simple and direct. One of our Black house members had been refused service in a small, nondescript little eating place. Danny, Cote, and everyone else, Black and white, who was in the house when we heard about it, talked about it for about three-quarters of a second, and set out for the place. Of course the four Communists in the house went; the difference was that we would have talked about it for a long time, or, to be fair, we might have.

In this case, there was no choice. We all went immediately. The guy in the little greasy spoon almost had a heart attack. There were about twenty of us, of all sizes and races, from huge Danny to our small guy from Holland. The owner of the place apologized, swore it never happened, swore it was a mistake, swore it would never happen again. We assured him that he was right. It was a mistake and we were sure it would never happen again.

It never did.

I had three jobs at Michigan. One of then nearly cost me my life.

The library job was great. I worked nights, usually from seven to 10, in what they called the science library. Actually it didn’t include chemistry, physics, or math, all the course I had learned in my Latin class not to take. They were in other libraries. We had some assigned books on reserve, mostly for psychology classes, behind the desk, and signing them out was my main task. It didn’t take much time and left at least half of my working hours for homework and flirting with the co-eds who came in. Mostly, I just talked and joked around with them.

A guy in our house named George Binder had the best job on campus. He worked in a very special library nobody ever went into. The administration knew it and paid him accordingly. He got 30 cents an hour.

The reason nobody ever came into George’s library (it had an official name, too, but we always thought of it as George’s library) was that it was reserved for fellows some such thing. The main thing, maybe the only thing, George had to do for his thirty cents an hour, was to see to it that nobody brought an overcoat into this fancy place

I think these special people resented this rule so much that they practically never used the library. George worked there a million hours a week and graduated with a perfect 4.0 gade average.

I made much more than George, possibly as much as 60 cents an hour, but I had to distribute books and flirt for my money.

I owed my other good job to my father.

When I applied to the student employment office for a job, I mentioned that I had done plumbing work with pa. They gave me a job digging a serer and laying a pipe for a blind English professor. He and his wife lived in a beautiful house on a hill in a place that looked rural and quiet; crows flew around giant trees that shone with red fall foliage. Someone told me where to dig and how to lay the pipe. I was young and strong and didn’t mind the work. I loved the place and loved the job.

I wondered vaguely why they hired me to do it, since I had no particular knowledge of that kind of plumbing work, but I was glad they did.

Glad, that is, except for one thing.

Other students who had taken classes with this professor raved about how wonderful he was. Despite being blind, he was considered one of the best teachers on campus. His students said he had memorized most of Shakespeare’s works, both the plays and the sonnets, and that his lectures were brilliant. I was an English major at the time but had been unable to get into one of his classes because they were always overcrowded. He and his wife, naturally, didn’t have much to do with m, but they were always polite and considerate on the few occasions when we did speak.

There was only one problem.

The problem was that his wife treated this magnificent man like shit.

Worse still, she did it in front of me. She talked to him like he was a dog and she had just stepped in dog shit in her blue suede shoes. I never knew why she did it, or why he took it. I only know I was glad in the end when that part of my job ended.

Apparently, I did the job decently because my next assignment was with the buildings and grounds; most of my fellow workers were athletes who weren’t expected to do much work for their money, such as it was.

I fit right in.

In retrospect, I wonder if the stars on the Michigan teams had to do even a little work for their spending money or for living expenses. During the time I worked with them, I never met anyone I knew to be a star athlete, possibly because I had very little information about who the star athletes were. I did go to some of the basketball games but, after the first game of my freshman year, I never saw a football game.

That was because I found out that I could sell my student ticket for $10, that is, for the price of room and board for two and a half weeks. I had loved sports as a kid but, sadly enough, had yielded to some extent to the rapid stupid super-leftist idea, then prevalent among many young Communists, that sports were beneath us since we were young Lenins just waiting for our genius to be recognized. We were too smart to be bothered with such trivialities.. Fortunately, the editors of the Daily Worker were a little smarter and ran an excellent in the paper.

I read and enjoyed it sometimes, but rarely mentioned it when with my comrades.

Whatever level of athletes the guys I worked with were, they made it clear they didn’t intend to kill themselves working. They would start late and quit early, and stand around and talk when they felt like it. They did work some; since I was one of the group, I also worked very little once I got over my fear of being fired for not working. Nobody bothered me any more than they bothered the athletes.

Maybe they thought I was so well built I must be an athlete, too.

Maybe they didn’t.

In all probability, the supervisor didn’t know or care if there were non-privileged students among his charges. He never bothered me and, except for not being able to eat the best food available free at the training table in the Student Union dining room, I was treated just like the team members.

I just counted my blessings and didn’t do my job like the rest of the guys.

The work we didn’t do much of consisted of mowing lawns, moving things from one place to another and back again as needed, and, on one occasion, putting down the floor of the basketball court after an event (a hockey game?) for which it had been removed.. In that case, it was frightening work since we had to handle very large and heavy pieces of floor with a largely unskilled crew. Fortunately, the foreman was skilled and no one was hurt.

We were also fortunate enough to have some very strong young men working for buildings and grounds.

One of the team members was a powerfully built man of about two hundred pounds , which, strange as it sounds today, was large enough to make the football team at a big ten school in those days. “Where are you from?” I asked him.

“Wyoming,” he answered.

“What’s your major?” I asked.

“Football,” he answered without hesitation.

“What will you do when you graduate?”

“Work on my father’s cattle ranch.” He spoke matter-of-factly and didn’t seem to mind my asking. He was a man with his life clearly marked out; there were no clouds in his skies, not the slightest doubt about his good life and rosy future.

He was an interesting guy and I would have loved to have watched his life – in his classes, on the football field, and, not least, at the training table.

Unfortunately, I had to eat in the winter, too.

After the magnificent orange-red giant trees of the autumn campus had lost their leaves and Ann Arbor had turned into an equally beautiful snow-covered picture postcard, the outdoor work at buildings and grounds dwindled away. The student employment office sent me to work in the powerhouse.

Fittingly, perhaps, everything was big in the powerhouse. There were gigantic motors or generators or what the hell ever they were (generators, I think), presided over by equally gigantic men. I remember that the floors were very clean and mostly empty. We would turn the monsters, (the generators, not the men) on their sides or move them a little. Since I only worked on the main floor for a day or two, I have very little knowledge of what they did there.

One of our comrades lived and worked in a women’s co-op house. Her job was to take care of the coal-burning furnace. Spending so much time in the dark and dirty basement of the house was depressing. She talked about it, which may have helped keep her sane. She gave the furnace a name and reported on his condition to her friends.

Like many of the Communists on campus, she was studying Russian, so she named the furnace “Osip.”

“Osip is not cooperating today,” she would say. Or, “Osip is very hot today.”

I was very glad when she got a different job, whereupon her depression promptly disappeared.

I should be so lucky. They gave me a whole batch of Osips in the basement of he powerhouse. My job was to empty the ashes from the coal-burning furnaces into a large metal cart that ran along tracks like a streetcar. I was the power of this streetcar and pushed my cart along under the bottom of the row of furnaces. When the cart was in the proper position, I would push a lever and the bottom of the furnace would open and hot ashes would fall from the red-glowing furnace into my cart. Presumably, the burning coals were prevented from falling into the cart at the same time by some kinds of grill or gridwork.

After the ashes had fallen, I would push the lever the other way and the bottom of the furnace would close again. Then I would go on to the next furnace. At the end of my little track. The cart was emptied; I would repeat the process a few minutes later.

It wasn’t like hanging out with the athletes but I was used to dark, miserable basements from my plumbing days. Besides I could think of myself as one of the men working in the basement of Maxim Gorky’s wonderful short story, “Twenty-six Men and a Girl “- except, of course, in this csse there was no girl.

After a while, I got used to the job and had settled down into a routine. It became easier; I had a few minutes to rest while new ashes accumulated in the furnaces. One day I was pushing my cart along its track when there was an enormous, explosive flash of light. I jumped back instinctively immediately, then stood still, shaking. After a while I looked around. My cart was off the track. In front of it was a large black piece of metal, perhaps three or three-and-a-half feet square.

I guessed later that it was the cover of some kind of box holding electrical equipment, possibly large fuses.

I was twenty years old.

The next thing I remember clearly is the supervisor telling me that the track curve close to the box at that point and that it can go off the track there.

“If you had been killed, it would have cost us five thousand dollars,” he said.

My father was a plumber so I wasn’t unfamiliar with “obscene” language. I had worked in an automobile plant and aboard ship. In each case I was shocked at the frequency, and to some extent at the variety, of foul language I had heard.

I called that guy every kind of cocksucker, son-of-a-bitch, and so on, that I could think of and, since he movement was pretty backward on women’s rights and animal rights in those days, I’m afraid I insulted all of his women relatives, and his pets.

Then I quit.

I walked slowly out of the powerhouse, sobered and frightened by how close I had come to meeting the Dark Shadow in a flash of brilliant light.

My next trip was from ashes to printer’s ink.

Knowing people helps. I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody so I became a columnist on the Michigan student newspaper, which was published daily. Some wildly imaginative poet had named the paper the Michigan Daily.

Writing for the paper was great fun. I had already written for the Michigan Worker and had on rare occasions, had a piece in the (oh Joy!) Daily Worker, which had a national circulation. I wrote pro-labor stuff and civil rights reports and pro-peace stuff.. My main sources wee the Wall Street Journal, Business week and the Daily Worker and other radical publications. I was a very strong believer in giving exact sources of information, documenting in detail whenever possible. Since it didn’t seem like too good an idea to give the Daily Worker as a source, I would generally give the source cited by the Daily Worker.

But my best sources were the business publications.

We believed, probably correctly, that such publications would tell certain economic truths to their mainly conservative readers that the more widely read press (what we called “the capitalist press,”) would not generally mention. I took great delight in mentioning these things. I was a champion of the poor and oppressed, a knight in shining armor, a fighter for truth, justice, and what we Communists regarded as the true American way.

I was also on my way to becoming a big man on campus, which I didn’t particularly care about, and very popular with the co-eds, which would have been delightful except that I was already dating a wonderful young woman. I had it made. What a life!

And I got paid for it! The pay was 50 cents a column. Sometimes they let me write two columns a week, sometimes only one. But it still helped pay the rent and it was easy. I wonder if the Daily Worker ever heard of paying its stringers?

Naw!

Seriously, the paper had a tremendous cash-flow problem. Very little cash was flowing.

One of our comrades wanted to turn down an offer of $60 a week from Life Magazine in order to take a job for $20 a week with the Daily Worker. Unfortunately, (presumably) he had to take the job with Life because the country’s only radical daily newspaper couldn’t afford to hire him. I didn’t keep in touch with him after graduation so I’m not sure what job he actually took or was able to get.

I then did one of the more stupid things I was to do in my lifetime, one that would have long-lasting repercussions. Like many other stupid actions, it was done with the best of intentions.

The Party club needed an educational director. Since my column had about 20,000 potential readers and the Party club had about 20 members, naturally the club leadership suggested I be the new educational director of the club. When I told them I had to work and do my classwork and couldn’t do both, they still pressed me to take the job (no more 50 cents a column, of course). The Party is very important, they told me.

I knew that.

So I quit the Michigan Daily and became an educational director. We also had a newsletter that we sent to 100 or 200 leading people on and off campus, mostly student leaders and professors. It was sent in the name of the Party club, the name of which I don’t remember. It was identified as a Communist Party club and we needed someone to sign his name for the club.

My loyalty and romanticism carried the day. I volunteered to sign the newsletter.

To me it was a matter of courage and unselfishness. People by the million had sacrificed their lives in World War 2 and before that in Spain and in China and other places all over the world, including in the Civil Rights and labor struggles have in our own country. It was, and at the same time was not, a big deal to be an open Communist in Ann Arbor at that time.

Of course it might have been a better idea to have someone who was not on scholarship sign the newsletter, but that didn’t occur to me until later.

“Later” was when I met with the scholarship committee to apply for my next year’s scholarship and the chairman asked me what the (and he named the Party club’s name) was.

“It’s a student club of the Communist Party,” I told him, realizing I had no other choice and unwilling to make any other choice in any case.

He then went on to other questions. I worried, a little late, about losing my scholarship. Happily, the head of the scholarship committee was Dean Walter (I think his first name was Eric) and he was also one of my English professors who liked my work and also, I think, liked me. He was a very decent man. They cut my scholarship but left me enough so I could continue to stay in school. I always felt Dean Walter kept the committee from cutting off my scholarship entirely.

The student Communists at Michigan at that time generally took one of two paths. Some went into the auto plants after graduation, others went on to grad school and, generally, good jobs. One of our guys ended up an economics prof; I think another one did, too. Several became lawyers. At least one became a doctor. One went to work full time for the Party or the YCL, worked and starved himself into tuberculosis and ended up in Arizona, home of tubercular ex-organizers. He was a guy I never liked and only sometimes respected, but he had guts. I’ll tell you more about him later. (He was one of the people who pushed me to take the job as educational director, among other things, but that was an honest position on his part. He thought he was doing the right thing.)

Nevertheless, he was to give me a hard time on several occasions, and to introduce me to the basic technique of leadership domination and intimidation that contributed so much to the destruction of the U.S. Communist Party and, I suspect, to the disintegration of the socialist world, or what we thought of as the socialist world for many years.

Who is Sylvia, what is she, that all the swains adore her?

I don’t know about the other swains but this swain adored her because she was a wonderful person. If we had been a little older when we were going together I might not have married my wonderful wife because I would already have been married. In fact, when I met Sylvia several years after college, and a few days after I had met my future wife and was already deeply in love,, I almost lost the woman I loved because of Sylvia, although through no fault of hers.

Sylvia was smart, principled, funny, athletic, and beautiful.

Not a bad combination. I have no idea what she saw in me.

She was the daughter of a Lutheran minister from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. How she got her progressive ideas, I have no idea. She worked as a waitress for a while and was very down-to-earth. We dated, went to Detroit for movement parties, talked and listened to music all night with friends. Sometimes, after a night of music and laughter and talk, she would say (much to my distress),, “Let’s go out and go horseback riding!” I would politely but firmly resist such suggestions. It wasn’t until some time afterward that I first got on a horse one or two times. Once I fell off while the horse was walking. I don’t know if the horse knew or cared whether or not I could ride. I rather think she didn’t give a damn.

I certainly didn’t care if she could ride a horse or not.

We had one magical night, the memory of which still brings me happiness after decades of a happy marriage and after not having seen her for many, many years. I had a gift, when I was very young, of being able to create poetry spontaneously. We were in the arboretum, a collection of trees the university maintained for study, on a starry, moonlit winter night. The ground was covered with snow. We slid down the hills in a large cardboard box, laughing all the time. On the walk back up the hills, I would recite poetry that I made up as I went along.

Winter hiking is wonderful, but winter hiking or playing in the snow by moonlight with someone you really care about, when you are young and strong, when you don’t think about getting cold, when every laugh is a violin concerto and every smile an orchid – that’s the true meaning of youth and happiness.

I found that kind of happiness only once more and for a much longer time. I met my Glorya about six years later and married her almost immediately.

Who is Glorya, what is she, that all the swains adore her?

I’ll tell you later.

I won’t tell you about some of our people and some of my friends in order to protect them and their work. Such is the nature of our democracy.

Jeppy was a sweet young sunny woman whose father was, I think, a college professor; I always attributed her sunny disposition to a happy, loving home life. Louise, who we called Louie, was a tall blond, who, like most of us (except me sometimes) was always well dressed and looked like a typical middle class or upper middle class college student. Most of the women looked very chic and nothing like the stereotype of student Communists. A few, like me, didn’t dress very well sometimes because we didn’t have money for fancy clothes or didn’t care much about them or both. If I had dressed badly more often, I might have been the original hippy, the founder of a major worldwide revolutionary movement.

As it happened, since I didn’t care much either way, I dressed decently too often to have initiated this important movement.

Some of the others are best described in terms of their marriages. Like many organizations, the Party club also served as a marriage broker. People with similar ideas and principles, morals and activities, spending time together, sharing triumphs and defeats, socializing together, sometimes taking the same classes, tended to pair off, to fall in love.

One couple from Boston found each other in the strange city of Ann Arbor where everyone spoke funny and fell in love almost immediately, or so it seemed to me. I remember, decades later, young lady saying, “What’s ah position on this question?” Or did she say, “What’s opposition on this question?” They were prim, polite, well-dressed. They were also good, principled effective comrades. I learned a lesson that was to serve me well in years to come: you didn’t have to speak lke me or look like me to be a good person.

Ernie and Pat got married. Both were smart and good looking. They had a German shepherd dog who was smart and good looking, too. Ernie was a brilliant writer. As with a number of the others, I have only a vague idea of what happened to them later, due to still another case of my stupidity.

Marv married Evvy, but not without suffering first. He got very drunk and made a total fool of himself the first time he met her at a party. He came home sick and miserable, afraid that the woman he now suddenly loved would never speak to him again or would forever think of him as an idiot. Fortunately, he was also very funny and a very nice guy and Evvy recognized that. The last I heard he was successfully running a small business. I don’t know what she’s doing/

Some parts of the country are lucky – they have Vernor’s ginger ale. Others are benighted.

One of the joys of our childhood was to go down to the Vernor’s store in downtown Detroit on a summer night and have a Vernor’s. You could get it in bottles anywhere in the city and the surrounding areas, maybe even in cans by that time although I don’t remember any cans. But you could only get flavored Vernor’s - with cherry or strawberry flavoring or with sweet cream or some other good things – at the main store. At least that was the best place, from the horse’s mouth so to speak, although in this case it’s not a very appetizing metaphor.

So when Laura Duncan, a marvelous African American folk singer, came to Ann Arbor she naturally wanted a Vernor’s, which she remembered from a previous visit to our part of the country. Even without the special flavoring you could get at the main store, it’s a wonderful drink.

The place she went for her Vernor’s refused to serve her/

Ms. Duncan was justly furious. She took the owner to court, making a special trip back to Ann Arbor to press the case when the court date came up. I believe she came back from New York and I believe she was pressing charges under a local anti-discrimination law, but I’m not positive of either one.

The court case shows what kind of a town Ann Arbor was.

I didn’t go to the trial but a friend told me about it. One of Ms. Duncan’s witnesses was a student named Jack Geist. It was a jury trial and the defense lawyer knew his jury.

“What is your full name?” he asked Jack. He managed to determine through great legal prowess that Jack’s full name (which was of enormous relevance to the subject of the trial) was Jacob Marvin (I think) Geist.

“Jacob Marvin Geist,” the lawyer kept repeating each time he asked him a question. The questions weren’t important. The answers weren’t important. “Jacob Marvin Geist” was important. The lawyer wanted to make sure the jury knew that this white man (a hated student) who was testifying in support of a Black woman was Jewish, just in case the anti-Black prejudice of the jury wasn’t enough to guarantee his victory.

He knew his customers. The jury voted in favor of the store owner.

Laura Duncan had made the trip from New York for nothing.

New York still hasn’t learned its lesson. Although you can get Vernor’s in Los Angeles and I don’t know how many other places across the country, as far as I know you still can’t get Vernor’s in New York.

I haven’t been in Ann Arbor for a very long time but I believe even the stores in Ann Arbor now serve African Americans.

So there is some progress in North America. Now if only you could get a Vernor’s in New York.

My trip from Detroit to Ann Arbor to New York and almost around the world was twisted like a drunken corkscrew. I left Ann Arbor, not in a sudden storm of intelligent passion, but like a ship becalmed on the Sargasso Sea. I didn’t know where I was going or what the future held. I just knew I had to get out of there and, for better or for worse, I did.

A good high school is a dangerous thing; mine probably contributed a great deal to my leaving the University of Michigan.

It had been a long hard journey to get there.

I turned 18 during World War 2. When I registered for the draft, I made my decision. I signed voluntary induction, which meant no waiting for my number to come up or not come up; I would become a soldier immediately. Since I couldn’t see shit, you should excuse the expression, I cheated on the eye test and passed it. So much for the efficiency of the vaunted U. S. armed forces.

On the other hand, maybe they were like Chrysler and got paid on a cost-plus basis and therefore didn’t give a damn what kind of soldiers they got.

They gave you time for a very short vacation before you had to report for a second physical exam, followed by induction and basic training. I decided to go to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, with my friend Leo Dworkin before going into the army.

Leo was a body builder and physical ed freak. I remember his telling me, “Anything that puts a strain on your muscles will make them stronger.” He was about my size but with bulging muscles and a powerful, if hairy, chest.

Well, if anything that puts a strain on your muscles will make you stronger, I had a terrific advantage. The only luggage I could get was my father’s old brown leather suitcase. It weighed about four thousand pounds – before you put anything in it. I reluctantly put some things in it and we were off, or at least we hoped we were. Whether we were really off depended on the good will of other people since we were hitch-hiking.

We really were off, especially me with my bag that broke a thousand backs. Funny, carrying it never seemed to bother pa, I remember offering to carry it for him (I think it was the same bag) when he was in his sixties. He just laughed at me. He didn’t even bother to laugh very loud. I think he just thought, “What a silly kid.” I was a grown man at the time and considerably younger than he was.

Leo and I made it to a town in Kentucky near Mammoth Cave, brushed off the dust o the road, and registered at a small hotel. We turned down an invitation to ride into the hills for “some very good moonshine,” spent some time talking to a couple of sisters who were thrilled to talk to guys from a big city, and were off to the cave. The cave was great, scary, dark, mysterious, with a fascinating history We saw what was described as Jenny Lind;s chair, a chairlike formation where the famous Swedish soprano had sat. Our guide told us about people with tuberculosis who had come to live in the cave because they believed the constant temperature and humidity would cure them; it didn’t and most of them died.]

He told us about the blind fish living in the absolute darkness of the depths of the cave and of the enormous extent of the cave as he led us from one section to another. He also said nonchalantly, ”This is my first day as a guide.”

This was intended to frighten us for the fraction of a second it took us to realize he was kidding. It did.

This trip was my first after high school and I remember it fondly, but it also had a very important effect on my life. At some point while we were in Kentucky I did some underwater swimming. I punctured my eardrum and failed my second physical examination for the army. Men with punctured eardrums had to be rejected because they could not be protected from a possible poison gas attack.

Back in Detroit after the trip, I was at a loss a to what to do next. Then I heard that Art, the singer and Marxist teacher, and another guy were going to Chicago to study at the Lincoln School and I was invited to go along. The Lincoln School was a large Marxist school with a very fancy group of teachers, second only to the Jefferson School in New York, which was huge and occupied an entire large building on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Avenue of the Americas in New York.

As it turned out, I later studied at the Jefferson School but never at the Lincoln School.

Art had made it sound wonderful. The thing I remember most was his description of the work of a professor named Winspear who taught a course on early Greek philosophy that drew 300 students at the Lincoln School. He was also a philosophy professor at a non-Marxist university and had written a book called, “Who was Socrates,” which Art said could also be called “Socrates, Saint or Stinker.”

(Since I never got to take his course, maybe I’ll read his book. I’ve always been a procrastinator but this would be a record even for me.)

Art and the other guy roomed together and I got a room in a drab place whose only distinction was that a famous model whose face was on huge billboards that featured her puckered lips and the slogan, “just the kiss of the hops” had also lived there. Oh well, at least it had some distinction.

Now that I had a place to live, all I needed was a job. There was some problem about that because I was barely 18 and most places wouldn’t hire you if you were that young. I finally applied for a job on a railroad and they put me to work sweeping floors and cleaning up generally around the office of the railroad yard. They let me work a few days before my physical examination but told me I had to pass the physical before I could be a regular employee. That shouldn’t be a problem. Except for my punctured eardrum and my eyes I was in good shape according to the army and I figured I could fake the eye exam.

Chicago was a strange city t me and, as with Adeline Cole, I was late for my appointment with the doctor and solved the problem in the same way – I ran like hell. Part of the run was up a very high set of stairs over some tracks.

When the doctor examined me he told me I had a heart murmur.

I was devastated. I was too young to have heart trouble. I told the doctor I had just run up the stairs at top speed. He said my heart should have resumed its normal pace and rhythm by now. I was so sad he gave me some free advice. He said, “If I were you and I could afford it, I’d take a nice long rest.”

I sat in my drab room in my drab rooming house and came very close to crying. Money, as always, was a problem. What could I live on while I was resting? I could go home, of course, but the aggravation when pa and ma fought would not be good for my heat or for he rest of me either. They fought less now, but it was not a pleasant atmosphere. Then, too, I had no idea if a “nice, long rest” would cure the problem. The idea of getting another opinion from another doctor was barely considered. If I was to get a rest I’d need every cent of my meager savings to live on. Chicago was a new frontier for me, a place of potential physical and mental adventures that I had eagerly anticipated. That was all gone now. The only thing that mattered was getting my heath back if that was possible.

I said goodbye to Art and the other man, checked out the cheapest way to get back to Detroit, and headed home, depressed and frightened.

When I met Art some years later he looked at me curiously and said, “vaguely.”

I suppose it was harder for him to remember me than it was for me to remember him. After all, I didn’t look llike a giant bear with a huge black beard.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about Art. I was 18 years old and had a bad heart.

I was scared to death.

I found a basement room on Second Avenue not far from Wayne University (later Wayne State University) , the beautiful main library, and the Detroit Art Museum. So my informal education was taken care of; now all I had to do was figure out how to get enough to eat.

I never did.

Most days I went to a nearby drugstore and had breakfast at the lunch counter. It consisted of two pieces of white toast and butter and a glass of milk. During the day I ate a lot of carrots. In the afternoon I went back to the lunch counter and again had two pieces of white toast and a glass of milk.

It was delicious, especially when compared with what I ate the rest of the time – carrots.

Neither of the two medical effects that have been mentioned for those of us who eat a lot of carrots happened to me. My skin didn’t turn yellow, which I understand does happen sometimes ,and my lousy eyes didn’t improve. I just developed a deep hatred for carrots and a very deep love for white toast and milk.

They were so much better than carrots.

As for cost, I had it figured out to the penny. Two pieces of boast cost 7 cents; a glass of milk cost 7 cents. Total cost 14 cents. I don’t think I tipped since I had been told you didn’t have to tip at the counter, which is one reason I ate at a counter, the other being that it was the cheapest place I knew about. After a while I increased my diet considerably – I had four pieces of white toast and butter at each of my two daily meals.

About once a week I went home to my folks house for a real meal.

There were probably occasional supplements, maybe even a meal in a cheap restaurant, but, if so, I don’t remember them.

Outside of the minor problem of eating, I really enjoyed my life. I spent many hours in the art museum examining every nook and cranny (whatever they are), going from room to room, my heart filled with delight. I would find some sunlit courtyard and read to my heart’s content – novels, poetry, history, Marxist theory. I remember reading the two-volume Selected Works of Marx and Engels in a great bright space with a Diego Rivera mural on the wall.

This was the real class struggle.

The main library was right across the street from the museum. Both were very large white stone structures surrounded by vast green lawns where the co-eds from Wayne woud sit and study in the spring and summer. I suppose there were some young men studying there, too, but I don’t remember them for some reason So my days were filled with hunger, art and reading, with some political activity thrown in.

But always in the back of my mind was the question of my hear: Was it healthy? Could I do ordinary work without danger? What about sports? Would I die young? I generally avoided thinking about that except on beautiful days when I loved living and on dark rainy days when I was a little depressed anyway. Maybe that was why I did things I enjoyed whenever possible. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow e die!

The relationship between poor people and doctors has been greatly oversimplified. Of course we suffer greatly from lack of medical care, from the absence of doctors in much of the so-called third world, where people are really poor. The same is true of poor and especially minority neighborhoods in our country where people often don’t go to a doctor until their disease is advanced. But it is also true that the quality of medical care for poor people in our country – and not only for poor people – is often very low indeed, much lower than for people with adequate medical care such as presidents, congress members, and rich people generally.

Very few of the enormous number of patients who suffer serious disorders or death at the hands of doctors are rich. There is a special term for disorders “resulting from the activity of physicians.” They are called iatrogenic disorders.

I myself came very close to death at the hands of a young man who was learning how to be a doctor at a famous teaching hospital (a resident) and when I later became a medical semi-maven, I probably saved my mother’s life and prevented possible serious harmful effects to my father when doctors simply ignored standard ways to use drugs.

None of which is why I didn’t go to a doctor before I looked for and got a job. I was rapidly running out of money and felt pretty good so I began to look around.

In Detroit in those days if you were a workingclass young person you looked for an industrial job. The unions kept wages decent and their influence was strong enough so that even non-union jobs paid half-way decent wages. I had worked on production work on a lathe during one summer vacation in a small shop across the alley and two houses down from my parents house. My great accomplishment on that job was that I didn’t make a simple mistake that could have killed me.

They did warn me: if you turned on the lathe while a key was in the part f the lathe opposite your head the lathe would go round at a very high speed and throw the very heavy key into your head and kill you. O.K. So what prize do I get if I don’t forget to take the key out?

I think it was 90 cents an hour, but it might have been 75.

Being a poet and a dreamer as well as a great Marxist thinker of the future, I had a hell of a hard time remembering to take the key out before turning on the lathe. After all, I had more important things to think about.

One of the good things about the job was that I could walk home through the alley for lunch. I would always hesitate on the way back and enjoy our yard, which was full of lilacs and peach trees. Before I started working summers I had spent a lot of time on the roof of the garage in that heavenly back yard, reading, smelling the lilacs, and reaching out for a delicious peach on a branch near my arm whenever I was hungry.

It wasn’t that my parents had gotten rich. They had borrowed most of the down-payment from relatives and bought a yellow brick two-family house with a front yard and a back yard for $6,000. I loved the back yard except that it made me dreamy and I had to be especially careful not to turn on the lathe before removing the key when I returned to work after walking through the peaches and lilacs.

So I naturally looked for a job in a machine shop (preferably not on a lathe) when the combination of my very low savings and what I thought of as recovering health – that is, I didn’t hurt anywhere that I noticed – told me it was time. I listed my experience as a plumber’s helper and as a lathe operator on the very short application form in a small machine shop a few blocks from my room on Second Avenue.

I could walk, had a little experience in similar work, and had a white skin. I was hired to do production work on a milling machine.

It was a good job, if a little boring. In a milling machine, a piece of material is fastened to a flat bed that moves slowly past a cutting tool that cuts the material to the desired shape; a lubricating liquid flows over the place where the cutting occurs. This cools and protects the tool. At least that was how it worked in the jobs I did. Later on, when I had achieved medical mavenhood, I found out that the lubricating liquids were associated with cancer.

But I didn’t know anything about that at the time. I knew I had to be at work at seven in the evening and that I got off at 5:30 A.M. I got a half-hour for lunch and had to run about five or six large, heavy pieces of steel through the cutter and stack the cut pieces neatly during my 10 hour shift. My pay was a dollar an hour.

But the good thing about the job, as with most jobs, was getting off work. In this case it was especially good. The dawn had just come up. There were real birds singing in tall green trees in a quiet morning every day. The streets were gentle and almost empty. The few people who were around were feeling the sweet dawn spirit, too. I would walk slowly to a local greasy spoon on my way home and have cold milk and French toast with huge amounts of syrup and butter.

It was probably the best meal I ever had.

I raved about it so much my wife always said she hoped she could cook a meal as good as the French toast I ate at a greasy spoon in Detroit. She never did, but neither did anybody else.

I would then walk the few blocks home and have much of the day off after sleeping.. Working so close to home was a terrific advantage and almost made up for the ten-hour day.

The good job ended rather suddenly.

One day I dropped one of the heavy pieces of steel on my foot. I was in great pain and “rubbed in” my wound as my father had told us to do if we were hurt. I may also have been in semi-shock. I just sat on a piece of metal and shook a little. I don’t know if I cried visibly or openly but I certainly cried a lot inside. Naturally, I didn’t think about going to a doctor. It wouldn’t have done me any good if I had. I was in the shop alone and didn’t have a key to lock up. In fact, I didn’t even know how to lock the place up. I had to stay there as always and wait for the day shift to come in.

When the boss did come in he asked me why I had stopped running the machine. I hadn’t even thought about the machine, only about my foot and my pain, He was thinking about something else. He barely asked about my foot. Apparently, he made a good deal of money on each piece I did. He fired me immediately. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was probably also thinking about protecting himself from a possible workman’s compensation claim in case my injury turned out to be serious or disabling.

I now had no job and no money and was unable to work. This was another twist on my road to the University of Michigan.

I very reluctantly returned to my parents’ home.

As usual I didn’t see a doctor. My foot was apparently not broken – I sure as hell would have known it if it were- and it gradually got better. The same was true of my parents relationship. As with many people, when the conditions of their lives got better they got along with each other better. Many people strike out blindly at those they love or at anyone who is handy when they cannot cope with trying to make a living and live a happy life.

Pa and ma were also happy to have me home and made every effort to make me happy.

And, except for the French toast, the food was better. It sure as hell bat my diet before I started working on the milling machine of carrots and milk and (definitely not French) toast. I had been on that diet for a number of months, which may be why ordinary food, with my French toast for my flower of happiness, was so heavenly. My mother’s cooking had improved considerably now that she didn’t have to feed six people on a dollar a day.

It was during this period that I had one of the most remarkable political experiences of my life, one in which my life may have been in serious danger.

Wartime Detroit was an exciting place. The auto plants in the motor city now made tanks or warplanes. People who had never worked at a decent-paying job before now found that, as in World War 1, they had a chance for a job in a plant at union wages.

Many people, Black and white, came from the South looking for work. There was an acute shortage of housing and Detroit was a largely de facto segregated city. In the pretty green neighborhoods with flowers and newer housing there were often “improvement associations,” which the Party leaders described as thinly veiled fronts for the KKK. They probably should been called “maintenance associations,” since their real purpose was generally to keep the neighborhoods all white.

Billy sent me to attend one of their meetings one night as an undercover reporter for the Michigan Worker. As it happens nothing obviously racist was said and I didn’t get a story. I did get hell from Billy, however, because I didn’t call in after I came home. He was worried as hell because some of these people were dangerous. I didn’t know he cared. He was a hard-boiled guy and I was pretty naïve. I almost gulped and said, “Yes sir,” except we didn’t talk that way in the Party.

Among the few places where African-Americans could move without meeting almost certain violence were the city’s Jewish neighborhoods. I think of that sometimes in these days of rabid anti-Semitism by Farakhan and his ilk/

The housing shortage sometimes led to open mob action when Black people moved into a new home. In one case an African-American family moved into a house on Harrison and Elm in an area inhabited mostly by white Southerners and were met by indications of hostility. These were not the beautiful houses in the more outlying parts of the city, but the houses were decent and for Black people living in very overcrowded conditions were a prize worth obtaining.

Gerry Horne, who I was to work with in the anti-Apartheid movement and for whom I have a lot respect, has written a book called, “Was the Civil Rights Congress a Front for the Communist Party?” I haven’t read the book but I understand Gerry’s answer is “no.” In my experience in Detroit, however, the rank-and-file of those who participated ii Civil Rights Congress actions were Party members or YCL members, to the everlasting honor of those organizations.

In the case of the house on Harrison and Elm we first went into the bars to find out if we could what was planned for the first night the African-American family was in the house. No Black members of our group were sent into those white Southern bars because it would probably have been dangerous and they wouldn’t have served anyway. We were subtle. We sent white Northerners, who stood out in those places almost as much as Blacks would have. We settled for sending in a few men each night to serve as volunteer guards alongside the family members.

I went in on the second or third night along with an African-American comrade named Joe. The family welcomed us and we all sat quietly and went about or normal business as much as possible. The family was determined not to be forced out of their new home. After a while the children – a boy of about six and his sister a year or two older –went to bed and their parents sat together in the living room while Joe and I sat at the kitchen table and talked.

Joe is about six feet tall and dark, with a face that looks a lot like Patrick Ewing’s. That will be fine in the future but right now it’s a definite disadvantage. The husband and proud co-owner of the new house is taller and thinner with light skin. His wife is small., pretty and like her husband, quietly determined. They tell us they would have preferred to leave the children somewhere else, but there is nowhere else and this frame house with a front and back yard, a two-car garage, and solid construction os something they desperately need and think they are entitled to. I do, too.

As they go back to the dimly lit living room they seem to look very briefly at the front closet. I wonder about this for a second and then go back to talking to Joe. He doesn’t seem to notice the glance at the closet. Maybe they’re just looking around as they walk through their new house.

About an hour later the young wife (they are both in their mid-thirties and seem quite old to me – Joe and I are both in our teens) offers more tea or coffee. In retrospect, I think maybe she should have offered us milk; we were so young and the teen years now seem so far away. But we were responsible - very proudly and consciously responsible young Communists and we didn’t think what we were doing was in any way unusual. Considering what other teenagers have done and are doing in many parts of the world, it wasn’t, but part of me still thinks she should have offered us milk and cookies. On the way back to the living room she looks at the closet again. I wonder why, but don’t say anything.

It begins about nine o’clock.

The garage is on fire!

The couple are about to call the fire department when we hear sirens. Somebody has already called them. But the fire has just started! Then it hit me. Someone called the fire department before the fire was started. I can see figures in the flickering light of the fire at the edge of the garage. Now we know why hey called the fire department, why they set the fire. It’s their way of mobilizing a crowd, a mob. The sirens get louder, leaving no doubt they are heading for “our” house. The cops should be so efficient. I haven’t seen a cop since I’ve been here. More significantly, neither has the family in the several days they’ve been here.

Most of the mob are hidden by the garage so I can’t see how many there are. The voices get louder. The husband puts his arm around his wife and looks, obviously and without looking away, at the closet. So does Joe (look at the closet, not put his arm around the wife). The husband goes to the closet and takes out what looks to me like a huge shotgun, checks it thoroughly, and puts extra shells in his pocket.

The family called the police when the mob began to gather but there are no cops in sight. We’re on our own.

The father puts out the light and the four of us stand in the kitchen in the dark and watch the figures in the flickering light. The mother goes to check on the children and returns a few minutes later Miraculously, they’re still sleeping.

When the shotgun first becomes a visible reality, Joe looks at me to see how I respond o the news that we may be involved in an armed battle. Apparently he had been told about the gun but I wasn’t, possibly because there were some doubts as to how I would respond.

Under the circumstances, I give the only possible response –what we used to call a great big shit-eating grin. If it comes to an attack by a mob of racists it’s infinitely better to have a shotgun than not to have a shotgun. Joe grins back.

It’s been raining all night, mostly lightly, with intermittent bursts of heavier rain.

As a certified atheist well-versed I my father’s creed of “it’s all bullshit,” I hope very hard, but certainly don’t pray, that the rain will get harder My intense hopes are answered and it begins to rain a little harder, then harder still. The fires goes out before the fire engines arrive. Some of the mob being to drift away and we can see a few of the figures waving their arms and hear them shouting something. Except for a very few die-hards (kill-hards?) the members of the mob walk don the alley past the edge of the garage to return to their homes and bars. We relax a little, drink more coffee, and settle down to the previous positions, Joe and I at the kitchen table, the couple in the living room

Joe tells me about his search for a job. He’s been to every plant in Detroit, some of them many times, almost always when he knew through the Party grapevine that they were hiring. He can see them hiring; but they aren’t hiring him.

Almost all of those hired are white men. The few African-Americans hired are very light-skinned. The few women hired are white, young, and pretty. He’s bitter as hell, especially since he’s just received his draft notice.

I feel and share his bitterness and anger but it’s not the same as when it happens to you. I make a few dumb, obvious suggestions. Joe knows I’m trying to be helpful and doesn’t tell me my suggestions are dumb and obvious.

The rain lets up and we hear the sirens.

Oh shit! Here we go again!

This time, we note with satisfaction, some of them are still wet, and the continuing drizzle adds t their discomfort and to our satisfaction. The mob is smaller. If it comes to a physical battle maybe they’ll only have us outnumbered 10 or 20 to one instead of 30 to one. The wettest ones clearly appear to be madder and more anxious for quick action—they were here before and are probably the leaders the less wet ones; obviously the newest potential recruits, are more curious and non-too-anxious to stick around.

But they do stick around. There is what looks like a lot of talking going on and someone is getting ready to make a speech. Just as he is getting into his groove, waving his arms and appealing to their manhood and their alcohol, to the their pride in being white and idiotic, God gets sick of the rhetoric and sends down increasing amounts of rain. Zeus laughs at God’s puny efforts and sends down three or four lightning bolts, just missing the garage we are trying to save along with the house. God, in turn, feels to need to show his power and opens the nozzle of his garden hose, sending a cold steady rain over the earth, or at least over that part in the vicinity of Harrison and Elm streets in Detroit.

Some of the mob run for their lives when Zeus does his thing. The rest wait a few minutes to see if the rain will let up, then slowly drift away.

We talk for a few minutes, then the father and mother go back to the living room. I’m elated that we’ve escaped so far, but share a feeling of vulnerability with the rest of the group,. I wonder if I should suggest calling the police again, but conclude that the family is obviously perfectly capable of making that decision. Joe and I sit at the kitchen table again. He tells e he will not respond to his draft notice. “If they don’t have a job for me, I won’t carry a gun for them,” he says bitterly.

“What are you going to do?”

“Disappear. Take off across the country, If they can’t see me when I’m looking for a job maybe they won’t be able to see me when they want me.”

We sit quietly again and think about the consequences of what Joe is contemplating.

“I sure as hell can’t blame you,” I say. “Good luck.”

We go back to talking about other things. The rain lets up again and the sirens sound one or two more times during the night but the rest of the night is quiet. Toward morning we hold a short meeting and agree that for this day at least there should be at least one guard with the family during the day as well as at night and that we should do everything we can to put heavy pressure on the police to do their job.

We wait until it’s late enough to wake people up but still early enough to catch them before they leave for work or school, and try to get someone to replace us on guard duty. It’s not easy. For someone who hasn’t been up all night in this tense situation, there is little reason to drop everything and come over for guard duty. One comrade after another turns us down. I begin to feel angry and cynical and filled with despair.

“What’ll we do if we can’t get anyone?” I ask myself. Joe seems to hear my thought.

“Looks like we’re here for another day,” he says wearily.

The mother, who, of course, hasn’t slept herself and still has to get the children off to school, acts motherly.

“”You boys go on home and get some sleep, “ she says. “We’ll be all right.”

Our calls just get a little more urgent after she says that. We sure as hell don’t want to wait for the night shift which has already been arranged for, but we clearly have no intention of leaving the family alone.

The husband has already decided not to go to work that day but some outside help is obviously needed,. People have to go to work, to school, are sick, don’t answer the phone. Finally, we get Gerry Boyd, an African-American auto worker, a powerfully built man in his thirties, who is on the state board of the Party. He’ll not only come right over. He’ll shake up the Party and our liberal allies to put strong immediate pressure on the city and the police so the family gets adequate police protection.

Gerry does exactly what he says he’ll do. He shows up and relieves us. The wheels start turning and the city fathers and the press get all shook up. The cops show up and promise to stay or be by very frequently. The family gets to sleep. More importantly, the situation gradually stabilizes and they are able to stay safely in their new decent house.

The power of a Party leader in those days was a terrific thing, and largely a good thing – except for the effect it sometimes had on the leaders themselves. Some of them became egotistical, dictatorial creeps who had nothing but contempt for people. Gerry Boyd never became that kind of person and Joe, the family and I were sure glad he was so effective and successful. I must have been introduced to the family that night but after many decades I don’t know what their name is and for that I apologize.

Joe’s decision to disappear, which he carried out shortly afterwards, reminds me of a poem I wrote when I was 17. Here it is:

THOUGHTS OF A NEGRO SOLDIER ON HEARING OF THE DETROIT “RACE RIOTS.”

Dark clouds above my hear

And the chill wind cuts like a knife

And the People march

And the cold wind blows

And Democracy fights for its life.

Dark clouds above my head

And clouds in the minds of men

And the wind roars through the treetops

And the People have lost agai

And we march through the mud and the filth and the mire

And the lightning strikes and our hearts are on fire

And we hate and we hate and we can’t think what to hate

But the clouds in the minds of men.

Clouds in the sky and clouds in our minds

Oh God how I wish I could see!

But how can a man give his all for a cause

When my brother has no love for me?

The sirens have stopped sounding in the rainy night in the streets around Harrison and Elm in Detroit but the sharp fight for decent housing has gotten worse, more intense, and more painful. Homelessness has become an accepted phenomenon, the term “the homeless” has become commonplace and it is not unusual to hear of homeless people freezing to death on the streets of our country’s cities. I was to work against discrimination in employment in Detroit and against housing discrimination with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in New York.

And many decades after our experience in the house on Harrison and Elm my son is working against housing discrimination in New York /City.

I have since learned that people of many different political and religious persuasions do good , effective work in the fight against housing discrimination, but the Party and the YCL were among the first and the most effective. I also know that my editor, the hard-boiled Billy Allan, was one of a group of white Communists who lived in public housing in Detroit and led a successful fight to open the housing projects to African-Americans.

Unfortunately, he was also jealous when my story about the family and our experience that night was run on the front page of the Michigan worker, under the heading, “Their Courage an Inspiration to all Detroit.”

Would it were so!

I never saw or heard from Joe after he dropped out of sight shortly after we stood guards that night. I hope he made it.

Somehow I think he did.

These were some of the stops and pitfalls on the way to Ann Arbor. But, as I said, it was my good high school education that did me in.

There were a few other things of interest in my University of Michigan days.

I hitched-hiked 12 miles to Whitmore Lake with a friend and sailed a few glorious days. I took a series of tests, in those days before intelligence tests were largely discredited, that showed me to be in the 99.9th percentile as far as intelligence was concerned. Of course anyone reading this book, or even that last sentence, knows there must be something wrong with such tests but I didn’t know that then and it was great for my confidence. I began to wonder about those results a little when both my wife and my son – the two people I knew best – proved in practice to be much smarter than I was. After all, how much higher than 99.9 out of a hundred can you go?

Apparently some other people were impressed with my results, too. They told me if I took a year of Chinese, they’d give me a fellowship to study in China when I graduated.

China! Wow!

I was so excited, so full of stereotypical pictures of China from all the movies and books about China I had ever encountered, I couldn’t think of anything else. I remembered the Chinese food we had eaten the few times our family had eaten at a Chinese restaurant in Detroit My love of adventure, or at least of books about adventure, took over my life, After a while I began to think a little more sanely, but only a little. What would I do for a living if I took this offer? Why did they offer it to me?

All I really wanted to do was to make a revolution and for me that meant being on “the barricades.” (NOTE: Please see “Les Miserables” for an example of the barricades.) In practice that meant going into the auto shops or some other basic industry and leading the workers to revolution for “Bread, Peace, and Land,” the slogans of the Russian revolution. Obviously, all we had to do was read Lenin and do exactly what he did. And equally obviously, the workers were just waiting for me to get a job in the place where they’d been working for many years and teach them how to live their lives.

But if I went to China I would be qualified for only two kinds of jobs as far as I could see: Work for the government and help make life miserable for hundreds of millions of Chinese people, which I wouldn’t do, or teach Chinese or Chinese history-- if I learned anything about these subjects in some university about as far from the barricades as one could get.

But China! China!

There must be some way.

Maybe if I was a really good teacher I could turn out a large number of brilliant Chinese scholars who would then go into the plants and lead the revolution. After all, what auto worker wouldn’t be glad to follow a Chinese scholar, just out of college, to revolution? Lenin was a brilliant scholar; he won the gold medal in school. That was it! I would multiply my power. Instead of one brilliant revolutionary in basic industry there would be dozens, hundreds, all trained by me!

And China would be so much more interesting than Detroit or Ann Arbor, the only places I had been (unless you counted Cleveland or Chicago, which were too much like Detroit to be counted.)

A few years later, when the Chinese Communists were victorious, the McCarthyite right howled at the moon and bit the heels of liberals, screaming, “Who lost China?” as if China were theirs to lose. I suppose it was a good thing I didn’t go to China even as a student; if I had, I would have paraded before the world as the guy who lost China. I would have been proud to plead guilty to that charge even if it was only wishful thinking on my part.

And to think I could do that just by studying Chinese language and culture in China as a graduate student!

Unfortunately, I found out that the funding for the fellowship was derived from reparations the Chinese had to pay after losing the so-called “Boxer Rebellion,” a war they had fought against having enormous amounts of opium forced upon them.

I decided, adventure or no adventure, romance or no romance, I couldn’t take that money.

It would be decades before the possibility of going to China would again be a reality.

But I had had some wonderful dreams.

China! Wow!

Not much more happened at Michigan.

I submitted something to the Hopwood literary competition in my first or second year but I don’t remember what it was or even if it was prose or poetry. I do remember that the name I used was “Leonard Steel.” Stalin meant steel in Russian. The point is not just that I was a somewhat sectarian or hyper-left Communist at the time, which I was, but that such a choice would have been made by millions of nonhyper-left Communists all over the world. It was what was later to be called “The Cult of Personality.”

I didn’t win a Hopwood.

As I said, it was my good high school education that led to my leaving Michigan. Here’s how it happened:

Some of the courses at Michigan were almost repetitions of high school courses, at least in part. My first American history course (actually a U.S. history course that was called American history as if Latin America did not exist) was so simple-minded and so much like my high school course that I took notes in French. Even that didn’t help me – although I didn’t actually try to do it – in a 40-year long lecture on The Scarlet Letter.

The book is stupid and obvious.

The discussions of the book in high school were stupid, obvious, and repetitious.

The discussion at Michigan was not a discussion a lecture, given by somebody to several hundred students in a large room.

It was stupid and obvious. More importantly, it never stopped.

Someone near me was wearing much too much perfume, a sickening odor that I can still smell any time I feel nauseous.. I considered my action for a few minutes, tried to hold out, tried to think about other things, tried looking around the room again.

Nothing worked.

I gathered my notebook and papers, my books and outer garments and walked out.

I went home and packed, returned to Detroit and packed again, much lighter this time, went to New York, and took a job on the first ship that would have me.

That was a really bad lecture.

WORK, WAYNE UNIVERSITY AND WORK AGAIN

It’s time to talk about Dave. .

He went through college at the age of two (walked through), shit on the college steps if my memory serves me correctly (unless that was me who did the shitting), was my chief antagonist in our early years and my best friend later, and he was dead needlessly and tragically at 22.

Dave was brilliant without obviously trying, handsome with jet black hair and bright, brilliant (what else?) eyes and a good smile. He skipped three times and went to summer school once and graduated from high school at fifteen and had finished two years of college by the time he was seventeen.

And he was dead at 22.

Dave was six feet tall, compared with my five eight and Sid’s five ten. He was a good athlete and got along well with people (except me in our early childhood – who was this other boy taking part of my parents’ attention?). Everything seemed easy to this black-haired golden boy.

We once sat in the basement surrounded by plumbing parts and tools and he asked me, ”What does life mean? Why are we here? Where does it all lead?”

He was in college and should have known the answers I certainly didn’t any more than he did. We watched the Brownian movement of the dust particles in a bright stream of sunlight that came through a basement window.

We didn’t solve the problem in our discussion that day and by the time I knew the answer Dave was dead at 22.

Many bright young men dodged the draft; many more got into special programs and became doctors at government expense and went into the service as officers and doctors, if not always gentlemen. Others shopped around for the best deal in the services. Dave did none of these things. He got his draft notice while in college and went into the army as a private.

The brilliant people who run the army sent him to Fort Hood, Texas, the asshole of the world. It was hot, dusty, dry, and full of racists and anti-Semites. Dave came back to us after a nervous breakdown. While he was home he tried to commit suicide by jumping off a balcony in a department store where several members of the family were shopping. His brilliance wasn’t so apparent at that time.

He never talked much about his experience. He did tell us that the anti-Semitic bullies had sung “Onward Christian Soldiers” to bait him. They also sang a “song” with the words, “If your name is Abie, join the Jewish navy, fight! fight! fight! for Palestine!”

I can only imagine the group of anti-Semitic animals howling around my beautiful brother like the famous picture of a bunch of dogs puling down a magnificent stag. I had experienced a tiny bit of it for part of one day when I worked at the DeSoto Warren plant. But I was able to just walk away from them. Dave was subject to military discipline, far from friends and home, far from help of any kind. He came back to us broken in body and mind.

He gradually recovered mentally and physically, but he was more determined than ever to fight the Nazis. He enlisted in the Coast Guard using the name and identification of his friend, Sol, who we all considered dumb because he had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade (as did my brother Sidney, who we never considered dumb).

Someone figured out that Dave wasn’t Sol and he was discharged from the Coast Guard. Incidentally, the armed forces did quite well by Sol. He served during the war in army intelligence (an oxymoron if ever there was one).

While he was studying at Wayne University, the city university in Detroit, Dave must have had some strange teachers or associates. He took a German course and somewhere along the line he picked up some interesting examples of German culture as it was manifested at that time.

Partly to bait me (or was he just practicing what the teacher had assigned?) he would recite a poem with the lines, “Tsum Rhine, tsum Rhine, tsum Deutche Rhine!” That means, “To the Rhine, to the Rhine, to the German Rhine!” The poem echoed the cry of the German nationalists. He also mentioned that his teacher said to him n at least one occasion, “This is German, not Yiddish, Mr. Cohen, “ while correcting his pronunciation.

What a nice teacher for the 1940’s in the United States!

It was definitely to bait me or to see what I would say that he sang the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel Song in the house. Did he German teacher teach him that, too? We were friends at the time but I was a Communist and he was not by a long shot. The words that he sang said, “Kamraden, die raiten rekactionen shussen, “ which means, “Comrades, sht (or in this context maybe killed) by the red reactionaries.”

A very smart friend who knew us both well advised me not to argue wih him but to leave the Daily Worker nonchalantly around he house. It worked very well. It was a good paper at that time and Dave joined the Party not too long afterwards.

But most of his life was not political. He once told me, ”We ‘re just watching life instead of living life.” He began going to Windsor, the Canadian city just across the river from Detroit, to party, meet women, and drink beer. He told me he drank a whole case of beer one night. He dated in Detroit, too, including a raving beauty of a red head who used to sit on the front porch of a house down the street from us. My mother quietly disapproved of her, I think because she wasn’t Jewish, but it didn’t dissuade Dave.

It wouldn’t have dissuaded me, either. She looked like a grown-up Elsie May Waterlawn.

But Dave didn’t date anyone for very long. He used to go to the telephone exchange when the shift let out at midnight to meet girls, another example of his brilliance. Where else could you find such a concentration of young women as at the place where a lot of telephone operators worked? I wish I’d thought of that.

Dave had plenty of reason to be bitter against Christians, but he figured the cruel assholes at Fort Hood were more of an example of how idiotic people can be than o how Christians behaved. He told me about one woman he dated who was a practicing Christian fundamentalist. In her church there was a sign that listed the number of good points one got for various good deeds, mostly five or ten. But if y a soul for Christ, you got a thousand!

She never got his soul, but I suspect they got each other’s body.

Dave also came home from the army with a passion for guns, which might also have contributed to his death. He used to sit at the kitchen table and clean his various guns. In one of the strange contradictions in the law at that time, one could become a federally licensed gun dealer just by paying a small fee, with little or no investigation such as was required to get a gun permit. Dave became a gun dealer, but, although I remember his buying guns, I don’t emember his ever selling any.

He just liked guns.

I followed his lead kind of passively like an admiring younger brother, but didn’t do much of the gun cleaning. We once fired a rifle from the roof or an upstairs window and had no idea where the bullet went. That scared hell out of us so we didn’t do that again. We set up a sewer cover in the basement and shot at it with handguns. The bullets fragmented and richocheted off the sewer cover and came damn close to hitting us.

That scared hell out of us, too, so we didn’t do that again either.

The only other significant incident with a gun was almost very significant. I had an argument with Sid and he had a thirty-two in his hand. I, being very smart (I had the I.Q. tests to prove it) kept on arguing. We both got madder and madder He was bigger but I was four years older and stronger. Finally, he released the safety on the gun. It sounded very loud to me, in fact it sounded like the howling of the hounds of hell.

I took Lenin’s advice. I retreated in order to preserve the forces – namely me.

“Okay, you’re right,” I said. He was scared, too, when he realized what he had almost done. We both went back into the house from the back yard where this happened and sat quietly thinking how close we had come to tragedy.

Guns also led to one of our more interesting adventures. As a general rule pa and ma didn’t travel much and practically never without the rest of the family but one time, for a reason I can’t remember, they did. And they were traveling without the car. Dave got all excited about that but I didn’t know why until they had left.

“O.K. let’s go,” he said the next day. I usually responded affirmatively to such suggestions but I was still a little curious when he headed directly for the car. I was even more curious when he took out the car keys and got in.

“Sure,” I said, “But where’d you get the keys?”

“I sneaked in and took them out of pa’s pocket while he was sleeping.”

“Oh,” I said brilliantly. “But won’t he miss them?”

“I’ll put them back before he looks for them when they come back. He’s not driving the car on the trip. In case yu didn’t notice, we’re sitting in the car and he’s not here,” he said sarcastically.

I could be sarcastic, too. I looked around elaborately, carefully, not missing any part of the car. “I believe you’re right,” I said.

“Just for that I’m not going to tell you where we’re going.”

And he didn’t. We stopped for gas and headed south into the wilds of Ohio and Illinois. We spent three or four days in small towns mostly and Dave bought a few guns and we ate in a variety of cheap diners and slept in the car.

It was glorious. We went where we wanted to and did what we wanted to and every day w4e went to a place we had never seen before and talked to people we had never talked to before. My son would one day be fascinated by the name of a town and would make the most beautiful smile every time we said the word. The same thing happened to Dave and me only we were no longer children.

“Are you going to Wawpauk?” a nice-looking young waitress asked us one day.

“Where?”

“Wawpauk. Wawpaukaneta.”

“Well hell yes, we’re going to Wawpaukaneta, “Dave answered immediately. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world,” and we did.

I don’t remember if it was in Ohio or Illinois o how to spell it or what it was like when we got there, or if it was any different from any of the other small towns we visited. Everyone seemed to know about it. Maybe they were I love with the name, too, or maybe it had become ordinary to them from overuse. I do know we almost didn’t get back before pa and ma did because we ere determined to go to Wawpauk and that we didn’t give a damn if we were caught coming home. We were in love and nothing else mattered.

Wawpaukaneta. Wawpaukaneta here we come!

We got back from the trip without mishap. Dave successfully returned the keys to pa’s pants pocket while pa slept and we were happy.

So happy, in fact, that we did it again a number of times even while the folks were in town. We would go at night. Dave would sneak the keys and we’d be off for most of the night. If the parking place we’d taken the car from was right in front of the house and there was room, Dave would cut off the motor and glide in so we wouldn’t make any noise. We loved it, maybe because of the risk, maybe because we never got caught.

I can’t imagine what pa would have done if he’d caught us, but in the back of my mind, at least, was the knowledge that he wouldn’t hit us with his hands because he’d be afraid he’d kill us.

I’m glad he was so strong.

This happened in front of our yellow two family house on Tuxedo. Luckily, we were almost always able to get back into the same spot we’d taken the car from on our quiet, tree-lined street, One time, however, the parking space was taken when we came home at four in the morning..

“Oh shit, “ Dave said eloquently.

“Fuck,” I said equally eloquently.

We sat and waited, hoping whoever had parked in our space would be good enough to leave before five or five-thirty when pa got up.

They didn’t. Finally, in desperation, Dave started the car. Without a word, he parked in the nearest available place. Scared to death, we sneaked into the house and Dave succeeded in returning the keys to pa’s pocket while he slept. Then we tried to sleep, without much success in my case.

If pa ever noticed that the car wasn’t where he had parked it, he never let on. We took a few more night rides after that and enjoyed the, but it was never quite the same. Maybe he’d forget how strong he was and hit us with his hands.

* * *

I’m not sure if Dave and I ever sailed together, I think not, although he and Sid and I worked together in the seamen’s union on at least one memorable occasion. However, we did work together on one-and-a-half jobs.

Really, it was one job and a half of a day on another. What happened was this. We were both living with pa and ma on Tuxedo and were looking for jobs. We saw an ad in the paper for two young men (yes, they could advertise for men in those days, and they could specify young men, too) to learn to rebuild car engines. The ad specified, “No drifters.” Well, we weren’t planning any long trips to Europe just then, so we applied and were hired. While we were eating lunch at a diner near the job the first day a guy approached us and started talking. Among other things, he asked how much we were getting paid.

“A dollar an hour,” Dave said.

“I’ll give you a dollar and a quarter,” the guy said.

“We’ll take it,” I said at the same time.

We later found out what the job was. We were to be apprentice millwrights. The first day on the job a guy who looked the jolly green giant but bigger gave us a talking to. “So you guys are apprentices. I never had any apprentices work with e before,” he said. “Well, you never have to do any dangerous work or any hard work. You can’t climb” He paused and then laughed like a volcano.

“In fact, you hardly have to do any work at all!” He continued to laugh and we gladly joined him. Getting paid without working sounded great to us. The guy who hired us was named Perkins, which Dave immediately made “prickins.” He was the general foreman and the job was, again, cost-plus. The bigger the payroll, the more money the boss made. The rest of the guys ere good guys generally but he lived up to his name.

“The first boos must have thought he had found just the right guys, ma laughed. “Two brothers. He probably thought you’d be there a long time.” She laughed again. Well, after all, a quarter an hour was ten dollars a week and as pa used to say, “It’s just as good in my pocket as in his.”

Better.

We were reconverting the giant Dodge Main plant from making tanks or whatever they made during the war t making cars again obviously Dodges. We were putting in conveyor belts, or rather the steel rails the cars and other materials hung from as they were carried from one work station to another. We would life large “I-beams,” while climbing a ladder, hold them in place with clamps called “C-clamps,” and the welders would weld the long steel beams so they hung in continuous lines for the car bodies t ride on. We did other things, too, but this was the heart of our job.

That “we” ma be a slight exaggeration. I mostly ran errands as an apprentice, but sometimes I got to climb a ladder and hold a heavy steel beam on my shoulder or fasten a C-clamp. I also handed up the clamps or tools and ran a jack hammer or pneumatic drill, filling my lungs with cement dust. Nobody ever said I wasn’t supposed to climb the ladder after that first day, but I noticed they didn’t tell me to do it when Prickins was around A lot of these guys were iron workers and to them climbing meant 20 or 30 stories not one or two. In the rare cases where high ladders were used they didn’t let me climb.

What I remember most about that job was the chocolate milk and the T-bone steaks. We were working 13 hours a day and were getting double time for overtime after eight hours. Twice a day they would send me to get snacks and almost all the time I got chocolate milk for me. And twice a day Dave and I would go to a restaurant called the “Flying Duck,” instantly and automatically renamed the “Flying Fuck” by the guys, for T-bone steaks. For the first time in our lives we were making good money, even at a dollar-and-a-quarter an hour, and we enjoyed it thoroughly.

And every day in the Flying Duck we heard some of the same songs: ‘Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, beautiful, beautiful brow’own eyes, beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, I’ll never love blue eyes again.” The other one that we heard once or twice a day for weeks or months was a Woodie Guthrie song , right up there on the jukebox with beautiful, beautiful brown eyes He sang: “Way down yonder in the Indian nation, riding my pony on the reservation, Oklahoma hills where I was born. Da, da, da, da, da, dation, da, da, da,da ,da, dation, Oklahoma hills where I was born.”

I used to have string beans and masked potatoes almost all the time with my T-bone steak (which needless to say I had never had before and have practically never had since) and when I have string beans or mashed potatoes nowadays I can sometimes still hear the jukebox in the Flying Fuck, er Duck, that’s Flying duck, playing “Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes, “ or Woodie Guthrie singing “ “Oklahoma Hills Where I was Born.”

The guys played the usual apprentice tricks on me. One day they sent me to find a sky hook. I knew there was no such thing so I spent a delightful couple of hours, part of it at double time, wandering around the giant plant where thirty thousand men and women had worked to make Dodge cars they didn’t own We were preparing the plant so they could make cars there again. I think Dodge Main is closed now. I don’t know if the echoes of our footsteps and our laughter can still be heard in the old building or if the building itself has gone to that great factory heaven in the sky.

I came back full of chocolate milk and told the guys I couldn’t find a sky hook. They asked me if I looked everywhere and I said I had and that was the end of it .I was somewhat surprised a couple of weeks later when they sent me to find a rail bender. “O.K.”. I can keep it up as long as you can,” I said to myself, and took off for another happy afternoon of peaceful wandering and chocolate milk.

When I got back they asked me where the rail bender was. I just looked at them.

“It’s with the sky hook,” I told them.

“Never mind, “ I’ll get it myself,” one of the millwrights said He came back a few minutes later with a long steel tool with a sturdy hook on the end that was used for – you guessed it – bending rails. The joke was on me this time, but nobody ever told Prickins.

Dave/’s experience on the job was different. He really tackled the job of learning the various skills a millwright has to know. After teasing him good-naturedly and playing all the usual tricks on him, they really began to teach him the trade. They also played more advanced tricks. They told him to bring in a pint of whiskey the next day and out it in a tool locker. Then they snuck it out, drank it, and told Dave they thought the boss probably got it and he was in serious trouble. They teased him about it all day but, unlike the pricks a Fort Hood, they told him about it at the end of the day and they all had a drink and a laugh about it when work was over. The guys generally seemed like good, smart, people, and no less intelligent than the people I had gone to Michigan with. They loved to say, “It’s supposed to be foolproof but you have to be careful because the fools are getting smarter all the time.”

Dave was ready for the test to qualify as a millwright in a matter of weeks or months instead of the usual four years and he passed it with a little help from his friends. Make that a lot of help. I don’t know how much help he would have needed, but we’ll never know. During the tests the guys from the union wandered around the room and, if they saw anyone hesitate even a little over a question or look up from the exam paper, they went over to him and gave him the answer.

Even I could have passed the test under those circumstances.

Shortly after Dave passed the test, we were sworn into the union.

The oath included a promise to keep the union for Caucasians only.

Taken by surprise, we swore the oath and became members of Millwrights Local 1102 of the carpenters’ union, Matthew Woll, international president. Woll was one of a number of presidents of AFL craft unions who were right-wing Republicans. I certainly had no intention of keeping that promise and I’m sure Dave wasn’t going to keep it either. It was like signing a pledge, under duress, not to join a union, a practice still widely used, especially in sweat shops or wherever the workers are vulnerable. The attitude of these en who I had liked and who had liked Dave and me was disappointing to say the least. It was one more example of people who can be decent about some things and rotten about other things. I don’t know if they agreed with the policy but I saw no evidence they disagreed with it.

The things I remember most about the union meetings was that the general foremen were members of the local, and the size of the sergeant-at-arms. Most of the men were at least six feet tall and weighed a least 200 pounds. The sergeant-at-arms was six feet six and weighed about 2,000 pounds, or maybe a little less. He didn’t need arms.

I asked Carl Winter, the head of the Party in Michigan what an individual member of such a local could do about this exclusion of African-Americans from the union and what we could do to make it more progressive. Mine was the last question at a large public meeting of the Party where Carl and other speakers were laying down the {arty line. Unfortunately, and perhaps tragically, it as Earl Browder’s opportunist line Browder was the national leader of the organization at that time and his line was American exceptionalism, the general laws of capitalism did not apply to the United States, ours was a progressive capitalism and we would not have any trouble with the bosses after the war.

Horseshit, sailor!

I say that with hindsight. At the time almost all Party members in the United States and in Latin America where they generally followed us into the swamp believed this crap. I did, too.

Looking back now, I wonder why the same people who led us into the swamp were kept as leaders, with few exceptions. If they were so smart why didn’t they (and I) see what was wrong with Browder’s line before it was sharply criticized by Jaques DuClos, a French Communist leader?

I missed Carl’s answer to my question because I went to the bathroom right after I asked it, figuring it would be the last answered since it was the last question asked. Carl answered it first and I never knew what his answer was. (Maybe I should have asked more people what he said??) But I got a better answer, or at least more wisdom, in the bathroom. A large African-American auto worker named Frank, a Ford worker I think, was raising hell in the bathroom. He didn’t believe all the horseshit.

“We’ve got to organize,” he said loudly. “We’ve got to organize.”

He made it clear he meant organize to fight the bosses. Had he said that loudly and enthusiastically on the floor he might have been expelled from the Party. A similar fate was suffered by a good friend of mine and involved Carl Winter. I’ll tell you about it later; right now let’s get back to Dave.

Dave didn’t attend that meeting. We worked a while longer as millwright and apprentice millwright and then drifted on. I don’t know if the job ended or we went on to things we considered more interesting .We both wanted to continue college and that was always a factor in our choices.

The next time we were together in a job-related situation was when we were pickets in the National Maritime Union’s strike on the Great Lakes. It would be our last major joint effort and it wasn’t really so major after all.

As I said, Dave and I never sailed together, nor did either of us ever sail with Sidney, who was also a seaman, but we all did strike duty together and we all got our seaman’s papers the same way. Shipping on the Great Lakes as run by the Lake Carriers Association, an alliance of giant mining, manufacturing and shipping companies. You had to have seaman’s papers to get a job on a ship and you had to have a job on a ship to get seaman’s papers. But if a boss offered you a job, you could get papers. We were told to the headquarters of the Lake Carriers Association needing a shave, disheveled, and smelling of beer or liquor and say, “I need a job.”

It also helped if you wore a dirty T-shirt and no shirt, at least that’s what I did and it worked. Dave and Sid got their papers and their jobs in much the same way.

One of our assignments was to go into bars where seamen hung out in a small town and talk to guys who might be sailing ships that wee not on strike and convince them to join the walkout. Dave and Sidney were fairly big and I was smaller but had at least a few muscles. Unfortunately, we weren’t very bright about the way we went about it. We’d walk into the bars looking like a goon squad and all the guys in the bar who might have been seamen immediately left, some without finishing their drinks, a crime among seamen.

The only thing that made us feel a little less bad was that the other group of three union seamen had had exactly the same experience. Our humiliation was raised to a higher level when a giant of a man started walking toward the six of us. We didn’t discuss it at length. We got the hell out of there/

To save our self-respect, we briefly discussed putting sugar in the giant’s gas tank, which would seriously mess up his car, or so I’ve been told. The discussion, carried on at an appropriate distance from the enemy, was going very well until we came to the question of who would get close enough to the man to see where his car was parked and do the deed.

Then the plan fell apart and we got the hell out of there again.

Our next union assignment went much better. A scab ship was tied up in Wyandotte, Michigan, and we and a bunch of other men attacked it throwing rocks, paint, bottles and debris at the ship. Our organizer was a young man had been six months away from a PhD from Harvard and from becoming a rabbi when he quit to become a union organizer. He probably thought throwing rocks at ships was more fun.

He married a wonderful young woman who I had had a crush on when I was 17, but she was much too old for me; she was 22. What impressed me most was that she was a pilot at 22 and was as strong as I was, in addition to being beautiful and progressive. A PhD from Harvard couldn’t compare with that..

He or someone else found out that I was a swimmer and suggested I swim out and cut a cable that held the ship in place and prevented the large, heavy metal link between the ship and the loading dock from breaking. Since the link was very expensive, it would have cost the company a lot of money if the cable were cut.

I was not enthusiastic

In the first place if I was caught I could go to jail for years. Dave was also not enthusiastic. He pointed out that if the ship’s engines wee started while I ws close to the ship’s screw, I would end up a lot of hunks of bloody flesh.

That cheered me up even more.

Finally, Dave got me off the hook. “You can’t see well enough without your glasses to find the fuck’n cable!” he told me.

“You’re right,” I said gratefully.

“I’m sorry,” I told the organizer with as much sincerity as I could fake, “But I can’t see well enough without y glasses to find the fuck’n cable.” I figured since he was an organizer and not a rabbi it as all right to talk that way.

So we didn’t cut the cable and I didn’t become a bloody pulp, thanks to Dave. After a while the organizer told us it was time to leave. As we were climbing the fence that marked the end of the company’s property, a group of Wyandotte cops drove up and got out of their cars.

“That sure was a good baseball game,” Dave said. “Yeah,” I said brilliantly.

The cops said, “Hi, fellows.”

They belonged to a CIO union, too.

That was the last union activity Dave and I participated in together and was one of the last things we ever did together. Paul Robeson had called for a crusade to end lynching and Dave and Sidney decided to go. I had started back to college at Wayne University in Detroit and was just getting used to the new situation and opted to skip this one. I was 20 years old and had been a Communist for six years and had been on many civil rights marches, including 17-hour bus rides from Ann Arbor to Washington. Dave intended to go on to volunteer to fight for the independence of Israel and to go the Hebrew University. Sidney, who was only sixteen years old, was going to come back home. They wee going to hitch-hike to save money, which was scarce as always.

I was sleeping when the call came in the middle of the night.

“My boy! My boy! My beautiful boy!” ma sobbed over and over. “My beautiful boy!”

The car they were riding in had been in an accident near Allentown, Pennsylvania. Dave had been in the death seat next to the driver and had been fatally hurt. He died in the hospital. Ma and Pa went to Allentown; I stayed home as I was told to do. Sidney had some broken ribs but would recover fully.

“They had him in a bed in the hall,” ma said bitterly.

The local paper carried an article that the FBI was on the way to Allentown to investigate the death of David Cohen who was a member of the Communist Party and a federally licensed gun dealer. In those days Party members carried bright red membership books. Dave’s may have contributed to a lesser level of treatment that might have contributed to his death.

We’ll never know.

Pa and ma said the people in the local Jewish community were very sympathetic and supportive and that helped pa and ma but it didn’t do Dave any good. They brought Sidney and Dave home and Sidney recovered physically in good time. Pa and ma and Florence and I recovered physically, too. None of us ever recovered in spirit or in our hearts.

Sleep well, beloved brother. Sleep well, beloved comrade.

I can still hear ma on the telephone in the middle of a Detroit night. “My boy! My boy! My beautiful boy!”

Fuck all the racists and anti-Semites!

Too many of them are still living. And my beautiful brother was dead at 22.

“My boy! My boy! My beautiful boy!”

END OF BOOK ONE

We recovered slowly and incompletely. Pa kept working. Florence was married and busy with family. Ma was still a slave to the telephone and involved with immediate and extended family and in trying, with some success, to get more time free from the enslaving job of watching the phone at all times. I went to school at Wayne University.

Wayne was different from Michigan. At Michigan everything was done with doeskin glove. When they knew I was a Communist, they reduced my scholarship, but gave me enough so I could keep going to school. They never interfered with any of our work for civil rights or peace. They were a center of academic correctness, and, as far as I know, they acted like one, at least in public.

Wayne, as I said, was different. Rumor, probably correct, said the administration had spies among the students. The football team, or at least some of its members, tried to physically intimidate some of the Communist and left-wing students, including me. I had a heavy encounter wih the fullback that almost ended in disaster. In our circles it was assumed that the administration was behind such efforts. And they tried to set up one of our people for expulsion with a phony demand for a psychiatric examination.

They had good reason to be afraid.

Among the student body more than 80% worked full time. And the students included many African-Americans, many sons and daughters of auto workers and a fair number of hated liberals and progressives of all kinds. Henry Wallace came in first in an early campus vote for president.

Instead of rolling hills and magnificent trees, Wayne was surrounded by city traffic; it’s main building was old stone, dark and mysterious looking. I liked it. I even liked the beat –up lunch space in the basement where you could get a pint of milk for a nickel to go wit the sandwich you brought from home. But we did have the wonderful lawns of the main library with the art museum right across Woodward Avenue a block or two away from Cass and Warren, where Wayne was located. Those lawns were an oasis in jungle of city grime and noise that students clung to like lovers in the spring and summer and dreamt of all during the harsh Detroit winterd.

The administration was right. There were radicals everywhere.

I was an open Communist as I was at Michigan and either sold 21 or 22 subscriptions to the Worker and recruited 17 new members to the Party in one year or sold 17 subscriptions and recruited 21 or 22 new members in one year on campus.

I’ve been wondering which it was for decades.

At that time I was completely devoted to our cause, convinced that socialism was inevitable, that we were right and were the best fighters both for the immediate needs of the people and for the future. That made recruiting easy. As one of the two open Communists on campus and by far the most visible, I was able to meet anyone who was interested in socialism and take it from there. I had switched my major from English to history and still had to work but political work was a major part of my life.

Lenin had said we didn’t need people who were just willing to give an occasional night to politics; we needed people who were willing to devote their entire lives to the Party and the revolution.

Who was I to argue with Lenin?

That of course is why it hurts so much to see how some people who considered themselves leaders have fucked things up. On a local scale I often worried, even as I worked my head off ad did my comrades, that someone nearer the top of the movement, with much ore leverage, could fuck thing up so efficiently that most of our work would negated. I never thought Stalin or the Soviet Union could make any serious mistakes, but I wasn‘t so sure about some of the people I met from day to day..

But my work was good and I was proud of it I would discuss things with people using a favorite tactic of proving one thing from an unimpeachable source beyond a doubt. When the person I was trying to recruit saw that I was right I insisted that he or she read Marxist literature and the Worker, pointing out correctly that I didn’t have time to go into everything. We wee right in regard to capitalism and the theory was strong. Lenin, Marx, and Engels wee pretty smart cookies and Stalin wrote convincingly, too.

One thing I’m still not sure about is whether or not I was an intellectual snob. I refused to recruit anyone who had not read Engels’ Anti-Duhring, a major Marxist theoretical work. Thinking back on I after a few decades I think I must have been right. Since I was dealing with college students, they should have had a firm theoretical background if they were to become Communists. In one case I made a mistake, or at least I didn’t get one important idea across. One of my recruits blew up a tree and was expelled.

I obviously should have made clear we didn’t blow things up As a former Druid and a future Sierra Club member, I felt particularly bad about the tree. I hadn’t thought it necessary to specify that we didn’t blow things up, but obviously I was wrong.

In another case my recruiting had tragic results that at first were very joyful. I recruited a nice, sincere young man who was a Republican when we started talking. He even dressed like a Republican – very neatly. But he was honest and serious and, despite the way he dressed, he joined the Party and became a good member. He fell in love with a lovely African-American woman with a beautiful smile and a soul to match.

In Detroit at that time there weren’t a hell of a lot of interracial couples, especially one came from a Republican family, but he was smitten, but good.

He asked our youth organizer if he and the young lady should get married (maybe they both asked him, I’m not sure) and the organizer gave them an intelligent answer, including a couple of things that I didn’t think of. He said of course they should get married if they loved each other but they should buy a car and a house if they possibly could.

They could and they did and they got married.

And the young man’s Republican father committed suicide.

All of us felt terrible for the young man and his young wife and hated racism and the stupidity and irrationality of racism more than ever Interestingly, when I married my Glorya I don’t remember thinking about my young recruit and his father at all. My parents’ reaction was more backward than I expected but I never considered the possibility that they would do something to harm themselves.

I had two jobs while at Wayne, one in the Kresge-Hooker Science Library and one working in the school cafeteria

A few interesting things happened on the library job.

An older woman (she must have been in her thirties) propositioned me but I managed to escape.

I discovered the joy of old science journals and a quiet room where I could sneak off and read parts of them. Included in the group were Liebig’s Annalen der Chemie, Nature, and The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, all dating from the 1600s. At that time I couldn’t read German but I tried to read a few pages of the Annalen, along with the English journals, every time I went into the old journal room Finding a paper by a scientist we had discussed in high school chemistry was a major thrill

I also was given an extra assignment to translate a paper from the French for money. As a second year French student I was obviously well-qualified to do the job. The paper was on cigar smoking and cancer and the company ordering the translation was the American Tobacco Company. This was many years before the earliest dates that have come out about when the tobacco companies knew about links between smoking and cancer. I don’t remember what the study found, but the fact that the company ordered the translation indicates they knew there might be cause-and-effect connection between smoking and cancer.

The last thing of interest about the library job was a little strange. One day I came in to work and another student who worked with me offered to fight me. I remember thinking I was getting funny offers from my fellow workers in the library and wondering why he was mad at me. I kept asking him and he kept saying, “Don’t play innocent with me! You know damn well why! Come on! Come on!”

I knew he was very upset but outside of that I had no idea what was making him angry.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked. “If I did, I’m sorry.”

That seemed to make him even more upset “You know damn well! You used my name!”

“For what?”

“For one of your Communist projects!”

I remembered vaguely. “But I asked you about that forum. And it’s not ‘a Communist project All kinds of other people are speaking, too.”

“But I didn’t know you were a Communist!”

I couldn’t help myself. “Where have you been? Everybody else on campus does.”

Finally, he calmed down after I told him that of course he and the small organization he headed could withdraw their sponsorship and could write a letter to that effect to the school newspaper. Then be became remorseful and said maybe they shouldn’t do that. I was almost comforting him as I assured him it was O.K. for him to do so. He was an honest person, highly intelligent with no idea of what was going in the world around him. I really had to work hard to convince him it was all right to withdraw is sponsorship o the forum. The more I tried to convince him, the more he decided I was a nice guy and he didn’t want to hurt my feelings Getting him to withdraw his organization’s sponsorship of the forum was almost as hard as ecruit8ing a new Party member.

The only interesting occurrence in my dining room job was when I had to work the table where the dean was eating and I afraid he’d recognize me and have fired. It didn’t happen, either because he didn’t know who I was or because he thought carrying dirty dishes was just the right job for me.

Rolf was my first judo teacher. He had come out of Nazi Germany, served in special forces in the United sates military during World War 2, and was an expert at judo. In the days before karate became widely known in the U.S., judo was considered by many to be the best of the martial arts. What I remember most about his judo classes is the two malted milks and two huge pretzels we had after every class. We didn’t gain any weight from such treats ,In fact,, we were generally still hungry when we finished eating our pretzels, but were afraid to look like hogs to the other guys.

Rolf was a good considerate teacher and he always explained to us about the hardest part of studying judo – getting up after we were thrown. He was a good all-around person with a nice sense of humor and a serious interest in U. S. folk music; he got recordings from the Library of Congress folk music collection, introduced us to an interesting man from the rural mid-South who was an excellent banjo player, and showed his consistency and good sense by marrying a pretty young folk singer named Barbara. The man from the South sang a song I loved, part of which went like this:

Oh that good old mountain dew

Them that refuse it are few

Oh, I’ll shut up my mug

If you give me a jug

Of that good old mountain dew.

My brother Bill had a still on a hill

Where he’d run off a gallon or two

And the buzzards in the sky

Got so drunk they could not fly

From the smell of that good old mountain dew.

And back to the chorus and innumerable verses.

Barbara went from being a mediocre folk singer to a good folk singer. For a while she sang songs that wee too familiar such as “Free and Equal Blues” and “Talking Atomic Blues,” both of which are well done if you hear them up to 100 times and torture when you hear them for the 101st to 999th time. Their popularity decreased dramatically after a couple of folk singers were murdered when someone in the audience heard them for the thousandth time and went berserk.

Rolf was at the center of two controversies, one at Wayne University and one in the community away from Wayne. In the first one, we were doing something against racial discrimination at a downtown hotel, I think the Hotel Detroiter The owners ,I was told, were some kind of right-wingers and we should probably have been more careful. As a negotiating committee was leaving the conference room, they were attacked from behind while walking down a staircase and brutalized. Rolf was kicked the ace by a looping kick from behind.

That practically guaranteed our victory in the discrimination battle. We put out a leaflet with a picture of poor Rolf with his wounded face and black eye and described this poor disabled veteran who only weighed 135 pounds, who had been attacked by a group of thugs, all of which was true. We didn’t mention that his disability was due to a nervous breakdown and that he had recovered completely. Nor did we mention that he was a judo instructor, a combat veteran, and, in general, one tough cookie.

We won great public support for our picket line where we distributed the leaflet and we won the battle if not the war, which, as I said earlier, did not begin to be won until the major African-American organizations joined it. When I say “we” it usually refers to the Party and the YCL or the Civil Rights Congress or some united front group of organizations in which Communists played an active role. It’s much easier to remember what we participated in doing than which organizations were involved.

At Wayne the attack was different. The administration, citing Rolf’s discharge after his nervous breakdown, tried to suspend him until he had passed a psychiatric examination. We took the offensive, picketing the administration offices with signs and leaflets headed “Loyalty Oath or Psychiatric Examination,” pointing out that the attack on Rolf didn’t come until after he had been at school and done well and until he became politically active. We won that one, hands down.

Rolf was a hell of a guy. He worked in a foundry and won the respect and friendship of the people he worked with, which was pretty good considering that he was white, Jewish, born in Germany, and looked at first like a 135-pound weakling. He and Barbara left Detroit because, in Rolf’s words, “Everybody gets an apartment except us.” In our circles, the centers or headquarters of various organizations served almost by accident in some cases as information centers for such things as jobs and apartments, both of which were generally scarce. Rolf and Barbara felt that they were unfairly low on the priority list when it came to being told about possible available apartments. After waiting a long time, in addition to looking for an apartment themselves of course, they got pissed off and moved to the wide open spaces of the West.

The last I heard Rolf was running a straight nonpolitical folk song radio program somewhere out West. Barbara and Rolf were divorced; she was still singing well, I’m sure. As for their politics, I couldn’t know less They are both good human beings and that counts for a lot, and Rolf is one of the most remarkable people I ever met. I still hear him say, laughing as he said, it, “The hardest of judo is getting up after you’re thrown.”

It’s a lot easier in judo than in life sometimes, especially when you are young and can look forward to two malted and two giant pretzels later.

As I said, we won the two battles around Rolf and began to think we were pretty good.

We lost a beauty, however.

The local bar, where many of the students hung out, refused to serve African-Americans so that the progressives or jazz lovers or just plain decent people who were white had the choice of going to the bar without their friends or not going at all.

For African-Americans, students or nonstudents, there was no choice – the bar wouldn’t serve them period. We got together a powerful coalition since the issue was so obvious and since the place was a student hangout. We were very confident o victory. A student boycott was called and was fairly solid but the place refused to budge. Later, we were told there was a united oppositon to ending racial discrimination in Detroit bars with both the bar-owners and the Teamsters Union opposing any change in the Jim Crow status quo.

After a long boycott, the more militant people got tired of waiting.

We had a surprise sit-in at the bar.

Unfortunately, we were the ones who were surprised. They ignored us for a while. Then, suddenly, a group of the biggest men I had ever seen came into the bar. I’m sure some of the others wee scared shitless. I know I was scared semi-shitless, and I was very brave.

They didn’t bother to slug us. They just picked us up bodily and threw us out. Somebody said to me later, “It’s a good thing they didn’t know who you were,” implying they would have roughed me up. I as a little surprised. I was just one of the Communists on campus and not the smartest one. I just happened to be open about my affiliations.

Unfortunately, the campaign fell apart after that, amid recriminations about some of us breaking the boycott. In retrospect, we could have handled the situation a little, or even a lot, more intelligently. I agreed with the bar owners and the teamsters that it was definitely not a good idea to make martyrs out of us.

I was very glad when I found out the giant guys were from the teamsters and not from my union at the time – the millwrights. I think most of them were beer truck drivers. There’s another story about Hodges Mason of the UAW (the auto workers union) and the teamsters but I’ll tell you about that later.

I also did some studying at Wayne, including the best course I ever took in college, and another course, the one that kept me from making Phi beta Kappa the national honor society.

The best course was a course in early Chinese history. I didn’t want to take modern Chinese history because I didn’t want to spend time and strength arguing with a prof who knew much more about what we were arguing about and could give me a grade at the end of the semester, or, alternatively, keep my mouth shut while he slandered the Chinese revolution. The course in early Chinese history was different The best thing about it was that we could do anything we wanted to in examining Chinese culture and our report didn’t have to be long.

This great professor just wanted us to get to know something about Chinese culture. I read 1500 pages of Chinese poetry in English, everything in the library. I became acquainted, albeit in translation, with Po Chui and Tu Fu, masters who rank with Shakespeare, as well as a number of lesser poets. God only knows which dynasty succeeded which in ancient China, but I know that the Chinese poets wee also Gods who walked on mountains and cried thunderstorms.

The course that kept me out of Phi Beta Kappa was, appropriately enough, a course in creative writing. During the course of the semester, the prof was friendly and told me a number of times I didn’t have to worry about the number of words I wrote since my poetry was good enough to make up for any lack of quantity in the prose division. He was a very strong Polish nationalist and a right winger, which had everything to do with what happened.

What happened was that my stupid bug bit me again.

I saw the movie, “A Song to Remember,” and came home misty eyed. As a result of having tears in my eyes and sludge in my brain, I wrote a report that concluded that the Polish people should unite, right-wing and left-wing, Communist and anti-Communist. I waxed lyrical.

The prof didn’t.

He gave me a “D” and kept me out of Phi Beta Kappa. He said it was because I didn’t write enough prose and didn’t remember telling me my poetry as good enough so I didn’t have to worry about how much I wrote.

I concluded that that proved you couldn’t trust the right-wing Poles anyway. I still think it was a very good, powerful movie.

Not much more happened at Wayne. I dated a charming and smart young woman. We carried on a lot of political activity both on and off campus. I met a great group of jazz and poetry people and still wish I had spent more time with them and less on politics. I kept on writing for the Michigan Worker or the Michigan Herald, or whatever we called our paper at the time.

However, one incident stands out, if only in retrospect. That was the time Dr. Herbert Aptheker was supposed to debate a professor on the Wayne University campus. The right-wing, with the support or at the instigation of the administration, tried to keep him from speaking. The campus was in an uproar.

Dr. Aptheker was a very special, brilliant man although I later lost a lot of respect for him. He had a doctorate in history and had written major works on the history of African-American people and their struggles for freedom in the United States. His American Negro Slave Revolts is a classic. Among left-wing students of history and many African-Americans, among others, he was very much admired; at a time when the so-called “Cult of the Individual” was widespread, he was considered almost Godlike in left-wing circles.

Unfortunately, he shared that opinion, or at least he did at the time of my disillusionment with him.

When I was at Michigan and when I was at Wayne, however, I shared the general left opinion of him – he was brilliant and principled. He had spoken at Michigan when I was there, giving a strong academic speech on campus for students and faculty (the university was not destroyed by lightning immediately after his talk) and a marvelous fire-eating off-campus speech in a Black church, which I liked much better. Among other things, he mentioned the publications Time and Life and after building to a crescendo, he almost roared, “No, time and life are on our side!”

How could you not love the man!

The audience of African-American community people and left-wing students and town residents went wild. Aptheker was wonderful.

He was wonderful in other ways, too. During World War 2, he was a major in command of a large number of African-American soldiers (a regiment?), In the small Southern town near where they were being trained, enemy prisoners of war were welcomed in the local restaurants and bars and other stores while the U.S. African-American soldiers were refused service. After this had been going on for some time, Major Aptheker decided to take action.

He marched his 2000 troops through the town in full battle dress, fully armed.

There were many cases of brown, messy pants in town that day. At least that would be my guess. In any case, none of the soldiers, who were getting ready to risk their lives for their country, were ever denied service in that town again.

Dr. Aptheker later saw the concentration camps and never forgot them.

He was a brilliant and sometimes ferocious speaker, so it was natural the administration did not want him debating one of their professors in front of a large number of students.

As I remember it he was barred from debating on campus but did speak to a large audience nearby. What I remember clearly was that there was a real fear of violence; he was escorted to his talk by a large number of left-wingers, mostly students, I think, to prevent any attack.

We formed a phalanx around him and were successful in our job.

In the course of the debate on campus about whether Herbert Aptheker should be allowed to contaminate our student body, I wrote a letter to the student paper recalling a debate in print between Marx’s friend and collaborator Frederick Engels and Professor Duhring ,the one he wrote against in his book, Anti-Duhring. I pointed out, rather gleefully, that after the publication of Engels’s book, Duhring was so disgraced I academic circles he had to go to work as a plumber (not that there’s anything wrong with being a plumber like my father).

The editor cut the hell out of my letter but left that point in.

Then something happened that raised a first doubt in my mind about our movement. I was told that Helen Winter, wife of our leader Carl Winter and the organizational secretary of the Party in Michigan “was furious” about my letter.

“Why didn’t she say anything to me?:” I asked.

‘I don’t know,” my friend who had told me answered, equally puzzled.

“What was wrong with it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” my friend answered.

I still didn’t know what she had in mind or why she didn’t bother to say anything to me. If criticism and self-criticism is supposed to the law of development for Communists, she was denying me the chance to develop. She was also attacking me behind my back and denying me a chance to defend myself. I’m sure there were things wrong with my letter as it was printed and maybe it should not have been sent at all, but Helen’s attacking me “furiously” to other people and behind my back was far worse in my opinion.

I probably should have gone to her and asked her what the problem was, but the conditions in the Party were such that I didn’t want to get my friend in trouble for telling me about it or get myself in trouble for asking. It should be clear to the reader by now that the Party was far from a democratic organization and that the leaders had a hell of a lot of power.

But it should also be clear that the members loved to Party so much and feared expulsion so much in many cases that they ignored shit like this. You may have done it when walking in city streets and stepped in dog shit. I decided that Helen’s shit-fit was an aberration and that all of our leaders didn’t have to be saints, or even very smart, as long as they tried and generally did a good job.

But I did wonder a little more about why Rolf and Barbara didn’t an apartment.

Only one more thing of interest happened before I graduated with honors from Wayne with a degree in history. I had a brief (but nonerotic) encounter with the fullback of the football team who was pushing me around in the school cafeteria. He carried a steel pipe that had “Gas House Gang” written on it.

He dropped it and I picked it up. I held on to it for defense against this large, powerful young man and he kept demanding that I give it back. Fortunately, actually luckily as hell, a faculty member came up and asked me to give him the pipe. I did.

He read the writing on the pipe out loud: :Gas House Gang.” Then he said, “I guess this belongs to you, “ and gave it to the fullback. His presence calmed things down and what could have been a disastrous, no-win situation was ended. Obviously, I could have hit the fullback and gotten in big trouble or killed; I also could have given the pope to him and gotten in big trouble or killed.

I concluded from this incident that the faculty did, indeed, have a useful role to play on campus.

Later, when things had calmed down even more, I had a talk with the fullback, trying neutralize him so he wouldn’t beat hell out of me at some future time. We were all convinced that the school administration encouraged or instigated such incidents but I didn’t stress that. Instead I stressed my love of sports, particularly swimming and football, the problems of being poor and a student, and so on. The clincher came when he asked me, “Do they have any religion there in Russia?”

“Of course. Most of them are Greek Orthodox,” I said.

His face changed. “I’m Greek Orthodox!” he said enthusiastically. He was a Greek-American. He never bothered me again and we warily said, “Hello” when we met in the school corridors or when I went to a football game.

To the delight of my family and myself, I graduated with honors and a degree in history not long afterward.

We were poor and relatively ignorant and I knew very little about academic life. My interest in graduate school was small or nonexistent so I didn’t take the graduate record examination right away when I knew something. By the time I took it, I had forgotten a lot.

It didn’t matter. What I needed now was a job and to get on with the revolution.

POLITICAL LIFE IN DETROIT

Pa though I should get a civil service job so he talked to his political friends and found one for me. I didn’t care what I did as long as I could eat and do what I wanted to. I was still writing for the paper, which I loved, and was enjoying Party life and politics in general.

We wee changing the world and jobs at the low level I was willing to work at were relatively easy to get. What kind of work I did was relatively unimportant.

So I applied for the job pa had picked out and passed the test. The job involved mechanical drawing. The fact that my handwriting was almost illegible and that I had barely squeaked through the only mechanical drawing class I ever took with a C was apparently completely irrelevant.

Pa arranged for recommendations from some of his political contacts, among them Judge George Murphy, brother of Supreme Court Justice and former Michigan Governor Frank Murphy, and Detroit prosecutor Duncan C. McCrea, who some years before had organized the Junior Intelligence Bureau, or JIB. As in other cases, I was either very young or very stupid at that time. I didn’t understand what the name meant but I knew it was good to be intelligent.

And the kids who joined got free baseball equipment and blue uniforms with white stripes down the side of the pants.

I didn’t understand why pa and ma didn’t let me join.

As it turned out it was probably just as well, politics aside, that I didn’t join. Duncan C. McCrae was found guilty of some kind of corruption a few years later and went to jail, and while this was par for the course among many politicians, it would have made me feel bad to have been associated with such a man. However, at the time he recommended me for a city job he was still a highly respectable prosecutor and although I was still associated with him, I could rationalize later that this association was pa’s idea, not mine.

None of this mattered. I didn’t get the job

The city sent me a letter saying I wasn’t going to be hired. We sent a letter or made calls asking why I wouldn’t get the job. They sent an answer saying it had to do with character flaws or some such term, which outraged us, since I was proud of my moral, not to say strait-laced, character.

It turned out on further inquiry that my character flaw was that I was a Communist.

I was tickled.

It was all right for me to be the worst mechanical drawer in the United States and maybe in the world but a terrible mechanical drawer who was a Communist was unacceptable. I didn’t care about the job at all, although pa and ma did, but I felt very bad about Judge Murphy who was a good liberal and about Mr. McCrae, who I didn’t know anything about but who had been doing pa a favor. As far as I know Judge Murphy wasn’t harmed by the incident and I’m not at all sure he even knew how it turned out.

Coleman Young, the Hashomer Hatzair, and the Martinsville Seven came together as part of a life and death struggle at the famous gate four at the Ford River Rouge plant in Dearborn. Michigan.

I played a role in bringing this event about.

Young, the future long-time mayor of Detroit, was a brilliant, handsome former head of the million member Wayne County (Detroit) CIO; at the time I am talking about he was either chairman or co-chairman of the Detroit Civil Rights Congress.

The Hashomer Hatzair was a left Zionist organization that described itself as Marxist Zionist. Its program advocated a bi-national state in Palestine and its members were generally progressive about issues in the United States. I first met them when I was in high school and one of the older members, who must have been in his late teens or even early twenties, approached some of my friends and me and asked us if we wanted to join a youth organization.

We asked, “What kind of a youth organization?”

“Whatever kind you want,” he answered.

“What will we do? What kind of ideas does your organization stand for?”

“Whatever you want,” he said.

He was lying, of course.

Most of our group drifted away when they found out that one of the purposes of the organization was to recruit young people to go to live on a kibbutz or cooperative farm in Israel, then Palestine. I liked the people and tried to get them to engage in progressive activities here in the United States. I saw a lot of them socially and used to walk around with a nice, new small briefcase with a shiny zipper, filled with booklets called the “Little Lenin Library” which I sold to the members of Hashomer Hatzair, called Shomrim.

They liked me, too, and wanted me to go to Palestine with them. They invited me to their socials, which were always lively, full of singing and dancing and good spirits.

They wanted to engage in progressive activities here, too, but some were afraid they would be put on what was called, “The attorney-General’s List” of subversive organizations.

I loved and enjoyed them. Maybe that’s why I was so disappointed and infuriated at some of the things Israel later did to the Palestinians. Here is a poem I wrote some decades later:

QUESTIONS FOR SHOMRIM

And will my people build a new Dachau

And call it love,

Security,

Jewish culture

For dark-eyed children

Burning in the stars

Will all our songs screech

Like the maddened eagles of the night

Until Yiddish, Arabic, Hebrew and Vietnamese

Are a thin thread of blood clawing up the side of

Unspeaking steel chambers

I know you Chaverim

The lost young summer nights of our childhood

We spent on street corners looking for life

In our scanty drops of Marx and Borochov.

You taught me the Italian Symphony

And the New World

And gave a skit about blowing up Arab children.

You taught me many songs

But none so sad

As napalm falling slowly in the dark

You were our singing heroes in ’48

Do you dare ask yourselves what you are now

We, you and I, were lovers once

As only wild nights of wrestling in golden snow

Can make one love

We hiked by moonlight

And you asked me to lead the Internationale

And now my son must die

For he’s an Arab

And my mother, too, for she’s a Jew

And you and I

Can only cry and wonder

Must Jewish people

Build our Dachaus, too?

But the sharp conflicts and the actions of a powerful Israeli state were decades away at the time I’m talking about. At that time we discussed whether or not Jews could live normal lives in safety and security in any country except a future homeland in Palestine – they said “No” and I said “Yes.” The organization in Palestine would send leaders called “shleachs” over o give guidance to the members and try to convince them to “make aliah,” that is, to go to Palestine to live permanently.

Since I was trying to convince them to stay here and fight for a better world for all people, some of these older leaders – I would guess they were in their late teens or early twenties at most – got pretty ad at me.

“You’re only Lenny, not Lenin,” one of them told me.

I was a pretty good natured teen-ager. It was a great line and I told him so, which made him a lot more friendly although we obviously disagreed on politics. One of the other shleachs took our disagreements a lot more personally. He challenged me to fight.

I was opposed to his proposal for two reasons: First of all, I didn’t think it would solve any ideological differences or prove who was right and who was wrong.

Second, and by far the most important reason, I knew damn well that he could kick the shit out of me.

These guys were remarkable young men. They were very smart and well read, highly principled, and terrific physical specimens as well. In addition, tsu mine shvake gesunt, that is, as an added trouble to my bad health (in this case, figuratively speaking), they were well trained in a number of martial arts.

I knew I didn’t know anything about boxing and this was before my study of judo with Rolf. In my fooling round with wrestling with friends who were much bigger or stronger, I had never gotten hurt or hurt anyone.

“Let’s wrestle,” I said.

He was all too ready.

“O.K.,” he said. “Do you know how to fall?”

It was really very considerate of him, I thought, and I appreciated it. We were standing with a group of Shomrim under a streetlight on an asphalt street. No mats or padding here. There was no escape.

“Sure,” I muttered.

He was very courteous, asking me if I was ready before throwing me unceremoniously down on the street and jumping almost immediately onto my chest. He then got up, a little disgustedly In think at my lack of skill, and we continued our discussion for a few minute before we all went home.

Of course going home wasn’t so easy. It would be getting later and later and various members of the group and I would walk each other a few blocks while continuing our very profound talk. Then, as often as not, the other ones would walk back the other way to finish a very important idea.

Unfortunately, we all knew everything, so it was difficult to convince each other of anything.

One interesting aspect of my “fight” with the shleach: Unlike the fanatical right-wing Israelis of today who preached hatred and violence against Prime Minister Rabin until one of them murdered him the shleach followed my father’s general principle: a Jew shouldn’t harm another Jew. I remember pa saying when another Jewish man jokingly made as if he was going to hit him, “ An id an id?” This meant, “A Jew hit another Jew?”

I’m still glad the shleach felt that way.

I would guess that most of the members of Hashomer were middle class or even upper middle class, although I really don’t have any basis for the guess except for how well-educated and cultured they seemed to be. A few of the members were wonderful musicians and one of them, Yitz Zeitlin, was later with the Israel Symphony Orchestra. In Yitz’ case, his intelligence and good looks made him a golden boy and a natural leader. In addition, he was a nice guy and not at all stuck up or full of himself as so often happened with Party leaders.

That’s why it was such wonderful fun when my brother Sidney beat him in a debate.

As a matter of fact, there were two other people in the debate, but the main ones were Yitz and Sidney, and that’s why it seemed to be so unfair. Yitz was a college student and was very sharp politically as well as being very well read in left-wing literature among other things. Sidney had dropped out of school in the tenth grade and, while highly intelligent, wasn’t particularly interested in left literature.

That was a bit of a disadvantage since the subject of the debate was: “Which should you support, the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks?” (factions in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, later the Communist Party). The selection of the debaters reminds me of the kind of thing that would happen again in some other organizations.

At this time, however, the trick was either new or, in any case, new to me.

Both sides presented their cases as best they could with Yitz and his partner making brilliant, profound and sophisticated arguments and Sidney’s partner carrying the banner of the Mensheviks, the known bad guys to most if not all of this audience, as well as carrying Sidney. When it came to the final statements, however, Sid slew the dragon with one hand tied behind him. He concluded with:

“Be a mensch, join the Mensheviks!” in a loud and enthusiastic voice.

The audience burst into laughter and what the Soviet news reports used to call “stormy applause.”

Lenin was lucky he never had to go up against my brother Sidney. The course of world history would have been very different. Poor Yitz and his partner fled in disgrace. I considered changing parties. Sid’s triumph was complete.

The expression. “be a mensch” is a very common Yiddish expression and means, literally, “be a human being, “ but the real meaning is, “be, or act like a real or good person as opposed to acting like a rotten person, a stinker, a schmuck.” (You can look up the meaning of the word “schmuck,” along with a detailed discussion of its various interpretations, in the records of the obscenity trials of Lenny Bruce.)

This debate, as well as the socials and much of the other activity of Hashomer, took place in their fine, well-appointed store front in our neighborhood. I remember two things most vividly about that store front. One is that they always called the toilet “Congress,” as in “I have to go to Congress.” The other is that the store front really was a “front.” The rent was being paid by a group of gamblers who, as in “Guys and Dolls,” needed a place where they could gamble in peace.

“It sure looked respectable,” ma said when the story of the police raid on the game came out in the newspapers. “A group of nice young Jewish boys and girls.”

So they lived without a headquarters when the police closed the place. down.

While they were willing to look respectable if it got them a free headquarters, some of the leaders and members seemed to parade a lack of “respectability” as a badge of honor or maybe even as a recruiting device.

“Oh, are you a Shomer? I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on!” they would say every once in a while. Although this sounded good to me as a teen-age boy, I was also a “serious,” or as my friend’s mother said, a “hayse” (hot) Communist so I never asked any questions about this fascinating statement.

Apparently anything interesting took place, if it took place at all, at their camp, called Camp Shomria. Unfortunately, due to serious political responsibilities and bad luck I never got to go there.

Then there was that moonlight hike.

It took place in Rouge Park, a giant park with Olympic size swilling pools and miles of roads and paths and lots of wooded land, The ground was covered with shining snow that reflected the moonlight and our laughter and our songs. Most of the time we walked on the roads but after a while we walked in the snow on the pathless hills. We tied ourselves together, young men and young women, in a long line and the whole line rolled down a high hill, laughing and giggling and squealing loudly all the way. Later we made French toast over an open fire in a clearing in the snow, under brilliant stars and a moon that sang love songs to us.

I loved the Shomrim and hope they bore themselves honorably in the far-away land most of them chose to all home. I don’t know enough about the details of their activities in regard to the Palestinian people’ they were caught in the contradiction between their nationalism and their Marxism, difficult ideas to reconcile when your people are not the ones being oppressed. Revolutionary nationalism is one thing in Viet Nam or South Africa (for the Black majority) and quite another for members of the ruling nation as in Israel.

A recent demonstration in Israel marking the anniversary of the murder of Rabin was the largest anti-government demonstration in history. I hope the members of Hashomer and their adult party Mapam played a large part in organizing it and that the Shomrim will keep working until the Palestinian people have a true homeland of their own.

In Detroit the Shomrim acquitted themselves well on several occasions before the case of the Martinsville Seven One of these occasions was a gigantic strike at the Ford Rouge plant.

Ford Rouge was the center of Party activity at that time, with 60,000 workers in various buildings. As a party that really had a lot industrial workers as members (as opposed to other left groups and probably as opposed to the present situation), the Party had members in a number of auto plants, in steel, and other factories. But Ford Rouge was the apple of our eyes, the place we paid most attention to.

In fact we had two extremely smart, extremely competent full-time organizers (Dr. Jim Jackson and Phil Schatz) who worked on organizing Party activity in the Ford plant; we also had a group of militant, experienced workers in the plant who had played a major role in organizing the union (the UAW) in the plant, and who in some cases had been fired for organizing and were only rehired because the National Labor Relations Board had ordered the company to do so.

Ford was so central to our activities that when I wrote and (ahem) published (that is, had printed at my own expense, the enormous sum at that time of $80) a four-page newspaper on the rearming and renazification of if West Germany, Phil Schatz asked me, “What’s the concentration?”

So, amid all the detailed documentation on former nazis coming into political and military power in West Germany (gathered from a book called “Betrayal. The Rearming of a Nazi West Germany”), I had to put in an article specifically about the Ford plant. I’d love to see the paper now and see what I wrote about Ford and how it fit into the rest of the paper. Although many thousands of copies of the paper were distributed, including thousands at the Ford plant, I don’t have a single copy left.

I must have cleaned my house 20 or 25 years ago in a moment of weakness.

There’s a cutesy concept that might eve be true that says that a good teacher learns more than the students she or he is teaching. Phil Schatz was teaching us a class based on, I believe, the “History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik),” the basic text used all over the world for laying down the basic line for Communist theory.

Included in the course was the idea that a Communist newspaper is a collective agitator, propagandist, and organizer. We taught Phil well. The Michigan worker or the Daily Worker, or both, organized a strike against speed-up, which was a horrible, ongoing problem at the Ford plant.

Unbelievable as it may sound to anyone who knows me, I used to get up at five or five-thirty in the morning and ha out to the Ford plant on the street car (are six cents) carrying a large bundle of copies of our paper hanging from each arm by the white rope tied around them. There was a feeling of solidarity riding through the pitch dark morning with street car full of workers, the light reflecting off the yellow straw seats thought the darkness.

The paper contained, among other things, articles on speed-up and its consequences ,specific stories of what had happened to workers due to speed-up at Ford or other auto plants or local steel plants. I would meet other comrades at the plant and we would distribute the paper to the workers who became more and more receptive as they read the paper. Ss I said, it was a good paper.

One of the comrades, Sue, said to me on one of those mornings, “I thought you would be at least a section organizer by this time.” I was a little surprised. I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in rising in the party (a section organizer was in charge of or supposed to lead a group of several Party clubs, called branches in the old days). I was in my late teens or early twenties. I was pretty well satisfied with what I was doing with my life right then and if I were to change I probably would have welcomed a trip to camp Shomria more than being elected or selected to being a section organizer.

The campaign continued and climaxed with massive distribution of small (about three inches long by 1 or two inches high) four page leaflets with such headings as “Speed-up Means Layoffs” and “Speed-up Means Injuries.”

I can still see the workers’ hands as they took the leaflets as fast as I could hand them to them, a surprising number of them with only three or four fingers on the hand that took the leaflet.

As the hands reached out I could hear the workers’ voices saying over and over again, “Speed-up,” “Speed-up, “ “Speed-up.” Most of the time I was too busy to look up from the hands to see their faces. It was a brutal poem of sometimes broken hands and words.

“Speed-up!”

I was to experience this later but my situation was very different.

Our campaign led to a massive strike by 60,000 Ford Rouge workers, with 10,000 men and women on the picket lines daily. This where the Hashomer Hatzair came in. What happened was this.

Billy would send me out with a question to ask the pickets every day. The days were sunny, the workers were friendly, I was very happy. I was a past and future production worker who felt completely at home with them. In most cases, they knew and admired the paper, since it had done a very good job in exposing the harm speed-up was doing. I would go back to the office and write my story and Billy would send it by telegram to the paper in New York.

The next day’s Daily Worker – boldly labeled “Airmail edition” – would be flown out in large bundles and sold on the picket lines.

I was thrilled. Talk about class struggle! Talk about doing your job right! Wow! I was pretty young at the time but kept this naïve attitude toward movement work until about two weeks ago.

The paper was selling very well and things were going wonderfully when a giant fly walked into the ointment with ponderous steps. The leadership of the local, Ford Local 600 UAW, was displeased with the success we were having and sent the union’s flying squad, perhaps best described as a self-defense or trouble-shooting group, to stop our sales.

They seized several large bundles and burned them.

This was a major challenge and couldn’t be allowed to go unchallenged.

Our people had been among the main organizers, if not the main organizers of both the UAW and the UAW at the Ford plant. Our people had been fired for organizing, for laughing in Dave Moore’s case, as Billy wrote with heavy and actually justified irony almost every week (or year). Nelson Davis had worn his union hat into the plant when he knew he would be fired for doing so and had refused the company gangsters (literally) orders to go out a side door.

He had insisted on going out the main door, parading through the plant the long way with the cap set happily on his straight and defiant head.

These two African-American progressives had been fired for organizing and had been rehired, as I have said, only on the orders of the National Labor Relations Board.

So we weren’t about to allow anybody to tell us we couldn’t sell our paper on a public street on a picket line on a strike we had largely organized.

Billy walked into the union headquarters the next morning and had a talk with the local leadership. He was accompanied by 300 men (male supremacists!) who were all UAW members. I wasn’t able to go since I wasn’t a UAW member at the time.

Billy told them they had to stop burning our paper. If they didn’t, he said, the flying squad should “step outside and we’ll do a little flying of our own.”

We had no more trouble from the flying squad.

All the Party clubs were going out to the picket line and selling the paper. The clubs were selling on average 200 copies a day. I asked the Shomrim to sell the paper on the picket line and they agreed. (I told you I’d get to their part in the strike.) They sold 200 copies on their day!

They were thrilled!

I was thrilled!

But they were thrilled more. I was from a poor family and had done hard physical work (although not too much at that time) but most of them had only read about work, although they had read quite a bit about it in some cases.

They had gone to a real giant picket line of 10,000 pickets and had sold a Communist paper to real workers and had been accepted despite their youth. They had encountered no anti-Semitism, no hostility of any kind.

When I told them they did as well as a Party club, they almost broke into a spontaneous Hora. It was a happy day for all of us.

The other valuable contribution of the Shomrim to the struggle in this country did not turn out so happily. It happened in a bitter Detroit winter and involved Coleman Young, Ford, and the Martinsville Seven.

Lynching had become embarrassing, what with the Civil War and all, so the power structure changed strategy – they went over to legal lynching. And the Martinsville Seven were among the first proposed victims.

They were seven young African-American men accused (surprise!) of raping a white woman, the time-dishonored excuse for literally thousands of lynchings. Now the power structure was going to do the same thing only “legally.” A national and probably international campaign had been mounted to save their lives after their almost automatic conviction and death sentence.

I asked the Shomrim to help in the campaign to save their lives and they agreed. Like me, they considered the racism against African Americans the same as the racism of the Hitlerites (although I understand a leader of the Communist Party of the United States wrote a whole book on racism in Nazi Germany and didn’t mention anti-Semitism; in fairness, I didn’t read the book and the person who told me this may have been prejudiced himself and completely wrong – or not)/

So there we were, a large number of young Jews, ranging in age from very young (11? 12?) to late teens or early twenties, preparing to go out to the Ford plant with leaflets calling on the workers to call, write, or send telegrams to the authorities in Virginia asking them to spare the lives of the Martinsville Seven.

Then, as we were waiting for the cars, driven by Coleman Young and Jack Raskin, another leading progressive activist, to pick us up and take us out to the Ford plant, another great big fly came into our ointment.

One of the younger kids didn’t want to go, maybe because it was cold as hell outside, maybe for some other reason. We never knew. He refused to say.

“So why didn’t you go without him?” you think (or even say).

The problem was the Shomrim did everything by unanimous consent. If this kid didn’t go, none of them would go. Coleman and Jack were on their way. Infinitely more important, the lives of the Martinsville Seven wee in danger.

We all argued with this kid, the leadership of Hashomer, his age-peers, me. We used logic, pleading, almost bribery. We did everything we could think of. Finally, out of desperation, I hit on the tactic that worked.

I screamed my head off at him.

I probably shocked his little nervous system.

He surrendered meekly.

When Coleman and Jack arrived we were ready to go. We piled into the cars (maybe they – and I- underestimated how many would be going ). We had a total of 27 people in the two cars. Probably the leaflets were in the trunk. It was the last time we would be warm that night until the return trip.

This was before anybody talked about wind-chill. You just knew you were freezing. It was 20 degrees that night and the wind at the exposed Ford gate was ripping through us. Otherwise, things went well The workers were very receptive and we had a large number of people distributing the leaflets. Our success and excitement at the good response made it feel a little less like the South Pole. Most of us ignored the penguins that stood around watching us.

Then that damned fly returned.

This time he took the form of a provocateur. A guy kept going up to an African-American Civil rights Congress activist named Les Brown, who had come in one of the other cars, and saying insulting things and making insulting gestures. Les was 6’3” and the guy was obviously trying to provoke a physical response to give the company security people an excuse to attack us all.

We figured the guards were less likely to interfere if there was a fight between two white guys or if we were able to avoid any physical fight at all, which was our real goal.

We checked with Les and when he agreed, I went up to the guy and swelled out my chest and raised my shoulders and just stood in front of him. You will remember that this as the pose that elicited my father’s remark,” You aren’t even a pimple on a good man’s ass” that did so much for my confidence. I had been lifting weights a little since then and might have achieved pimple status by this time but I wasn’t really very tough compared with people who were.

Fortunately, the guy didn’t know this. He tried to go around me to bother Les some more but I kept fronting him as (I imagine) a good basketball player fronts his man (or woman).

Finally, faced with what he wrongly considered an insurmountable obstacle, they guy slunk away. Actually, he just walked away, but I couldn’t resist saying “slunk.”

The rest of the evening went well. We froze but we were proud of what we were doing. We gave out thousands of leaflets. Our Shomrim, even the youngest, did their jobs well.

I was so proud of them I was ready to quit Sid’s local Menshevik chapter and join their Bolsheviks.

Tragically, our efforts and those of many other progressive activists were in vain, Shortly afterwards, the state of Virginia cut short the lives of these seven innocent young Black men whose only “crime” was to be born in the democratic United States of America with the wrong color skin.

Some time before the murder of these young men I had written the following two-part poem.

FROM KNORA TO MARTINSVILLE

Do you hear the thunder rolling, Oh my brother

Do you hear the roar of doom

Does the chill of dread Korea

Come into your warm death room?

(The next lines are lost in the mists. The poem continues.)

FROM MARTINSVILLE TO KOREA

All those guns and all those tanks

And I am strapped to die

While my Black brother struggles on

Beneath a leaden sky

All those guns and all those tanks

For Freedom’s sake, you say

Well, we could use some guns and tanks

In Martinsville today!

For Freedom

We’d show them freedom then

We’d start right here in Dixie

And we’d never stop again

Til the black robe of the lynch-judge

And the white robe of the klan

Wound be burned and banned forever

By the brotherhood of Man!

Needless to say the poem was never published. In those days of red-baiting and hysteria it would have been dangerous for the publication that printed it and for the people who authorized its publication. Today, legal lynching continues, augmented by police bullets that continue to be, as in the case of Beverly Lee, “quick as the wind.”

Our social life was pretty insular.

We had many parties and everyone in our group was generally invited. We’d call each other and ask:::”What’s happening this week-end?” and we’d all go to whatever was happening. There were basement parties, sometimes real house-rent parties, with fantastic fried chicken, potato salad, greens, lots of beer and great music and dancing.

I was still a lousy dancer but, given enough beer, I’d think I was pretty good. It didn’t matter. With good food, music and friends I had a good time even if my dance partners didn’t. And some of them didn’t know any better; they couldn’t dance either.

We also had larger parties at the Jewish Cultural Center, run by the Jewish IWO or International Workers Order, a left cultural and insurance organization. Many other left-cultural organizations were part of the IWO. The organization was crushed during the hysteria of red-baiting after World War 2.

The Party picnic, as I have mentioned, was one of the great events of the year. Another was the picnic given by the All Slav Congress, with wonderful Polka music and dancing, impossibly delicious ethnic food, and (surprise!) lots o beer and good looking young women we hadn’t met yet.

We also had a bowling ;league; we did our bowling in an African-American neighborhood, since all the other bowling leagues wee Jim Crow—no Black people allowed.

One of the interesting things about our bowling league was the great friendship of Steve and Mike. The rest of us could afford only our official three gams. Steve and Mike were very good friends and always bowled thee games with each other before the official games started.

We all thought they were very ice guys who just liked to bowl a lot.

They probably did, but that wasn’t the only reason they were so close.

It turned out they were agents of the Detroit red squad and were busily spying on us, taking notes and names secretly.

I wonder if they reported my lousy dancing and occasionally good bowling?

I felt betrayed because I liked Steve. He had a beautiful smile and was always very friendly. I was to feel a similar but far less clear and intense feeling of being betrayed by my comrades in a social situation.

What happened was this. Some of the people invited me to go to Finn Camp, a beautiful camp on a sunlit lake (and I’m sure the sun shone all the time on it as it did the day I went there). They said we’d go swimming and have a picnic. It sounded great. The camp was run by a progressive Finnish organization.

Our group was the usual mixture of Party and YCK people, Black and white, mostly young. When we got there we noticed a few stares, or thought we did. When we saw a group of young men gathering with more baseball bats than baseballs and gloves, we bean to think we really had seen some unfriendly stares. When some of our group began to gather pop bottles (called soda bottles in New York and elsewhere), which were made of glass and were fairly heavy in those days, we began to suspect that some of our group knew more than the rest of us.

I know I did.

It got more and more tense. They kept gathering bats and young men and we kept gathering pop bottles. (We didn’t have any place to gather more young men.) The lake still shone with sunlight. The trees and grass wee just as magical. But something had changed

We saw a couple of older men, accompanied by a few women and young men, approach the group with the baseball bats. They talked a while – it seemed like a long time to us. Sometimes the talk appeared to be agitated. Finally, the young men dispersed. Some went swimming. Baseball appealed to others and gloves and baseballs suddenly came out of nowhere.

We went back to our picnic. All was right with the world.

Or was it?

The rest of the day was uneventful except in my mind. Who had known we would have trouble and why hadn’t everyone been told? to me it was clear, and it was later verified, that we were going to test whether this progressive Finnish camp would welcome African-American people to picnic and swim.

Had all the African-American people been told? I don’t know. Had everyone except me been told? It sounded unlikely.

In this case our leadership had been doing a principled thing (fighting Jim Crow at a progressive camp) in a highly unprincipled way,

Although I don’t remember discussing this with other comrades, it left a sour taste in my mouth. Maybe everyone wasn’t invited to all of our social events. Apparently, in this case, I was invited not because of my infinite charm and good looks but because I was a young male, and possibly because I was expendable.

We also had social events, sometimes together with other organizations, at other places. There was a wonderful night at the Joe Louis farm. (I never knew why it was called the Joe Louis farm; I assume he owned it but am not sure.) In this case I don’t remember the place at all. The only thing that sticks in my consciousness is a full moon and mellow music coming out of a building behind me and a tremendous feeling of happiness and contentment.

I swam a lot, often with my family at an artificial lake called, I think, Kent Lake. But the outstanding swimming experience was a day trip to Leamington on Lake Ontario, a place of exquisite beauty and peace.

We went with Billy and Ilene, two of the most beautiful and charming people I had ever met. They wee happy, in love, and married while very young soon after that day. I was to visit many magnificent beaches later, thanks to racism in the United States and government insistence that I spend my vacations in such places but this was my first experience with such a beach.

Billy’s good nature was a little surprising. Maybe it was because a few years earlier his father had been released from a mental institution where he had spent more than decade after being smashed over the head by a cop in a labor dispute. Maybe it was because of his mother, a friendly, good-looking woman who had been some kind of hero during the drive to organize the auto workers and was highly respected and liked by everyone I knew. Maybe it was because of Ilene, who was a raving beauty, very, smart, very progressive without showing off about it, and pleasant all the time, or at least all the times I ever saw her. Maybe she was happy because of Billy.

We swam and frolicked and loafed and admired the view and laughed and I, at least, wondered why life couldn’t be like that all the time.

Maybe it had something to do with work.

But we weren’t thinking about work. During the long ride home, the sun seemed to follow us and set slowly so our day would continue to be perfect. We stopped for banana splits and, since we had eaten all our food, and had been swimming or running or horsing around most of the day and were starving, didn’t have to worry about gaining weight. We all looked perfect. Our friends wee perfect The world was perfect.

Or would be after we Communists straightened it out.

The men who sold the Daily Worker on the streets in those days of anti-Communist hysteria wee special.

Unlike our beloved leaders, who sometimes acted like arrogant, elitist mother fuckers, these guys wee modest and friendly. They were Communists and workers, they were doing their jobs like they were supposed to If they knew they were real heroes, they never showed it.

Johnny, like Billy and Ilene, was what we now call “ethnics.” Johnny was a Greek-American, Billy’s father was a Slav, Ilene was, I was told, Indian, but I don’t know what kind of Indian she was or whether or not she was. I didn’t particularly care. (Billy and Ilene didn’t concentrate on distributing the paper in the street; my point is that all, or almost all, the national groups that make up our people were included in the Party.)

Another John, who was still distributing or selling the paper on the streets at the age of 87, was probably Irish or Scotch or English.

Izzy was a Russian Jew.

John was tall, a little stooped at 87, and one of his eyes was either completely or almost completely closed. Every once in a while he would say, “Knights of Labor. I was in the Knights of Labor.” The Knights of Labor was an important union of the eighteen hundreds. Unlike most other early and not so early unions in the Unite States it didn’t bar African-Americans from membership.

John walked slowly but his mind was clear. Every once in a while I would run into him selling the paper or going to some Party lecture or meeting. Then one day I became aware that I hadn’t seen him for a long time.

“What happened to John? I haven’t seen him around,” I said to Billy.

“He couldn’t hold his urine. They had to put him in a home, “ Billy answered matter-of-factly.

And that ended the story of the last active member of the Knights of Labor. I salute him, humbly and with love.

Johnny was just a sweet guy, always friendly, with a beautiful smile. He had black hair, and his skin was darker than John’s I think. He may have been in his forties or fifties when I knew him, about five seven to five nine. We were all comrades in his eyes and therefore all brothers. I don’t know what happened to him. When I left Detroit he was still selling the paper, doing his job.

Izzy had the toughest job of all. In contrast to John and Johnny, who sold the paper at different times and places, Izzy was almost always at the same place at about the same time, an easy target for the fanatic, the hater, the person crazed by anti-Communist hysteria. His job was to stand next to a small newspaper vending machine in downtown Detroit and sell the Daily Worker and the week-end edition of our paper, whatever we called it that year (Michigan worker or Michigan Herald).

Izzy was about five eight, as I remember him; his skin may have been roughened somewhat by the weather, unless my mind is creating an illusion that would correspond to what I know of Detroit winters. He wore a black leather coat when it was cold that matched his black hair. He gave an impression of strength, which may be why he wasn’t beaten up more often.

I’m not even sure he was ever beaten up, but if he wasn’t it was a miracle, aided perhaps by his appearance of strength. When, during the depression, Billy had sold the paper on the streets for a penny, sleeping on the floor of the paper’s office and eating on what he made through his sales, the limiting factor in determining the number of sales was, more than anything else, whether or not the prospective buyer had a penny. But though there were probably occasional problems with the police, the population as a whole was generally friendly or neutral

Not so for Izzy.

Fascism was a more likely possibility in those days. Izzy, John, and Johnny showed enormous courage, In looking back at their situation, I can only be grateful that they didn’t have to sell the YCL Review.

That would have broken their magnificent spirits!

One day I came into the paper’s office and I heard Billy say, “Mr. Berenson,” his voice heavy with sarcasm.

I could only guess what had happened before. Izzy as about 55 years old and one would ordinarily address him as “mister” except that Communists called each other by their first names or sometimes, more formally, “comrade.”

Izzy was obviously angry. He said something I didn’t catch and Billy said, “Mr. Berenson” again with even more sarcasm. Izzy, clearly hurt, frustrated, and furious, walked out of the office.

I didn’t say anything. But Izzy’s hurt, angry face and Billy’s voice remained in my consciousness for a long time.

For decades.

I was, however, sharply reminded of this incident only a few years later when Billy did something that really fucked yp my life, and, at the same time started a chain of events that brought about one of the greatest joys of my life.

I’ll tell you all about it later.

Most of the stories I wrote for the paper are long forgotten, even by me, but a few stand out in my memory.

First, let me tell you how we worked.

Once a week we would hold an editorial board meeting and decide what to put in next week’s edition of the paper. Billy, or sometimes Carl Winter, the head of the Party in Michigan, would make suggestions, which were discussed and generally adopted. When the guy we called “Ace” was there he would also make suggestions, I didn’t make suggestions, which in this case was all right because, frankly, I didn’t know enough.

Then Billy would me what he thought I should write for the next issue and we’d talk about whether I had time to do it and whether I had any questions about the story.,.

A few times we held our editorial board meetings at the offices of the Polish left paper (there were a number of left papers in various languages at that time). In those cases there was always a radio playing or water running; the purpose of this was to prevent the bugs the FBI had planted in our offices or telephones from picking up our conversations.

Good thinking.

Bit we never said anything important or secret.

All one had to do was read next week’s paper and he or she would know exactly what we had planned to put in the next issue. Maybe they would be interested in how successfully we did what we had planned to do, but I don’t think even the FBI was that foolish.

Maybe we sometimes mentioned friendly people or even comrades who weren’t known as comrades, but playing the radio or running the water was still foolish since the government had enough snitches in our ranks to tell them anything along those lines they might want to know.

Of course, running the water might make use want to urinate, but if that had any political significance it’s too deep for me.

We didn’t play the radio or run water when we met in our own offices. Maybe we said more important or profound things in the Polish paper’s office.

On a serious level, of course, it’s pretty disgusting that the government should bug the offices of left newspapers or any newspapers. I think that’s part of what’s called our democratic way of life. Legal political parties to the left of the Democratic Party aren’t treated legally.

Watergate was simply an extension to the Democratic Part of the kind of treatment gen4rally reserved by republicans and Democrats for parties to the left of the Democrats.

Probably the most important story I wrote was the one in which I broke the Stafford Gordy case, or at least made it possible for the case to be won. I’m not sure if it was won but I laid the basis for winning it with simple logic (the kind I was good at).

Stafford Gordy’s uncle,Charles Gordy, had shot and killed a cop with his rifle when the cops illegally invaded his front yard and tried to fore their way into his house. Needless to say, the Gordy family was African-American, apparently Charles Gordy didn’t know constitutional rights didn’t apply to him.

The case became a cause celebre in Detroit, with the African-American community and the left defending him on the grounds that man’s (or woman’s) home is his castle and that his rights had been violated. And the cops and the right pushing hard for a conviction and severe punishment.

After a long and hard struggle, we lost and Charles Gordy went to jail.

Billy visited the jail and told them the movement would be watching closely to see that nothing happened to him, and nothing did. But the next step by the cops was to accuse his nephew, Stafford Gordy, who lived in the same neighborhood, of murder in another case.

Billy sent me out to talk to the family and hear their side of the story. Naturally enough, we suspected a frameup from the beginning.

It turned out we were right.

I went to the house, a neat, modest wood building, like so many others in the neighborhood. A woman answered the door. She was young, think brown-skinned. His sister or his wife. I told her where I was from.

“Daily Worker, good deal!” she said.

I never forgot her words or her tone. We were known and respected. People expected us to do a serious job defending the rights of the oppressed.

Thinking about it now, it seems very likely that she had read Billy’s stories on Charles Gordy and hoped we would do a similar but more successful job supporting Stafford Gordy.

The only link between the crime and Stafford Gordy was footprints from the scene of the crime to his house, at least according to the cops’ version. But, according to the cops’ version, it took them an hour to follow those alleged footprints the few hundred yards between the two houses.

I jumped on that with two hands and both feet.

Apparently the footprints were so faint it took them an hour to follow them a few hundred yards, but, according to the cops, they were clear enough to lead directly to Stafford Gordy’s house.

Not likely! Not at all likely!

I’m pretty sure we won the case. I’m very sure the argument created reasonable doubt and a jury is not supposed to convict if there’s reasonable doubt. I’m also very sure we acted honorably and worked hard in the cause of justice.

“Daily Worker, good deal!”

Yeah!

In two cases m stories were headlined in special four-page “editions” of the paper distributed in over 100,000 copies each at the gates of various auto plants, but, as with my brother Dave, someone else was the brains of the gang.

This time it was Billy.

Since he was a pretty crusty guy, kind of a middle-aged curmudgeon, a lot of people we ordinarily might have had a chance of getting interviews with wouldn’t talk to him. In some cases he had been on the right side of a principled battle, probably in most cases, but he was still crusty and people would sometimes hod grudges against him. His writing could also be pretty sharply critical if he disagreed with you.

No problem.

He had this young cherubic, handsome teen-ager (later a young, cherubic handsome man in his early twenties) to send out to ask the questions for him/ the young man could add questions of his own and write the story. Since Billy and another comrade (who knows who she is but who will remain nameless here) had trained him fairly well the system worked.

In those days anybody who was for peace or used the word peace, or said anything against nuclear war was in danger of being red-baited and faced the possibility of fierce retaliation. The McCarthy strategy worked. Most people were afraid to talk to us, especially about peace.

We, on the other hand, along with some pacifists and religious people, were desperately trying to build a movement that could stop what we thought, probably correctly, was a very serious danger of nuclear war.

Carl Stellato was the president of the 60,000 member Ford local 600. Two caucuses were vying for control ; o f the local and he was in the other one, the one our people were not in. I interviewed him and asked him about nuclear war.

“I’m against it,” he said. “Who the hell wants to see his kids blown up?”

That became my lead and the subject of the headline on one of our 100,000-copy four-page issues of the paper. Itr was also to lead to a realignment in the caucuses at Ford; we ended up supporting him.

It must seem strange to readers now that such an obvious statement should be of such importance. The feeding frenzy of the press and the right wing, of Congress and local politicians, was almost as bad as it is now in examining Bill Clinton’s sex life. But there was more at stake. The danger of nuclear war was real. People lost their jobs, committed suicide, were driven out of the country, went to jail.

Carl Stelatto had made a valuable contribution by being frank and honest.

The other story was similar. Shelton Taps was an African-American who was an international representative of the UAW, an important position, well-paid, and subject to the whim of the leadership of the union. He made a pro-peace statement that we handled in the same way. Luckily he didn’t lose his job over it.

He recognized me from my teenage years when we had attended the same parties and was very friendly. He might have been a member of the left-wing caucus of the union when he attended those parties and may have been trying to show me he still had some good progressive ideas. I made sure to tell him what paper I was writing for but he told the truth about how he felt about war and peace anyway.

He might not have known we intended to put out his statement as the lead story in a 100,000-copy edition of the Michigan Worker and distribute it to members of his union. I didn’t either

But we were desperately fighting to avoid nuclear war. Fortunately for both of these men we had other statements from UAW leaders (but not at their high level in the union) in those editions of the paper so they were not out there alone.

One man who wasn’t afraid to be out there alone was the Reverend T.T. Timberlake, an African-American who was the head of the Baptist Ministers Alliance in Detroit.

I never met him but my admiration for him is unlimited.

It was deeper into the McCarthy period when even comrades who used to say, “You write the statement” when I asked them to comment on something were very reluctant to say anything. I would be on the telephone trying to get anybody who wasn’t one of the bravest of our comrades to say something we could quote and was being turned down right left (so to speak)

Then I’d call Rev. Timberlake.

He’d come up with the most honest, militant comments imaginable. I worried about him. I think I asked him at least once, “Are you sure you want to put it quite that way?” Maybe I just asked that in my mind but I tried t think of ways to avoid quoting the most militant statements.

He was magnificent.

Scared me to death.

I had a picture of him in my mind He had to be old, otherwise he’d be worried about feeding his family after he lost his job, his congregation. I saw him as a broad-shouldered older man with gray hair and glasses. He always had a serious look on his face and he looked very, very wise.

Maybe not so wise about the dangers of McCarthyism, but wise about other things. He cheered me up on many a dreary afternoon when too many comrades who were union officers or held some other important position were telling me “No comment.”

If good ministers go to heaven, I’m sure he’s there now.

My most concentrated job of writing for the paper was covering a convention of the YCL. Usually I would write one story, or at most two, in a week. At this week-end convention, held in Cleveland,, I wrote a number of stories both during the day and in the evening and night after the sessions were over for everyone else. I covered the plenaries and the panels and included the resolutions and some quotes to give s flavor of what was said.

I loved it.

My girlfriend at the time went to the dance that evening while I was writing. Unlike me, she loved to dance and could, especially fast dancing. I remember her dancing away, fast and furious She especially love Latino dances

“I would tell my partner, ‘ Tengo un novio qui escribe,’ and then we would dance away,” she told me. She told that means, “I have a boyfriend who’s writing.” I wonder if that’s what it really means?

She called for me and waited while I finished writing the last article and then we went to one of the many parties that were still going on all over the place.

So it worked out just right. The way I danced and the way I loved to write I couldn’t have been happier, and the way she loved to dance, she couldn’t have been happier.

But one thing I wrote made me a little less happy, but only a little.

YCL members used the term “work in” to describe joining an organization to push for the things we believed in. I used the term in one of my articles and A.J.Muste, an anti-Communist movement activist and leader used it to attack the YCL and the Communists generally. (I was to work with him later in the peace movement.)

Since the editors, who were much older and more experienced didn’t catch and cut out the offensive phrase, I couldn’t get too much criticism, and I didn’t. I never saw Muste’s article but the incident raises some interesting questions.

It’s true we joined other organizations, in part at least, to work for the things we believed in, although we often also believed in the general goals of the organizations. I saw this work at Michigan where our members helped to get their organizations to support peace and civil rights. Our goals generally also included fighting for labor’s rights and women’s rights and for better housing, education, jobs, social security, and so on.

In other words, the things we were working for were good. If we had been known as Communists, which we sometimes were, but nowhere near often enough, we might have been isolated and unable to accomplish as much. But if we weren’t known as Communists the very good work some of our people did wasn’t known as work by Communists and the Party didn’t grow.

Three quick examples. Social security and unemployment compensation wee, as I understand it, largely the products of work by Communists on various levels. (That’s two.) And hundreds of workers in basic industry, when they joined the CIO, thought they were actually joining the Communist Party because the CIO had been red-baited so much and because, in fact, a lot of the important and dangerous work of organizing basic industry in the United States had been done by Communists.

I don’t claim to know all the answers. I know the McCarthy strategy of isolating the Communists and weakening the labor movement and other peoples’ movements succeeded to a large extent. I also know, in hindsight, that the Communists were correctly frightened but allow3ed themselves to be isolated long after it was necessary and didn’t build our independent strength enough.

Being very smart, I memorized Lenin’s formula on open work of the Party. He said the best way to maintain security was to be known to the people and not known to the government. This was a good idea since being known to the government in Tsarist Russia meant a slow, cold walk to Siberia. When I was in Siberia a few years ago my main problem was that the hotel rooms were too hot and you couldn’t open the windows.

I’m sure Lenin’s comrades didn’t have this problem.

Since my smartness was, unfortunately, limited, I have no certain idea how to apply Lenin’s formula to the slightly different conditions in the United States.

When the U.S. Congress took a page from the Tsar’s rule book and passed the Smith Act, the Party and others pointed out the dangers to the constitutional rights of freedom of thought and speech the law posed. According to the law, “conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence” was a crime punishable by five years in jail. The law was formulated in such a way that it could be, and was, used to prosecute U. S. Communists for teaching Marxism despite the fact that we didn’t advocate overthrowing the government.

As a result. a number of Communist leaders went to jail for five or more years.

Not that anybody listened, but I was very critical of the way in which the Party defended itself against these charges. In a similar situation in Canada, the Communists not only pointed out the dangers to the rights of everyone when the rights of some were taken away. As we correctly did in the United States. They also made a point of publicizing as much as they could what they actually did stand for what socialism was and why the rotten conditions of capitalism for the workers and for most of the people made socialism a highly desirable alternative.

We generally didn’t make these points, at least to any significant extent in any of the material we put out in many, many thousands of leaflets and other material in Detroit.

What we did put out on the threat to constitutional rights was good and was necessary. But we missed an enormous chance to do a massive educational job on what we really stood for at a time when millions of people might have been interested.

Of course, I didn’t explain my ideas on this to anyone but a few friends, certainly not to the leaders.

It was a forgone conclusion that they wouldn’t listen.

What does all of this have to do with my writing for the paper?

The Michigan legislature, not to be outdone by Congress in showing how reactionary they could be, passed a bill known as the “little Smith Act, “ with provisions similar to those of the national bill.

On the day the Michigan bill went into effect I went to the office of the Michigan Worker as usual, not knowing whether or not I would be arrested that morning and face the very real possibility of spending the next five years in jail.

I had written a great many stories in the paper in my own name.

I told you I wasn’t too bright.

I GET IN TROUBLE

Much to my surprise and joy, I didn’t get arrested.

The fight against the Smith Act and against the little Smith Ac in Michigan, was a long one. So was the one I was about to become engaged in, and the attack came from an entirely unexpected source.

It came from my comrades.

It started with Rosita and Chris.

Rosita was from Latin America, probably from Central America. We didn’t know much about Latin America in the movement in Detroit in those days except in theory. At least I didn’t. But I knew about Rosita. She had dark eyes that seemed to glisten, black hair, and beautiful brown skin. She had a smile you could die for. And she was modest, not egotistical or what we used to call stuck up. She was always friendly and cheerful.

We were friends. I was too much in awe of her to ask her to go out with me.

I didn’t see her often, just when we happened to be at the same movement activity at the same time. The important time, it turned out, was when we were at some large meeting or convention. She was obviously disturbed about something.

“I was going to write a play about Harriet Tubman and then Chris did. He stole my ideas!” she said bitterly, almost crying, tears in her lustrous eyes. ‘’God he must be a bastard,” I remember thinking. “Making Rosita cry!” She poured her heart out to me for a long time in a low voice while the business of the meeting continued without disturbing our conversation.

I was a little surprised. Chris was a very good-looking and charming African-American man, union steward in a large department in a major auto plant. What was most impressive was that most of the workers in his department were white women. He must have been quite a guy to get elected in spite of the prejudice that no doubt existed in the minds of the people in his department.

He was well-liked in the movement; everyone, including me, thought he was a terrific guy.

I listened and sympathized. I agreed that stealing someone else’s ideas was terrible. If someone had accused Rosita of doing the stealing, I might have had a different opinion, but under the circumstances, I had to agree with her completely. How could Chris do such a thing?

Neither of us knew what could or should be doe about it, so we just talked and felt bad together and said bad things about Chris Nobody could hear us and nobody ever knew what we said. I assumed Rosita was telling the truth since she had no reason to make up such a story.

That should have been the end of it. I learned later that I had been observed “whispering with Rosita.”

Much later I learned that an order had come down from above shortly after this that I was not to be part of the leadership. For “whispering with Rosita”? An order from above? I thought we elected our leadership. And nobody could have had any idea of what we were saying. Maybe that was the problem.

I didn’t know anything about the order at the time so I continued my life as before, doing my job, enjoying my life, and going through the everyday struggle everyone else did. Some time after these events I heard that Chris had been selling used cars, taking deposits and not delivering the cars.

By that time it didn’t matter. Rosita was dead.

I heard she had starved to death. I heard she had died during a back-alley abortion.

I think of Rosita every time I hear some anti-abortion asshole tell us he’s pro-life.

Then there was Marty.

Marty was probably the purist, most principled, most loyal Communist I have ever met.

He therefore had to be expelled from the Party.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have weaknesses. Like Lenin, he didn’t come from a workingclass background; his father made and sold accordions. He could be sectarian and stubborn. So could I, and I didn’t have any weaknesses. But he was a remarkable person.

Communists served in the armed forces during World War 2 in numbers far greater than their proportion in the population. Many were ‘premature anti-fascists,” a term actually used in a negative way when the army was screening Communists out of the armed forces. Many were veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, men and women from the United States who fought against Franco;s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. At least two, Bob Thompson and Herman Boettcher were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in the U.S. armed forces in World War 2.

Marty, like a number of the members of my Party club, was a veteran. He had served in the Pacific area and, along with his comrades and possibly some other people, had organized 100% of the sugar workers in Hawaii into the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union, headed by Harry Bridges, the radical trade unionist. I remember the 100% figure. The guy who told me about it (not Marty) was profoundly impressed by their batting average

Communists also played an important role in explaining the nature of fascism and the Japanese military dictatorship to their fellow soldiers.

Now that they were home, they were still militant, still ready to fight for a better life, generally more so then than ever. Some of our veterans were members of what was called the 52-20 club. That was a government program under which veterans received unemployment compensation of $20 a week for 52 weeks while they readjusted to civilian life and looked for a job or decided what they wanted to do next.

During the Party’s annual fund-raising drive, people often contributed a week’s pay. I remember our vets pledging two and three weeks’ income (their only income in most cases) to the drive. And I particularly remember Marty saying, as he pledged three weeks’ income, “”There’s no such thing as self-sacrifice in regard to the Party.”

He didn’t mean you shouldn’t sacrifice for the Party. He meant that no matter what you did or contributed, it was never too much.

He obviously had to be expelled. Who ever heard of such a thing!

He was sectarian.

When he came to teach me to drive (“you might have to grab a jeep some day”) he came 20 minutes early for a six A.M. appointment. I could have killed him and end this part of the story right there, but I was too sleepy to move much.

He showed the same attitude in a more serious situation.

When an African-American family moved into another house in a previously all white, mostly Southern neighborhood not too far from the house on Harrison and Elm, a mob of racists wrecked the house. They broke almost all the windows, threw all kinds of junk and dirt at the outside of the walls, ruining the paint job completely, and did as much other damage as they could before the conveniently late arrival of the police.

The Party decided to repair the house. I didn’t know if there was any publicity or if we did it in our own name or not. I do know we did a good job. We had a lot of workers in the organization at the time, many of them skilled. The house was completely repainted, the windows restored, and all other damage repaired. Pressure was successfully put on the authorities to see to it that the house was adequately protected.

One interesting aspect was that the leadership decided to have only white workers do the repairing so no one could attack the African-American workers and claim that a “race riot” had taken place.

The neighbors didn’t know what to make of it. All these white people repairing the damage to a black person’s house. Some pretended not to see us. Some looked silently and then walked away. A few called us “white n----,” which some of us took as a compliment and others just laughed at. I thought about what they might have been thinking for a long time afterward, wondering if their thinking had changed at all.

Marty had been working at a very hard physical job in an auto plant an hadn’t slept for 24 to 36 hours but he, naturally, insisted on taking part in the project. I lived nearby and, since the driving lessons were far from complete, he picked me up and drove me home On the way home he fell asleep and my head banged into the windshield.

Although some of my family, friends and comrades might disagree, there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage to my head.

Before Marty went to work in a plant, he was instrumental in starting the MELS Venetian Blind Company.

For those of you who happen not to be fifty-year veterans of the left-wing. movement, the letters stand for Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

All-in-all I’d say the company was a disgrace.

The value of a commodity, according to Marxist theory, is determined by he socially necessary labor time needed to produce it A boss can increase the amount of extra profit he takes out of the workers by increasing the hours of work at the same pay or speeding up the workers to produce more in the same time. I think the MELS company was a cooperative but whoever decided how fast the workers worked was a mean taskmaster.

The workers, about fur or five in all, were all Communists and included one or more of Marty’s brothers, in addition to Marty. I saw them work once and couldn’t have been happier that I didn’t work with them. The scene looked like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. They did everything at a comically fast rate. They finished in almost no time, then rushed on to install venetian blinds in someone else’s house.

Mazeltov!

Thank God the company didn’t last long. I don’t know who first realized they were acting stupidly but it couldn't have taken them long to figure it out. I figured it out in about three seconds on a slow day. On Marty’s next job in an auto plant he was said to have handled a million pounds of materials a day (I still wonder if that could be rue or if a few zeroes were added by mistake). Obviously, the company wanted to get as much work of this great big guy as they could so they put him in one of the hardest physical jobs in the plant. But I don’t know how he could have worked harder than in the MELS Venetian Blind Company.

Contrary to appearances from what I’ve told you so far Marty was not stupid. In fact he was quite brilliant.

One of our comrades, an African-American steelworker named Steve, invited Mart and me to meet with eight Black steelworkers and tell them about the Party. Steve was quite a guy. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, tall, well-built and very smart. He was also, evidently a hell of a fighter. Shortly before, there had been a wave of physical attacks on known Communists in the various factories around the city. Some of our guys were beaten pretty badly. When they tried it with Steve, he put several of them in the hospital

We met in Steve’s living room. He served sodas (called “pop” in Detroit) and introduced us to his co-workers and them to us. After each of us had said a few things, it became obvious that Marty should do most of the talking.

He started with the first line of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all previously existing society is the history of class struggle.” He discussed the class struggle in today’s world, in Detroit, in the plant where he worked, in the steel mills. He talked about speed-up, exploitation, racism, colonialism, imperialism, the fight for a sorter work week, the history of the labor movement, unemployment and the fight for unemployment compensation and social security in which the Party had played such an important role.

I’d say he talked pretty well. All eight steelworkers joined the Party at that meeting.

Steve and I asked if we could join, too, but Marty pointed out that we were already Party members.

Oh, yeah, that’s right. Thanks, Marty.

It’s interesting in these days of supposed antagonism between the African-American and Jewish communities that at that time and place Steve thought it was a good idea to invite two white Jewish comrades to speak to his friends and that the other workers were recruited into the Party by two (actually one Marty) Jew Communists. It’s even more interesting that, as far as I know, none of us even thought about that aspect at the time. I know I didn’t.

Steve and I really learned a lot, just like Steve’s friends. Marty knew his stuff. That’s why I was glad when Marty was m partner in a debate between members of the Young Communist League and the young Socialists on , “Should Youth Support Wallace?”

Unfortunately, the subject was to be Marty’s downfall and, ultimately, my own.

The debate took place in a local hall, with folding chairs and a stage. We sat at a table with water and our notes, just like real academics. The audience was made up almost entirely of members of the YCL and the young Socialists. I think the socialist group was called the “Young Peoples’ Socialist League” or YPSL, pronounced “yipsel.”

We all wore suits and ties.

I wore my red tie, a white shirt, and the gray suit my uncle Ben gave me, the best suit I ever owned. I was ready.

It’s highly doubtful that any minds were changed but it was still good news that in that time of incipient McCarthyism we were still able to talk together without coming to blows. Each side was convinced they won. I don’t remember what any of the others said but I do remember that something I said got the loudest applause. (Did I mention that each side only applauded for its own speakers? Do I have to?)

What happened was this: One of the two young Socialists opposing us had mentioned he was a member of he SIU (Seamen’s International Union ), a conservative AFL seamen’s union.

I stood up to speak; I walked to the front of the stage in my red tie. I was very confident. I thought I was smart, and I knew Marty was.

When I reached center stage someone in the audience said, “NMU.”

“You’re damn right NMU!” I said in a loud, strong voice. “And the NMU is not Jim Crow!”

The audience, or rather our 50 or 60 YCLers in the audience, burst into loud applause, the loudest of the entire evening. I was thrilled even if the 50 or 60 young Socialists and their friends didn’t have enough sense to applaud enthusiastically, too. Obviously, if they were really as politically sophisticated and advanced as we were they would be YCLers instead of young Socialists. The left-led NMU (National Maritime Union), affiliated with the CIO, had integrated crews. The SIU did not.

Indeed, they used to sneeringly refer to the NMU as having “checkerboard crews.”

The evening wasn’t really connected with what happened to Marty except in the subject mater. The subject mater was to ruin Marty’s life.

Marty’s mistake was thinking for himself.

I always thought he should have read more theory but he did all right without reading Capital. In fact he did considerably better than all right. And there was nothing in theory about not thinking for yourself.

Marty decided that the Party should not support Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. Quoting the Communist Manifesto, he said, “The Communist Party is the party of the working class.” Since a major effort of the Party at the time was to help end the two-party system and build a party that would work for peace, civil rights, support labor and so on, Marty’s ideas wee not popular with the leadership.

He was a valuable guy with lots of prestige. As in the Spanish Inquisition (as depicted in the movies) he was interrogated by a group of people. Carl Winter, our District Organizer, the head of the Party in Michigan, held long talks with him. When Marty refused to recant, he was burned at the stake.

“Disperse you rebels! Why don’t you disperse?” as the British officer said at Lexington.

Marty didn’t disperse. So they had to burn him at the stake (now that’s a real mixed metaphor!).

Marty would probably have preferred being burned at the stake to being expelled but the inquisitors didn’t offer him the choice. They expelled him.

“Carl Winter is a SON of a bitch,” Marty told me, emphasizing the first word. “I offered to carry out the policy of supporting the Progressive Party even if I didn’t believe in it but he said [quoting a well-known position of Lenin that in no way applied in this situation],’No separation of theory from practice.’”

So Marty was expelled from the party he loved, the party to which he had devoted his life and for which he was prepared to give his life, because he wouldn’t say he believed in something he didn’t believe in , even if he was prepared t work for the thing he didn’t agree with.

If Carl Winter was a SON of a bitch, as Marty said, or as we non-male-supremacists say, just a prick, he proved it at the next Party convention. A resolution was introduced supporting the expulsion of Marty from the Party. It couldn’t have been introduced or have a chance of passing without Carl’s explicit approval.

But Marty was appealing his expulsion to this very body!

I asked for the floor and got it. “Marty is appealing his expulsion to this body His appeal has not yet been heard. No one has heard his side o the story. How can you vote on whether or not to expel him before his appeal is heard?” I asked, speaking as clearly and sincerely as I could. To me the logic seemed irrefutable.

It must have seemed somewhat less so to the rest of the delegates.

An audible wave of disbelief went around the room. Were the sounds gasps, soft but intense words, stifled exclamations (whatever those are)?

I don’t know. I only know I heard something and it wasn’t applause.

Mine was the only vote against expelling Marty

Shortly afterward, I was told I would no longer get a by-line.

Marty’s problems were much more important He had a beautiful little son with black hair and dark eyes His name was Phillip. Phillip died of leukemia not long afterward.

I think the experience of losing both the party he loved and the beautiful son he loved broke Marty, at least temporarily. He left town and didn’t say goodbye, at least not to me. I don’t know what happened between him and his wife.

The last I heard, decades ago, Marty was living on a farm somewhere in the West.

One aspect of Marty’s story is of interest in understanding how the Party responded to the threat of being forced underground during the anti-Communist hysteria of the period. In preparing for the possibility of being outlawed and the possibility of fascism the Party bought a portable printing apparatus, not guns, a correct decision at that time. In this situation, obviously some time before Marty was expelled, he was one of the very few who knew of the existence of the device. He made a serious mistake, violating strict instructions not to tell anyone of its existence. He told me and, of course, he shouldn’t have.

Helen found out about it and was, needless to say, furious.

What did the fight to save Willie McGee from a legal lynching have to do with the movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

In my case everything. True to my simple-minded tendency, I thought we could save Willie McGee’s life if we could get enough pressure on the authorities. So did the rest of the movement, including the Party.

It wasn’t really simple-minded, but to accomplish the task of saving the life of Willie McGee, or in today’s world, of Mumia Abu Jamal, it would take enormous work, organization and perseverance. We could save his life but we could also fail.

An audible wave of disbelief went around the room. Were the sounds gasps, soft but iintense

words, stifled exclamaions

Most of the stories I wrote for the paper are long forgotten, even by me, but a few stand out in my memory.